7
On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves held in the areas of rebellion against the United States. The edict was one of the most significant federal actions in American history, but also one of the most perplexing to explain. Shortly after the announcement of Lincoln’s election as president in November 1860, putting a northerner in charge of the national government, South Carolina and six other states seceded from the union. By February 1861 they had formed a breakaway government and had seized federal facilities, including most forts located in the Deep South. The South Carolina militia trained its cannon on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor and demanded its surrender.
Confronted with this hostile action, Lincoln denounced secession as “legally void” and an “insurrection” against the United States in his inaugural address on March 4. “The Union of these States is perpetual,” he said, and his responsibility was to administer the union intact. At the same time, the president implied that he would not invade the South and disclaimed any intention of abolishing slavery where it already existed. Yet paradoxically, less than two years later, President Lincoln issued an executive order that stripped Confederates of their slaves, wiping out $2 billion of their wealth. The president had undergone an extraordinary transformation, moving from acceptance of the traditional compromise over slavery to a decision that smashed the institution. What explains this change of heart?
Lincoln defended his proclamation as “a fit and necessary war measure” derived from his constitutional authority as commander in chief of the American military. The president was conscious of critics who complained that slaves were contributing to the Confederate war effort and that freedmen were fleeing to Union military lines. Historians have pointed to additional factors that may have influenced Lincoln’s decision: pressure from Republicans in Congress (especially the antislavery radicals) and from the Democratic Party, which was still politically powerful in parts of the North and opposed to Lincoln’s war policies; a flagging war effort and drooping morale in the North; unresolved diplomatic tensions with Great Britain; abolitionists’ demands; and bitter northerners who yearned for revenge for their fallen sons. Lincoln never unveiled his full thinking about the proclamation. That story went to the grave following his assassination in 1865.
Yet the Emancipation Proclamation does reflect an explanatory truth: circumstances can alter prior positions. The war, with its mass killings, widespread suffering, and deep social angst, changed the decision-making landscape in a realm on which previous generations had compromised. A train of events—some deadly—recast the context in which a decision about slavery was reached. The Emancipation Proclamation stands as one of the most conspicuous instances in which the turn of events—in this case, secession and war—can reshape political decisions.
FEDERALISM, SECTIONALISM, AND DISSOLUTION OF THE UNION
The causes of the Civil War have engaged some of the best scholarly minds for generations. The origins of the crisis are devilishly difficult, if not impossible, to pin down, and that is not the task of this book. Rather, its objective is to analyze the Civil War in relationship to American statebuilding. To begin, it is useful to specify the broad context of the union’s division.1
Four factors were instrumental in the breakdown of the union: federalism, socioeconomic change, geography, and political capacity.2 Federalism is the logical place to start because it formed the structural arch of American governance. There was wide agreement that an intimate bond existed among the union, the Constitution as its legal foundation, and the preservation of republican liberty. Virtually every president articulated the axiom, beginning with George Washington, who coupled union with liberty, and continuing through Andrew Jackson, who saluted the states as the foundation of constitutional liberty.3 But disagreement persisted about the balance between national authority and state autonomy. This debate was frequently expressed as opposing views on the origin of the constitutional union. Some claimed the federal government was created by “the people” of the nation; others held that the Constitution was a compact among states that had bestowed specific powers on Congress. At midcentury, Whigs and Republicans in the North tended to accept the former interpretation, while southerners and Democrats favored the latter.4
There was nearly universal agreement that the federal government lacked the authority to overturn slavery in the states where it existed. Slavery was viewed as a domestic institution under the purview of state law. Lincoln ran on a Republican Party platform in 1860 that pledged “the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively.” He repeated this stricture in his inaugural address and mentioned it again in his message to Congress on July 4, 1861. Congress’s power to regulate slavery existed only at the seams of the federal system, that is, on the high seas, in cases in which fugitive slaves crossed state borders, in the District of Columbia, and in federal territories. This last arena was the subject of impassioned debate, as slave owners contended that the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution protected private property in the territories from deprivation without due process of law. Complicating the debate was the concentration of slavery in contiguous states, a geographic reality that accentuated the power of the slaveholding South and maximized its political position in Congress.
