Chapter 10
In This Chapter
● Welcoming Lincoln to the White House
● Assessing the respective strengths and strategies of the North and the South
● Ending slavery, or at least starting the process
● Surveying the key events of the Civil War and recognizing how the North won
It pitted brother against brother and killed more American soldiers than any other war in U.S. history. But from this terrible struggle emerged a country that had fought its toughest enemy — itself — and won.
This chapter is your guide to the key aspects of the Civil War, from the man who struggled to reunite a torn nation to the beginning of the end of slavery to who won which battle where. (For a more comprehensive look at the Civil War, check out Civil War For Dummies, written by Keith D. Dickson and published by Wiley.)
Introducing Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln began his presidency by sneaking into Washington, D.C. Because of a suspected assassination plot in Baltimore, Maryland, Lincoln’s railroad car was rerouted so he arrived at a different time than what was publicly announced.
It was an inauspicious beginning to a tough job. Within a few months of Lincoln taking office, 11 states — Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Virginia, Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Florida — had left the Union, and 4 more — Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware — were thinking about leaving. The man in charge of sorting out the whole mess had received only about 40 percent of the popular vote. Although he’s now considered one of the most extraordinary men in American — and world — history, Lincoln was more of a puzzle than a leader to most Americans at the time.
The next few sections cover what kind of man Lincoln was, what he believed, and the lengths to which he was willing to go to keep the Union whole.
Painting a picture of the sixteenth president
Lincoln was an enormously complex person. He possessed a great sense of humor but also had an air of deep sorrow and melancholy about him (likely exacerbated by the fact that two of his four sons died before him and his wife suffered from various mental illnesses). He was fiercely ambitious and firm of purpose. He was also modest and cheerfully ready to poke fun at himself, but sometimes he sank into deep despair and doubted his abilities. Lincoln didn’t drink at a time when many men drank to excess, was skeptical when it came to organized religion (although he professed a belief in God), and delighted in telling racy stories.
He was tall and ungainly looking (6 feet, 4 inches tall, weighing 180 pounds) with large hands and feet, and his enemies often referred to him as a gorilla or ape. He often dressed all in black and wore a stovepipe hat in which he sometimes stored his correspondence. Lincoln spoke with a high squeak, which may have been why he kept his speeches short. He was strong, having been a champion wrestler in his youth, and at ease with the fact that he was homely.
One popular and perhaps apocryphal story about Lincoln is that when a young girl suggested he grow a beard to improve his appearance, he whimsically did so between the election and his inauguration.
Lincoln’s greatest gift may have been his ability to use people, in the best sense of the term. He could overlook people’s faults — and even their dislike of him — if he thought they had something to offer, and he did so with humor and grace. Case in point: When a troublemaker reported to him that his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, had called the president a “damned fool,” Lincoln replied, “Then I must be one, for Stanton is generally right, and he always says what he means.”
He had plenty of need and opportunity to use his gift of getting the most out of people. Throughout his presidency, Lincoln had few close friends or advisors. His cabinet (notably William Seward, secretary of state; Salmon P. Chase, secretary of the treasury; and Stanton, secretary of war) represented a wide range of political philosophies. The biggest thing the men had in common was their low opinion of their boss.
Jefferson Davis
As president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis may have been Lincoln's counterpart, but he was in no way his equal. Davis was stiff, unyielding, narrowminded, and humorless. In fact, he may have been the anti-Lincoln.
Born in 1808, Davis was a West Point graduate who was wounded and decorated for bravery in the Mexican War. He was also a U.S. senator and served as secretary of war under Pres. Franklin Pierce. With his brother, Davis owned a Mississippi plantation and believed in good treatment of slaves. But he also firmly believed in the institution of slavery.
After Lincoln's election, Davis resigned his Senate seat. Although he first opposed secession, he accepted the presidency of the Confederate states as a compromise candidate. His presidency was plagued by mediocre cabinet members, quarreling among the rebel states, and his own inability to think anyone could possibly be right if they didn't agree with him.
