• Why is the Civil War considered the first modern war?
• How did a war to preserve the Union become a war to end slavery?
• How did the Civil War transform the national economy and create a stronger nation-state?
• How did the war effort and leadership problems affect the society and economy of the Confederacy?
• What were the military and political turning points of the war?
• What were the most important wartime "rehearsals for Reconstruction"?
Like hundreds of thousands of other Americans, Marcus M. Spiegel volunteered in 1861 to fight in the Civil War. Born into a Jewish family in Germany in 1829, Spiegel took part in the failed German revolution of 1848. In the following year he emigrated to Ohio, where he married the daughter of a local farmer When the Civil War broke out, the nation’s 150,000 Jews represented less than 1 percent of the total population. But Spiegel shared wholeheartedly in American patriotism. He went to war, he wrote to his brother-in-law, to defend “the flag that was ever ready to protect you and me and every one who sought its protection from oppression.”
Spiegel rose to the rank of colonel in the 120th Ohio Infantry and saw action in Virginia, Mississippi, and Louisiana. He corresponded frequently with his wife, Caroline. “I have seen and learned much,” he wrote in 1863. “I have seen men dying of disease and mangled by the weapons of death; I have witnessed hostile armies arrayed against each other, the charge of infantry, [and] cavalry hunting men down like beasts.” But he never wavered in his commitment to the “glorious cause” of preserving the Union and its heritage of freedom.
What one Pennsylvania recruit called “the magic word Freedom” shaped how many Union soldiers understood the conflict. The war’s purpose, wrote Samuel Mcllvaine, a sergeant from Indiana, was to preserve the American nation as “the beacon light of liberty and freedom to the human race.” But as the war progressed, prewar understandings of liberty gave way to something new. Millions of northerners who had not been abolitionists became convinced that preserving the Union as an embodiment of liberty required the destruction of slavery.
Marcus Spiegel’s changing views mirrored the transformation of a struggle to save the Union into a war to end slavery. Spiegel was an ardent Democrat. He shared the era’s racist attitudes and thought Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation a serious mistake. Yet as the Union army penetrated the heart of the Deep South, Spiegel became increasingly opposed to slavery. “Since I am here,” he wrote to his wife from Louisiana in January 1864, “I have learned and seen... the horrors of slavery. You know it takes me long to say anything that sounds antidemocratic [opposed to Democratic Party policies], but... never hereafter will I either speak or vote in favor of slavery.”
Marcus Spiegel was killed in a minor engagement in Louisiana in May 1864, one of 620,000 Americans to perish in the Civil War.
By the time secession ran its course, eleven slave states had left the Union.
The American Civil War is often called the first modern war. Never before had mass armies confronted each other on the battlefield with the deadly weapons created by the industrial revolution. The resulting casualties dwarfed anything in the American experience. Beginning as a battle of army versus army, the war became a conflict of society against society, in which the distinction between military and civilian targets often disappeared. In a war of this kind, the effectiveness of political leadership, the ability to mobilize economic resources, and a society’s willingness to keep up the fight despite setbacks are as crucial to the outcome as success or failure on individual battlefields.
Sergeant James W. Travis, Thirty-eighth Illinois Infantry, Union army, and Private Edwin Francis Jemison, Second Louisiana Regiment, Confederate army two of the nearly 3 million Americans who fought in the Civil War. Before going off to war, many soldiers sat for photographs like these, reproduced on small cards called cartes de visite, which they distributed to friends and loved ones. Jemison was killed in the Battle of Malvern Hill in July 1862.
THE TWO COMBATANTS
Almost any comparison between Union and Confederacy seemed to favor the Union. The population of the North and the loyal border slave states numbered 22 million in 1860, while only 9 million persons lived in the Confederacy, 3.5 million of them slaves. In manufacturing, railroad mileage, and financial resources, the Union far outstripped its opponent. On the other hand, the Union confronted by far the greater task. To restore the shattered nation, it had to invade and conquer an area larger than western Europe. Confederate soldiers were highly motivated fighters defending their homes and families. Like Washington’s forces during the American Revolution, southern armies could lose most of the battles and still win the war if their opponent tired of the struggle. “No people,” Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard later claimed, “ever warred for independence with more relative advantages than the Confederacy.”
On both sides, the outbreak of war stirred powerful feelings of patriotism. Recruits rushed to enlist, expecting a short, glorious war. Later, as enthusiasm waned, both sides resorted to a draft. The Confederacy in the spring of 1862 passed the first draft law in American history, and the North soon followed. By 1865, more than 2 million men had served in the Union army and 900,000 in the Confederate army. Each was a cross section of its society: the North’s was composed largely of farm boys, shopkeepers, artisans, and urban workers, while the South’s consisted mostly of non-slaveholding small farmers, with slaveowners dominating the officer corps.
Few recruits had any military experience. Fifteen years had passed since the Mexican War. Ideas about war were highly romantic, based on novels, magazine articles, and lithographs of soldiers covering themselves with glory. One private wrote home in 1862 that his notion of combat had come from the pictures of battles he had seen: “they would all be in a line, all standing in a nice level field fighting, a number of ladies taking care of the wounded, etc. But it isn’t so.” Nor were the recruits ready for military regimentation. “It comes rather hard at first to be deprived of liberty,” wrote an Illinois soldier. Initially, the constant round of drilling, ditch digging, and other chores were only occasionally interrupted by fierce bursts of fighting on the battlefield. According to one estimate, during the first two years of the war the main Union force, the Army of the Potomac, spent only thirty days in actual combat.
Battle of the Iron-clads Monitor and Merrimac, painted in 1877 by William Torgerson, depicts the first clash between ironclad ships, which took place off the coast of Virginia on March g, 1862. Precursors of modem battleships, ironclads were among the numerous technological advances introduced during the Civil War. The masts of a wooden naval vessel are visible on the horizon.