Socioeconomic change over the course of the antebellum period fostered sectional tensions, which had profound political ramifications. Population growth steadily advantaged the North. In 1790 the slave states held a slight majority in the House of Representatives; by 1860 they occupied a little over a third of the House seats, and this proportion was significantly enhanced by the large increase in slaves. Slave states controlled half the seats in the Senate until the admission of California as a free state in 1850. During this period the South remained a rural region and became more dependent on growing and exporting cotton, its chief staple, while the North underwent a socioeconomic transformation, especially in the urban Northeast. In addition to the rise of steam transportation, the commercialization of economic transactions, and urbanization, the North innovated public schooling and developed a robust communications and publishing capacity. The number of daily newspapers increased from 42 in 1820 to 387 in 1860, with circulation doubling in the 1850s alone. While the theoretical attributes of “modernization” have been questioned, the concept is suggestive in drawing a connection between individuals’ aspirations for personal fulfillment and support for nationally uniform values.5
Modernization theory helps explain the behavior of abolitionists, whose campaigns are conventionally tied to the appearance of William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper the Liberator in 1831. The rise of evangelical Protestantism is similarly linked to the antislave campaign, which grew over subsequent decades. To some opponents of slavery, keeping territories free of blacks and slave labor competition was probably just as important as condemning an immoral institution. Whatever the mixture of motivations, abolitionists were a small minority, favoring a degree of equality for African Americans that was repulsive to most southerners and many northerners. The historical significant of the abolitionist movement was its continuous campaign of publicity and protest, including the formation of small political parties after 1840 that sought to limit if not eradicate slavery. Southerners responded with a robust defense of their “peculiar” institution. Viewed through a wider lens, southern justification of its slavery–cotton plantation complex and northern distaste for the South’s aristocratic society crystallized into divergent cultural images by the late 1840s.6
Geography complicated the unfolding of these sectional contrasts. On two occasions during the Mexican War the House of Representatives passed the Wilmot Proviso, which prohibited slavery from any territory that might be taken from Mexico. The Senate squelched both measures. The acquisition of Mexican territory in 1848 set the stage for further conflict over slavery in the newly acquired lands, an issue that remained on the national political agenda until the onset of the Civil War. Actual and contemplated settlement of the West, coupled with the national government’s authority to make rules for the territories, set up repeated clashes between sectional leaders. Geography also figured in the formation of the Confederacy, which encompassed an area equal to western Europe and contained hundreds of miles of ocean coastline, important ports, and the lower portion of the Mississippi River. The South’s territorial expanse made its bid for nationhood creditable and its government a formidable enemy.
Finally, political capacity directs attention to volatile components of the governmental system. As the polity advanced, electoral reforms enfranchised virtually all adult males of European ancestry for elections at every level of government by midcentury. By the late 1840s political parties were the principal managers of these canvasses. No office, including the presidency, was filled by a national tally of popular votes. Place (geography and political jurisdiction) and politics were intimately connected. The combination of party politics and procedural mandates of the Electoral College gave Lincoln the presidency. Party politics was highly competitive and often engendered viciously derogatory characterizations of opponents. In light of the unbounded nature of many contests, some historians have blamed partisan politicking for the breakdown of the political system.7 Party rhetoric could be inflammatory, which accentuated the implications of the Republican presidential victory. Southerners did not wait for Lincoln to take office to secede.
THE CRISIS OF THE 1850S
A procession of provocative events buffeted American politics between the Mexican War and Lincoln’s inauguration, a chronology that is integral to the breakdown of the union.8 It is useful to note that the debate over slavery had three broad dimensions: legal-constitutional, political-legislative, and cultural. In a general sense, arguments over slavery engaged judges, lawyers, and theoreticians; candidates for public office and lawmakers; and members of society, such as clergy, editors, and organized antislavery advocates. Recognizing the societal location of the debaters helps track the connections between each set of actors.