When the South's major armies surrendered, Davis fled with what was left of the government's treasury and vowed to fight on. He was soon captured, however, and thrown in a prison cell for almost two years without a trial. Upon his release, he went to Canada before returning to Mississippi. Davis spent his remaining years writing about how the war's outcome was everyone else's fault. He died in 1889. More than 250,000 people attended his funeral, many of them nostalgic for the "Old South" he represented.
Fortunately, Lincoln had a talent for making his point without being confrontational. For example, he was often exasperated at the reluctance of his leading generals to fight, particularly Gen. George B. McClellan. However, Lincoln didn’t want to be seen as micromanaging the war. So instead, he once drolly observed, “If General McClellan does not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it.”
Ultimately, Lincoln was able to use his many gifts and unique personality to rally people in the North to keep fighting, first for the cause of preserving the Union and later for the cause of ending slavery.
Understanding Lincoln's views on slavery and the Union
Lincoln’s views and values were influenced heavily by his upbringing. Born in Kentucky in 1809, Lincoln lost his mother when he was 9 and moved with his father (an unsuccessful farmer) to Indiana and then to Illinois. Lincoln had almost no formal schooling. After leaving home, he took a flatboat trip down the Mississippi, worked in a store, studied law, and was elected to the state legislature at the age of 25. In 1846 he was elected to Congress, but by 1850 he had given up on politics. As the slavery debate grew hotter, however, Lincoln decided to reenter the political arena in 1854 and fight the spread of slavery.
That Lincoln opposed slavery is clear. “If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong,” he once wrote. “I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel.” But like most white Americans, he thought black Americans were inferior, and he wasn’t in favor of immediate freedom for slaves. He also didn’t think blacks and whites could live together: “My first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia, to their own native land,” he once said. “But a moment’s reflection would convince me, that whatever high hope (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution would be impossible.”
As president of the United States, Lincoln put a higher value on preserving the Union than on ending slavery: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves,” he wrote, “I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”
He was also adamant that no states would be allowed to leave the Union without a fight: “A husband and wife may be divorced,” he said, “but the different parts of our country cannot . . . . Intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them.”
Bending the Constitution to preserve the Union — and win reelection
Not everyone in the North felt the same way. As the war progressed, opposition to it formed around Peace Democrats, people who called for negotiating a way to let the “wayward sisters go in peace.” The more radical of these Peace Democrats, who actually called for disloyalty to the federal government, were called Copperheads after the poisonous snake that strikes without warning.
The generally patient Lincoln had no patience with the Copperheads. In some areas, he suspended their rights to have a speedy trial and be charged with a specific crime when arrested. More than 13,000 people were arrested and held without trial during the Civil War.
Uh, thanks for coming Abe
One of the most famous speeches in American history is Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. But the speech wasn't exactly a big hit when it was delivered on November 19, 1863. The occasion was the dedication of the national cemetery at the site of the Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. The cemetery had been ordered because many of the 8,000 bodies that fell there had been so hastily buried after the battle that they'd become exposed again.
Lincoln wasn't even the featured speaker. That honor fell to Edward Everett, a famous orator who'd been a U.S. senator and president of Harvard University. Everett spoke for nearly two hours and delivered some 1,500 long and windy sentences before he finally sat down.
Lincoln, who, contrary to myth, didn't write his 268-word speech on the back of an envelope during the train trip to Gettysburg, spoke for about three minutes. He was interrupted several times by applause. When he was done, a Philadelphia newspaper reporter on the stage leaned over and whispered to Lincoln, "Is that all?" Lincoln replied, "Yes, for the present."
Although some newspapers commended the speech, others said it stunk. "Anything more dull and commonplace would not be easy to produce," humphed the Times of London. Lincoln shared his critics' opinion of the speech. "I failed, I failed, and that is all that can be said about it," he said. Seldom was he more wrong.