The Mexican cession set the stage for this argument. The gold rush in California, which dramatically swelled its population, supported its demand for statehood—as a free state. A deadlock between pro- and antislavery legislators in the territories was broken by the Compromise of 1850, which admitted California as a free state, abolished the slave trade in the nation’s capital, and allowed populations in the territories of New Mexico and Arizona to decide the status of slavery themselves. The most controversial part of the compromise was the Fugitive Slave Act, which permitted slave catchers to apprehend virtually any African American by swearing that the person was a runaway slave. Apprehended individuals had no legal right of self-defense; federal marshals could command bystanders to “aid and assist” in the arrest or risk up to a $1,000 fine. An egregious denial of civil liberty, the law brought the reality of slavery into nonslave communities.
A succession of polarizing events unraveled the compromise. Harriet Beecher Stowe, daughter of a well-known abolitionist, published Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), a novel that dramatized how decent people become corrupted by the evils of slavery. The book became an instant best seller, reinforcing northern images of southerners, who in turn saw the book as Yankee meddling with the southern way of life. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which organized lands west of Missouri into the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, largely to facilitate a transcontinental railroad, overturned the Compromise of 1850. The new policy was the brainchild of Stephen Douglas, Democratic senator from Illinois, who agreed to repeal the Missouri Compromise (1820–1821) in return for southern Democratic support for this plan. Political reaction in the North was swift, with various segments of the electorate converging into anti-Nebraska coalitions in the 1854 elections. With the Whig Party dissolving over slavery, the anti-Nebraska groups coalesced into the Republican Party for the 1856 election.
Rival settlers poured into Kansas, forming pro- and antislavery governments preparatory to a bid for statehood. Violence between the two factions—leading to the epithet “Bleeding Kansas”—kept the battle over slavery alive for years both in the territories and in Congress, working to the advantage of the Republican Party. In 1857 the Supreme Court announced its Dred Scott decision, which invalidated the prohibition against slavery in any federal territory. Most northerners probably saw Chief Justice Roger Taney’s opinion as further evidence that southerners had fastened their grip on the federal establishment. That year also recorded a serious business slowdown, which prompted Republicans to add economic measures, such as a protective tariff and a Pacific railroad, to their agenda, which had initially centered on opposition to the expansion of slavery. The recession cost the Democrats control of Congress.9 By this time many southerners had concluded that the Republicans were bent on squeezing slavery to death. People of this mind-set could find confirmation in John Brown’s unsuccessful raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859.
The election of 1860 took place in the context of these provocations. The Democratic Party split into northern and southern factions, with southerners insisting on constitutional protection for slavery in the territories. Douglas headed the northern Democrats, whose position was popular sovereignty (local voter decisionmaking) in the territories. Extremist southerners threatened secession if a “Black Republican” won the election. Some surviving Whigs in the border states formed the Constitutional Union Party, devoted to preserving the union. Lincoln and the Republicans gained the presidency by winning the electoral vote in fifteen of the eighteen free states, without capturing a single slave state. Although Lincoln received just 40 percent of the total popular vote, 55 percent of the voters in the free states supported him. Republicans won control of most northern state governments but failed to win a majority in either chamber of Congress.10
SECESSION AND LINCOLN’S DECISION FOR UNION
The announcement of Lincoln’s election triggered the secession of seven southern states and the formation of the Confederate States of America by early February 1861.11 Secession presents a curious puzzle. By seceding, the South triggered the very result it feared: the abolition of slavery and the destruction of southern society. Why did southern leaders take such a big risk? Precedents dating back to 1787 demonstrated that workable compromises on slavery could be achieved. Republicans would have held a minority of seats in Congress in 1861 had southerners not withdrawn from that body. The Supreme Court was dominated by southerners, including Chief Justice Roger Taney. Democrats remained a viable political presence in the North. A temporary truce might have been achievable, which would have bought time to recapture power in Washington. Moreover, southerners did not know that Lincoln would use military force against the Confederacy.12
Unraveling the thinking of southern leaders is speculative, of course, but charges of conspiracies afoot help explain the decisions of both sides in 1860 and 1861.13 Conspiratorial thinking, common to the age, led to the belief that conclaves of individuals were plotting in secret to gain self-serving goals. Although conspiracy scenarios can have factual foundations, predictions of plotters’ intentions open up an unbounded spectrum of possible outcomes, including unlikely fantasies. Both southerners and Republicans accused their sectional opponents of secretive schemes to undermine the republic.