By taking these actions, Lincoln disregarded the Constitution in his drive to preserve the Union. (In fact, several of Lincoln’s actions were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court — but only after the war ended.)
In 1864, Lincoln was up for reelection. He feared he might lose to someone not as devoted to preserving the Union. So he again bent some rules, suspending voting rights in some anti-Union areas of the border states and arranging for Union soldiers to get leave so they could go home and vote, presumably for him.
In addition, the Republican Party formed a temporary alliance with Democrats who favored the war, thereby creating the Union Party. The Democrats against the war put up George McClellan, a general whom Lincoln had twice removed from command. Despite his fears about not being reelected, Lincoln won 55 percent of the popular vote and held a comfortable 212-21 margin in the electoral college.
Fortunately for the country, the war remained Lincoln’s responsibility to the end. “With malice to none, with charity to all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds,” he said in his second inaugural address.
North versus South: Comparing Advantages and Action Plans
If London bookies had been taking bets on the outcome of the American Civil War, they might have set the odds a little in favor of the South based on the Confederacy’s advantages. Sure, the North had some big pluses, including the following:
● A population of about 22 million, compared to about 9 million in the South (of which 3.5 million were slaves). In addition, immigration during the war added thousands of new recruits for the Union Army.
● Seven times as much manufacturing, which meant the Union Army was always better supplied.
● A far better railroad system (75 percent of all the track in America), which greatly aided the transport of troops and supplies.
● Control of the U.S. Navy and the merchant fleet.
● A central government already in place, and a more diverse economy.
● Lincoln, with his leadership skills and grim determination to preserve the Union.
The South, however, had a number of its own advantages:
● A defensive stance: The Confederacy didn’t have to conquer the North or even win a lot of big battles — it only had to fight long enough for the North to give up its quest to bring the Southern states back into the Union. A defensive war is much cheaper to fight than an offensive one in terms of both men and materials. Although the South’s population was smaller overall, it still had about 200,000 men available to fight within a short time of the war’s start.
● Home-field advantage: Much of the fighting was on the South’s territory, because the North had to conquer the South to get it back into the Union. The Southerners not only knew the terrain better, but they also had the incentive of defending their homes and farms. (Of course, as the war progressed, the South found that fighting on the home field wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.) Although the idea of letting slaves fight was out of the question for most Southerners (and most slaves), the slaves’ presence at home meant the South’s farms and plantations could keep running.
● Strong military leadership: The South had much better luck finding able military leaders right from the start, particularly a courtly and brilliant Virginian named Robert E. Lee and his right-hand man, a former military school instructor who liked to suck on lemons (perhaps better known to you as Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson).
● The benefit of history: The Southern secessionists were in good company. Secession by determined regions had previously succeeded in Latin America, the original 13 American colonies, the Netherlands, and Greece, just to name a few well-known places.
To win the war, reasoned Gen. Winfield Scott (the ranking Northern general who was 75 years old and so fat he couldn’t get on a horse), the first step was to suffocate the South by blockading its coast. Next, cut the South in half by seizing the Mississippi River. Then chop it up by cutting across Georgia and then up through the Carolinas. Finally, capture the Confederate capital, Richmond, Virginia.
Many Northern newspapers sneered at Scott’s plan for being too timid. They urged the North’s leaders to forget Scott’s anaconda plan (so-called because the idea was to encircle the South and squeeze the life out of it like the giant South American snake). Instead, newspapers called for the Union Army to march directly to Richmond and get the whole thing over with. But Lincoln recognized the worth of Scott’s approach. He also recognized that the way to win wasn’t to conquer and hold Southern territory but to beat the South’s armies over and over again.