The core of Republican Party ideology after 1854 was the existence of a “slave power” conspiracy, whereby southern aristocrats plotted to control the national government in order to protect slavery. William H. Seward, a senator from New York, argued that the Democratic Party had become the tool of southerners pushing a “nefarious schedule of slaveholding designs.” Conscious of racist attitudes among many northerners, Republicans attacked the “slaveocracy,” emphasizing the efforts of a minority of southerners who allied with “doughface” northern Democrats to control the national government. Evidence existed that gave credence to such allegations, such as the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision. After 1854 southerners pressed for a legal guarantee of slavery in the territories, but some Republicans contended that they planned much more. In his debates with Stephen Douglas during their 1858 campaign for the US Senate, Abraham Lincoln said, “put this and that together,” and before long the Supreme Court will allow slavery in the free states.14
Secessionists responded with far-fetched allegations concerning the intentions of the “Black Republicans,” a party that they averred was under the sway of abolitionists. Historian James McPherson has succinctly summarized their charges: “secessionists conjured up frightening scenarios of future Republican actions.” Notwithstanding Republican leaders’ promise not to interfere with slavery in the South, secessionists contended that the party’s real agenda was to squeeze slavery into extinction. Other horrors would follow, such as interracial marriage and murderous hordes of freed slaves in their midst.15 Lincoln’s election raised the possibility that the president would appoint antislavery judges to federal courts in the South. No one knows how much of this alarmist rhetoric was an attempt to gain constituents’ support for the secessionist cause. What is apparent is that both Republican and secessionist conspiracy theories were consistent with and probably reinforced by stereotypes prevalent in the 1850s. Given that politics entails making decisions based on the available information within an atmosphere of cultural belief, it is reasonable to suppose that allegations of conspiracy persuaded some people to foresee the opposition implementing worst-case scenarios.16
Southern secession presented Lincoln and the Republican Party with a difficult predicament. Lincoln had stated in his inaugural address his intention to administer the union intact, but he offered no specific plan of action or timetable. He waited for events to develop, perhaps thinking that radical southerners had pitched another power play to force concessions from Congress. Lincoln and the Republicans refused to be blackmailed and hoped that unionist sentiment throughout the slave states would lead to reunification. Reports that the federal garrison at Fort Sumter could not hold out without supplies forced the president’s hand. He announced to the Confederacy that he would send nonmilitary aid to Sumter. Lincoln realized that his decision was likely to result in war, but he was unwilling to fire the first shot. After the South Carolina militia forced the fort’s surrender, Lincoln called on the governors to deliver 75,000 militiamen for federal service to suppress an “insurrection.”
Lincoln could have followed another path. He could have accepted secession as a fait accompli and allowed the southern states to form their own national state; their withdrawal would have cleansed the United States of the aristocratic slave-based culture. He could have agreed to southerners’ demand for an iron-clad constitutional guarantee of slavery, but he and congressional Republicans rejected that proposal. Although there is no persuasive evidence that Lincoln thought war was necessary prior to the firing on Fort Sumter, he had addressed the issue of preserving the union on several occasions, offering clues to his thinking.