Confederate Pres. Jefferson Davis favored a much simpler plan: Make the Northern armies press the fight, whip them, and push them back North, thereby breaking the morale of the Northern people who supported the war. General Lee concurred at first but then realized that the South’s limited resources might be better used in a quick and decisive strike to take the heart out of the North. Twice he tried to take the fight to the Union; twice his limited resources forced him to go home.
Freeing the Slaves
One of Lincoln’s most pressing problems was what to do about slaves. As soon as the Northern troops first moved into Southern territory, escaped slaves began pouring into Union Army camps. One general declared the slaves as “seized” property and put them to work in labor battalions so they could earn their keep. But other generals who favored the abolition of slavery immediately declared them freed.
Lincoln was forced to rescind the orders because, as president, he felt that freeing slaves was solely his responsibility and because he had to be careful not to antagonize the slave-holding states that had stayed loyal to the Union: Kentucky, Missouri, Delaware, Maryland, and, later, West Virginia, which broke away from Virginia during the war. What Lincoln really hoped for was that each state would abolish slavery on its own and compensate slave owners so that federal funds could be used to send freed slaves to Africa.
The next two sections describe the beginning of the end of slavery and the consequences of Lincoln’s historic Emancipation Proclamation.
Announcing the Emancipation Proclamation
In June 1862, radical Republicans in Congress who were impatient with Lincoln’s caution mustered enough votes to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories. Congress also authorized Lincoln to allow the Union Army to enlist African Americans who wanted to fight. Prodded by these congressional actions, Lincoln then told his cabinet in July that he intended to proclaim freedom for slaves as of January 1, 1863. But he wanted to wait until the Union Army had won a big battle before making the announcement.
On September 22, five days after the Union gained what was more of a tie than a win at Antietam Creek, Lincoln made his proclamation public. Through the famed Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln announced that as of January 1, all slaves in any state still in rebellion “shall be, then, thenceforth and forever free.”
Surveying the consequences of emancipation
Contrary to what some may believe, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free a single slave. It didn’t apply to slaves in the border states, and slave owners in the Confederacy certainly didn’t obey it. But it did have effects Lincoln hadn’t intended.
● In the South, the Emancipation Proclamation reinforced the will of the proslavery forces to fight on, because it was clear that if they lost, slavery would end.
● In the North, it angered people who were comfortable with fighting to preserve the Union but not to free people who might then come north and compete with them for jobs. Union Army desertions increased and enlistments decreased after the announcement.
● Abolitionists thought the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t go far enough, and other people thought the government had no right to take away the southern slave owner’s “property.”
An alright guy
"I took the [Emancipation] proclamation for a little more than it purported, and saw in its spirit a life and power far beyond its letter . . . Lincoln was not . . . either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man. [But] he was one whom I could love, honor, and trust without reserve or doubt."
— abolition leader and former slave Frederick Douglass.
Yet, gradually many Northerners came to embrace the idea of abolishing slavery as a moral cause, and Lincoln’s move added another reason for the North to continue to fight. Just as important, working people in England and France cheered the emancipation of slaves. At one point, a letter of support was sent to Lincoln that supposedly came from 20,000 laborers in England. Such support helped ensure that European leaders wouldn’t risk the wrath of public opinion by aiding the South.
Looking at the Fighters, the Generals, and the Major Battles
The Civil War was mostly a young man’s fight. Although no records were kept, you can bet that the vast majority of the enlisted men were under 21 years of age and that more than a few were in their early teens. The Civil War was also truly “a brothers’ war,” with families and friends divided by their allegiances. Mary Lincoln, the president’s wife, lost three brothers in the war — they all fought for the South. The Confederacy’s leading general, Robert E. Lee, had a nephew who was an officer in the Union Navy. And if you want to talk about a house that was truly divided, consider the situation of Sen. John Crittenden of Kentucky: He had a son who was a major general in the Confederate Army and another son who was a major general in the Union Army.
Because of the fraternal flavor of the two armies, it wasn’t unusual for them to engage in friendly banter between battles, sometimes even getting together for a game of baseball or to trade tobacco for coffee during truces.
The friendliness didn’t stop the carnage, however, as you can see in Figure 10-1. More than 600,000 American soldiers died during the Civil War. That’s more than the number who died in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. About two-thirds of that number died from diseases rather than battle wounds, and it’s estimated that the average soldier ended up in the hospital at least once or twice a year. If the soldier ever left the hospital, he was lucky. Sanitary conditions were awful, and 75 percent of the operations consisted of amputations, many of them needless.
Figure 10-1: Carnage from a Civil War battlefield. Photo taken by Matthew Brady, the most famous of the war’s photographers.
The Northern forces almost always outnumbered their Southern opponents. At the end of the war, the Union Army had about 960,000 men in uniform compared to the Confederates’ 445,000. In addition to having a larger population to draw from, the North’s forces also included thousands of European immigrants who took up a rifle almost as soon as they got off the boat.
Additionally, thousands of African Americans fought for the North after being allowed to join the army in 1863. They were paid $7 a month (about a third of what white soldiers got), and they fought well under white officers, earning the grudging respect of those they fought against and alongside.
The following sections highlight the military leaders on both sides and the famous battles of the Civil War.
Meet the generals
What each side did have, at least by the close of the war, was a great general at the head of its army. In the South, that man was Robert E. Lee, the son of a Revolutionary War general. A West Point graduate, Lee was actually asked by
Lincoln to take over the Union Army before the war began. But Lee’s loyalties were to his native state of Virginia. He was honorable, courteous, skillful, and not afraid to take a chance.
Lee’s Northern counterpart was Ulysses S. Grant, the shy and sloppy son of a storekeeper. Grant was also a West Point grad, but he’d resigned his commission to avoid a court-martial for drunkenness. He rejoined the army and rose through the ranks to command mainly because, unlike some of his contemporaries, he wasn’t afraid to get into a fight with the enemy. “He is the gentlest little man you ever saw,” Lincoln remarked. “He makes the least fuss of any man I ever knew.” Grant was highly intelligent, determined, compassionate — and a cold-eyed killer, if that’s what it took to win.
The war at sea
The North’s first objective was to blockade the Southern coast and cut off the South’s ability to trade its cotton in Europe for arms and supplies. The Union Navy had a number of ships and guns, but the South somehow managed to scrounge up a navy of its own from refitted private ships or ships built for the South in England, as well as scores of sunken or captured Union merchant ships.
One of the Confederacy’s ships was a Union vessel called the Merrimac, which had been sunk. Southern ship fitters raised it, covered it with iron plates, and renamed it the Virginia. For a few days, it terrorized the Union fleet off Hampton Roads, Virginia, sinking two Union ships and threatening to decimate the entire group. But the North’s own hastily constructed ironclad ship, the Monitor, showed up in the nick of time. On March 9, 1862, the two met in a four-hour battle that basically ended in a tie. The Virginia was eventually burned and the Monitor sunk, but their battle was significant in that it was the first battle between two ironclad ships — ultimately spelling the doom of wooden warships.
After a slow start, however, the North’s sea blockade was ultimately highly effective.
The War on land
When it came to the ground war, part of the North’s strategy included capturing the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, and gaining control of the mouth of the Mississippi River. Starting in 1862, largely under the leadership of Grant, the Union Army began taking Tennessee and slowly moving up and down the Mississippi River, cutting the South in half just as Gen. Winfield Scott had suggested (see the earlier section “North versus South: Comparing Advantages and Action Plans” for more on Scott’s plan).
Hairstyles and hookers
Like most major conflicts, the Civil War gave birth to a number of new terms that are still part of the American language. One of them came from the hairstyle of a Union general who wore his whiskers down the front of his ears along his jaw line, but not as a full beard. His name was Ambrose Burnside, and his whiskers became known as sideburns. Another Union general,
Joseph "Fighting Joe" Hooker, became known for the large numbers of prostitutes that hung around his army while it was in the Washington area. They were jokingly called "Hooker's Division." Although hookers was already a term for ladies of the night, the general helped nationalize it and ensure its lasting place in the language.