Like other Americans, Lincoln saw an indivisible link between the union and the republic. Several generations of Americans had lived under the Constitution and its federal system, an arrangement repeatedly heralded as the civic solution for preserving liberty. The ideological commitment to this axiom transcended the legal-constitutional basis of the political system and embraced a cultural understanding of the union. It may be that the awakening of nationalist sentiments in Europe and the frequent use of military force to achieve political goals at midcentury influenced Lincoln’s course of action. His second annual message to Congress (December 1862) displayed elements of a mystical, philosophical vision of the political community. Referring to the great midsection of the country, Lincoln’s homeland, the president said, “a glance at the map shows that territorially speaking it is the great body of the Republic,” one of the most important regions in the world, but a pivotal part of “our national homestead.”17 It would be unthinkable to bisect America’s sociocultural heartland. In other words, the United States was more than a collection of states; it was a community of people spread over a massive landscape. As Lincoln expressed the sentiment in December 1862, “A nation may be said to consist of its territory, its people, and its laws.” The territory of the United States, he said, “is well adapted to be the home of one national family.” Lincoln may well have considered it his duty to safeguard this view of republican liberty.18
CREATING A WARTIME STATE
The Civil War lasted four years, beginning with Lincoln’s call for volunteers on April 15, 1861, and ending with the formal capitulation of Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army on April 12, 1865.19 By extending this chronology through Reconstruction, when US (Union) military forces occupied parts of the South, the Civil War era covered roughly fourteen years. The armed forces of the United States expanded from 28,000 in 1860 to over 1 million in 1865; 2,667,000 people served in the US military during the war. A total of 900,000 individuals enlisted with Confederate forces, although the Confederate army seldom exceeded a quarter million men at any one time. This massive mobilization of manpower equaled one-third of the nation’s male workforce.20 Men in uniform fought in 237 named battles. More than 700,000 of them did not survive the conflict. The North spent about $3.3 billion to subdue the South, a figure that exceeded all previous federal expenditures and left the national government with a debt of $2.6 billion, dwarfing previous fiscal obligations. The number of federal employees ballooned from roughly 30,000 in 1860 to nearly 200,000 in 1865. These data attest to the massive scale of the war, which occasioned the national government’s largest intervention into society up to this point in US history.
Lincoln’s first major task as commander in chief was to raise an army. His April 15, 1861, communication asking governors to provide 75,000 volunteers generated more men than requested, as did the president’s call in May for three-year volunteers. By the time Congress assembled in July, a quarter million men had been mobilized; lawmakers authorized a million more. The War Department relied primarily on governors to form units, and as a result, most Union regiments bore the name of their state. As the war settled into a prolonged and bloody struggle, volunteers dwindled, and recruitment became more difficult. The Union then turned to conscription. The draft attracted additional volunteer enlistments, particularly in congressional districts with unmet quotas. Volunteering was sweetened by state and federal bounties, which eventually cost northern governments as much as soldiers’ regular pay. By the middle of the war Congress and the president accepted black troops, previously barred from joining the regular army or state militias. Eventually, 186,000 African Americans served in the Union army.21
Supplying these troops with arms, uniforms, footwear, housing, and food was a monumental task. The War Department had on hand only a fraction of the supplies needed to outfit tens of thousands of soldiers. Initially the states outfitted most units, until the War Department’s Quartermaster Corps improved its acquisition procedures. By 1862 the War Department had instituted centralized procurement, which became more efficient as the war progressed. In 1864 the Quartermaster Corps had nine specialized units that acquired materials and food destined for dozens of Union supply depots around the country. Some goods, such as small arms, ammunition, and uniforms, were made at federal arsenals; by the end of the war the US arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts, could make 200,000 rifles a year. Other items were procured from private firms via contractors. In addition to ships and other vessels that were built or refitted by commercial vendors, the US Navy operated five yards, employing between 2,500 and 5,000 workers to construct vessels. By any scale of measurement, the wartime procurement program dwarfed any prior efforts by the national government.22