On the Confederate side, Lee twice took the war to the North, but both times he was forced to return to Southern territory when he was opposed by larger armies and faced uncertain supply lines. Starting in late 1863, the North began grinding down Lee’s army in Virginia while another Union Army under Gen. William T. Sherman marched diagonally across Georgia and then up into the Carolinas, destroying everything in its path that could be used by the enemy. “We have devoured the land,” Sherman wrote to his wife. “All the people retreat before us, and desolation is behind.”
Following are ten of the key battles or campaigns of the war (check out Figure 10-2 to get a visual of the various locations):
● Fort Sumter: After the first Southern states had seceded, they began seizing federal forts and shipyards inside their borders. Maj. Robert Anderson, commander of the fort in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, agreed to surrender the fort as soon as the food ran out, which was the honorable thing to do. But Southern forces wouldn’t wait, and at dawn on April 12, 1861, they fired the first shots of the Civil War. Anderson surrendered when he ran out of ammunition, and the only casualties were two Union soldiers killed when a cannon exploded. But the war had begun, and the fact that the South had fired first was a big help to recruiting efforts in the North.
● Bull Run: The first large fight of the war took place near Manassas Junction, Virginia, on July 21, 1861. Despite the fact that it was a brutally hot day, hundreds of residents from nearby Washington, D.C., came out to picnic and watch the fight, thinking it might be the highlight of what many expected to be a 90-day war. Neither army was trained or prepared, and for most of the day utter confusion reigned. Then Confederate forces got the upper hand, and Union forces panicked and ran. The rebel army was too tired to chase them.
Figure 10-2: Key Civil War battles and campaigns.
● Shiloh: Grant’s army was caught napping on April 6, 1862, near this church in Tennessee and was on the brink of being routed when Grant launched a counterattack the next day that managed to push the Confederate Army back. This victory helped solidify the Union Army’s dominance in the West.
● Antietam: Lee’s first push into Northern territory took place near Antietam Creek in Maryland on September 17, 1862. The battle was fought in a narrow field between the creek and the Potomac River. This was one of the bloodiest battles of the war, with 22,000 killed or wounded. Lee was forced to return across the Potomac, providing Lincoln the “victory” he’d been waiting for to give the Emancipation Proclamation.
● Chancellorsville: The Union Army, under Gen. Joseph Hooker, tried to surround Lee’s forces in Virginia from May 1-3, 1863. But Lee took a brilliant gamble, divided his smaller army, and attacked first. It was a complete Confederate victory, but a costly one. Lee’s top general, Thomas Jackson, who was nicknamed “Stonewall” for his courage and tenacity, was mistakenly shot and killed by his own troops during a reconnaissance after dark.
● Gettysburg: Lee again pushed into Northern territory in early June 1863, this time into Pennsylvania. In a massive battle from July 1 to July 3, Lee’s army hurled itself at Union forces led by Gen. George Meade. But the South’s effort failed, and Lee was once again forced to withdraw.
● Vicksburg: This Mississippi town was a major Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River. Coordinating with Union naval forces moving up from New Orleans, Louisiana, Grant masterfully moved his outnumbered army around the city and laid siege to it. Vicksburg surrendered on July 4, 1863, giving the North control of the Mississippi River.
● Chickamauga and Chattanooga: These confrontations, which ran from August to November 1863, led to Sherman’s march across Georgia. At Chickamauga, Union Gen. George H. Thomas withstood a furious attack and saved the Union Army from a rout. After the Union Army was surrounded at Chattanooga, Grant led a rescue effort and drove off the Confederate forces.