The Peninsula Campaign in the spring and summer of 1862 suggests the magnitude of the job facing the War Department. Prodded into action by Lincoln, General George B. McClellan, commander of the large Army of the Potomac, ordered an amphibious expedition from his base in Alexandria, Virginia, to Fort Monroe on the James River, with the objective of capturing Richmond, the Confederate capital. Three hundred vessels were employed to transport 70,000 troops to the strip of land bounded by the James and York Rivers. The entourage included hundreds of wagons and thousands of animals to pull them. Three hundred wagons were needed just to haul food for the horses and mules. Despite the magnitude of this operation, McClellan failed to defeat the Confederate armies defending Richmond. In addition to water transportation, railroads proved invaluable for moving armies between locations, but the US military was still dependent on horsepower. The Union purchased a million horses and mules during the war. General Joseph Hooker’s 1,159-mile rail trip to rescue trapped Union forces in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in September 1863 included 3,000 horses and mules, along with 20,000 troops.23
Feeding, outfitting, and compensating a million-man Union army cost an unprecedented amount of money. The military buildup was sudden, but few thought the war would last very long. The unexpected financial shortfalls put Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase and Congress under pressure to secure additional funds. The basic fiscal solution was to borrow, accounting for about 78 percent of wartime costs. This approach was consistent with the general pattern of financing major wars in the United States and elsewhere. The Treasury issued a variety of bonds, which became harder to sell as the war progressed. To address the reluctance to purchase these bonds, Congress created national banks (the law was passed in February 1863 and amended in June 1864), which were allowed to issue paper notes in exchange for accepting one-third of their capital in US bonds. The national government, in other words, created a subscriber for its own debt. To overcome bankers’ hesitancy to join the new system, the 2 percent tax levied on state banknotes was raised to 10 percent in March 1865. The creation of national banks during the Civil War was the third time since the Revolution that the central government had authorized a banking system, each in the wake of war.24
Pressure to bolster funds in early 1862 moved Congress to issue $150 million in paper currency (greenbacks), which was convertible to specie. Banks’ suspension of specie payments resulted in the elimination of the convertibility provision in two subsequent greenback authorizations, both for $150 million. Congress approved a variety of new tax measures, in part to provide assurance that the government could pay the interest on its borrowing. The most lucrative source of funds was a traditional one—customs duties on imports, for which rates were raised. A direct tax was apportioned among the states. Numerous excise (indirect) taxes were approved, which imposed levies on manufactured items, occupations, liquor, tobacco, and documents. A graduated income tax was adopted, and by 1865 it competed with the tariff as a source of revenue. A sense of the scale of these fiscal innovations can be obtained through simple comparisons: in 1861 Washington collected $41 million in revenue and spent $66 million; in 1865 the government received $333 million and spent $1,297 million. These numbers illustrate how the crisis of war magnified the fiscal operation of the national government.25
Congressional Republicans demonstrated a firm commitment to funding the war effort, despite considerable intraparty differences over the design of these measures. Republicans also used their majority status to promote economic development, principally by using land grants to aid the construction of a transcontinental railroad, establishing state agricultural colleges, and passing a homestead act that provided 160 acres to qualified recipients. Congress created the Department of Agriculture, the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Internal Revenue Service, and it initiated free mail delivery in cities. The election of 1860 and the departure of southern congressmen had opened the legislative gate for Republicans to enact most of their economic agenda.26
The states, largely under Republican control, contributed substantially to the funding of the war. At its outset, northern states outfitted newly formed regiments and built facilities to accommodate them before their departure to fields of deployment. State and local governments provided bonuses for the recruitment of volunteers, a policy that continued through the war. They assumed the major burden of caring for wounded veterans and the families of soldiers, some of whom lost their male breadwinners. Boston, for example, spend a third of its 1862 budget on the war, which occasioned the adoption of new taxes but still left the city with an enlarged debt. Chicago and Cook County shared fiscal responsibilities for recruiting soldiers and caring for their families. These state and local contributions to the northern war effort demonstrated cooperative federalism in action.27
MILITARY STRATEGY AND EXECUTION
The Confederacy’s objective was to defend its territory until the North tired of war. In the meantime, the Confederacy hoped to win foreign aid and recognition, goals that were never realized. The elevation of Robert E. Lee to commander of the Army of Virginia in 1862 during the Peninsula Campaign brought an aggressive military mind to Confederate strategizing. Lee hoped that a military foray into the free states would reduce Union morale and enthusiasm for continuing the conflict and induce a negotiated settlement. Confederate attacks took place at Sharpsburg, Maryland, site of the Battle of Antietam (September 1862), which turned out to be the bloodiest day of the war, and at the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1863) in southern Pennsylvania. Both were repulsed and may have strengthened, not diminished, the North’s commitment to subdue the South.
The shock of the Union retreat at the Battle of Bull Run near Washington, DC (July 1861), the first major fight between the two armies, convinced Lincoln and Union officers that suppression of the rebellion would be more difficult than anticipated and would require broader strategic thinking. From the outset, Lincoln was adamant about keeping the border states, Kentucky and Tennessee in particular, out of the Confederacy; this objective included controlling the river systems that flowed through them, as well as the Mississippi. Lincoln declared a maritime naval blockade of the South at the beginning of the war and worked to keep Great Britain neutral, which thwarted Confederate efforts to win foreign support. As the war dragged on and casualties rose, Lincoln’s hope to force a rebel cease-fire evolved into a strategy of relentless pressure to destroy the enemy’s capacity to wage war. Prospects for success appeared dim in the summer of 1862: McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign had not succeeded, and Confederate resistance in the border states was stiff. Abolitionists were pressuring the administration to take action against slavery, and Congress passed a confiscation act in 1862 that stripped rebels of their property, including slaves. Aware of these developments and worried about the upcoming fall elections, Lincoln looked for an opportunity to boost Union morale and pressure the rebels to desist. The Union’s successful but costly repulsion of Lee at Antietam afforded Lincoln an occasion to announce his intention to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. By this point he had committed to an “unlimited war” that sought the South’s unconditional surrender and the banishment of slavery.28
Executing Lincoln’s strategy was another matter. The president was repeatedly disappointed by his generals’ inability to pursue and destroy rebel forces. McClellan was the epitome of an overly cautious commander. The military situation brightened in 1863 when the Union stopped Lee’s northward probe at Gettysburg, followed by Lincoln’s conclusion that Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and Philip Sheridan were the kind of military leaders he needed. Still, lagging morale and a stalemated war led Lincoln to anticipate defeat in the presidential election of 1864. Sherman’s capture of Atlanta helped Republicans prevail in that election. By the end of the year Sheridan had driven the rebels out of the Shenandoah Valley; Sherman had started his March to the Sea in Georgia, bringing “the hard hand of war” to the South by destroying property; and Grant had begun his siege of Lee’s forces at Petersburg, Virginia. Under continuous Union pressure, Lee’s army dwindled until his capitulation near Richmond in April 1865.29
It had taken the Union four years to get to this point. Why so long? Many factors affected the conduct of the war, with geography ranking as a primary influence. The Confederacy covered a huge area but had only one major city: New Orleans. With rivers that emptied into the Atlantic honeycombing the eastern coastal plains and mountains running north and south in the region’s midsection, the Confederacy’s terrain posed logistical difficulties for armies that lacked modern transportation and accurate (or any) maps.30 Within this huge landmass the Confederacy waged a defensive war and displayed a fierce élan to uphold southern honor and pride. The adoption of the rifle, which quadrupled the effective range of the older smoothbore musket, advantaged the defenders, subjecting the massed formation of attackers to deadly lines of fire. The use of cannon could increase the suicidal nature of a close-formation attack, which was still the standard tactic. The extraordinarily high casualty rates at Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg attest to the juxtaposition of new killing technology and conventional fighting techniques. The notable exceptions to the South’s defensive posture were Lee’s advances into Union territory, which produced little more than a dreadful number of Confederate casualties.31
These deadly realities made Union commanders cautious. The classic manifestation of offensive timidity was General George McClellan, whom Lincoln relieved of command in late 1862. Many officers from the regimental level to the division and army level were political appointees, but this was not much of a liability, given the minimal military understanding of offensive warfare with armies numbering in the tens of thousands. It took time for officers to obtain on-the-job training in tactics and for Lincoln to find commanders who understood that the North had to win a “complete conquest,” as Grant put it. Some of the caution exhibited by military leaders was mimicked on the political front. Considerable opposition to Lincoln’s military course came from the Democratic Party, which favored a negotiated settlement and opposed emancipation. McClellan headed the Democratic ticket in the 1864 presidential election.32