● The Wilderness: This was a series of battles in Virginia starting in May 1864 in which Grant used his superior numbers to wear down Lee’s army. The carnage was terrible, and Grant’s critics accused him of being a butcher. But the strategy worked. Lee’s army couldn’t break off to try to stop Sherman’s march through the heart of the South. By March 1865, the Union forces outnumbered the Confederacy’s two to one.
● Appomattox Courthouse: This wasn’t a battle, but it was the site in Virginia where on April 12, 1865, Lee formally surrendered to Grant. The Southern Army was exhausted, outnumbered, and half-starved. Grant generously fed the defeated Southerners and allowed them to go home, taking their horses and mules with them. Although some units fought on for a few more weeks, the Civil War, for all intents and purposes, was finally over.
Two More Reasons Why the North Won
Winning a war without money or friends is rather difficult, and the South had neither. Its economy, please pardon the expression, went south, and it failed to convince any major European powers to join the fight on its side.
The Southern economy was based solely on agriculture. When the Civil War started, there was only one iron foundry in the entire South. Still, the Confederacy’s leaders were sure the South’s cotton would be enough: “You dare not make war upon our cotton,” a Southern politician boasted before the war. “No power on Earth dares make war on it. Cotton is King.”
True, European nations, particularly Britain, had depended on Southern cotton to fuel their textile industries. In fact, some 80 percent of Britain’s cotton came from America before the war. The South figured that if the Union’s blockade cut off Southern cotton to Britain, Britain would intervene on the South’s behalf.
But this idea had some holes in it:
● The first hole was that when the war started, Britain had a surplus of cotton, partly because it had stocked up when war clouds loomed on the horizon, and partly because it had started getting more cotton from Egypt and India.
● Secondly, British laborers hated slavery and wouldn’t support the South even if that meant costing them jobs, which it did. British leaders, even those who favored the South and also favored the idea of two smaller Americas over one big one, didn’t want to buck popular sentiment that supported the North.
Actually, Britain and the Union came close to war a couple times, most closely when a Union ship stopped a British ship at sea and arrested two Confederate diplomats on their way to London. This act was clearly against international law and might have given the Brits an excuse to enter the war on the side of the South. But Lincoln wisely released the two diplomats and shrugged the whole thing off as a misunderstanding.
With no European allies and the Union blockade succeeding, the South’s economy completely tanked. In 1861, approximately $1 million in gold-backed Confederate paper currency was circulating. But by 1863, Confederate printing presses had churned out $900 million in currency, with hardly any gold supplies to back them. Thus, an 1863 Confederate dollar was worth about two cents in gold.
In the North, the economy was buffeted by the war, but because it was stronger going in, it handled the conflict better. Advances in agriculture and manufacturing, and the supply of gold and silver from California and Nevada helped keep the economy going despite the manpower drain caused by the war.
Losing a Leader
The worst manpower drain of all came on April 14, 1865, just five days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. It was Good Friday, and President Lincoln had decided to go to Ford’s Theatre in Washington to see the comedy Our American Cousin.
At about 10:30 p.m., during the second act, an actor and Southern sympathizer named John Wilkes Booth snuck into the presidential box and shot Lincoln in the back of the head. Lincoln was taken to a lodging house across the street from the theater, where he lingered until the next morning and then died, surrounded by several members of his cabinet. “Now he belongs to the ages,” said Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.
Booth was from a prominent American acting family. He was born in Maryland and was a white supremacist who had plotted to kidnap Lincoln and use him as a bargaining chip to end the war on better terms for the South. But Lee’s surrender changed his plot to assassination. Booth made his escape from the theater after stabbing a Union officer who was in Lincoln’s box and jumping to the stage, breaking his leg in the attempt. He was cornered in a Virginia barn a week later, and was shot to death or killed himself — it was never clear which. Four of Booth’s fellow conspirators were hanged.
Four others were convicted of helping the conspirators after the fact and were sentenced to prison.
America’s four-year Civil War was over. The healing would take more than a century.