Given these constraints, how did the North win? First and foremost, the Union had overwhelming population and economic advantages. There were four times as many white males living in the North than in the South. The North also enjoyed a large numerical edge in the female population, an imbalance that worked to the Union’s advantage. Women in the North took on numerous important tasks—working as nurses in military hospitals, seamstresses in army arsenals and for private clothing manufacturers, clerks in the federal government, and welfare workers in local communities, as well as running their family farms in the absence of their husbands. The North’s manufacturing base, established before 1860, strengthened during the war, while the South’s limited industrial sector did not. Most railroad mileage, canals, and telegraph connections were located in the North. Overall, the North’s assets gave it a decisive edge in a war of attrition.
The Union’s economic advantage extended to public financing, the lifeblood of war. The South’s fiscal system was teetering on the brink of collapse by 1865, caused in part by the Union’s ocean blockade, which had shut down most Confederate ports by 1864. Unable to import (or, for that matter, export) goods, the Confederacy collected minimal customs duties—the chief source of government revenue in the antebellum era. Inflation sucked the blood out of the South’s fiscal capacity. Besides building, buying, and refitting oceangoing vessels, the US Navy acquired hundreds of gunboats that allowed the Union to dominate the interior rivers, such as the Mississippi. The Union had captured New Orleans in 1862; Grant’s capture of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863, the South’s last stronghold on the Mississippi, isolated the western portion of the Confederacy.
The last factor that enabled the Union victory had to do with government and politics, especially the leadership of Abraham Lincoln. In effect, the president functioned as the army’s chief of staff, outlining strategy and instructing generals himself until he found a military man who shared his goals, at which point Grant became the army’s top commander. Lincoln also played an instrumental role politically as the nation’s chief executive. Caught between conservative Democrats, some of whom were slaveholders in the border states, and radical Republicans who urged a vindictive approach to the South, the president proceeded cautiously yet adroitly. He remained the leader of his party, working cooperatively with Republicans, who controlled most state governments in the North. Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation (both the preliminary and final versions) was a military and political masterstroke, adding a moral objective to the war that satisfied antislavery Republicans. Although the Confederacy’s constitution was nearly a carbon copy of the US Constitution, conflicts over states’ rights impeded the capacity of the South’s central government. Whereas Lincoln withstood criticism with humor and self-control, Confederate president Jefferson Davis was sensitive to political slights. As a mechanism for channeling political activity, the northern version of federalism worked better than its southern imitation.33
RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL POWER
The Confederate surrender in April 1865 ended the confrontation between armies but did not eliminate armed conflict. Resistance to the federal presence in the South continued during the years of Reconstruction (1866–1877), when white southerners undermined Yankee attempts to reform local governance and blocked assistance for former slaves. The Northern response to these developments occasioned unprecedented federal intervention in southern society. Reconstruction represents a critical stage of American statebuilding.
Planning for the occupation of former Confederate territory raised complicated questions about the nature of citizenship, the protection of civil liberties, and the conditions under which southern states could rejoin the union. Lincoln took a lenient approach to the latter issue during the war, presumably to induce Confederates to cease military hostilities. Moderates in his party supported this approach, but Republican radicals demanded the eradication of slavery and the destruction of southern aristocratic rule. Lincoln’s assassination, which occurred just days after Lee’s capitulation at Appomattox, and Andrew Johnson’s elevation to the presidency changed the political calculus. Johnson was a former slave owner and Democrat from Tennessee who had accepted the vice-presidential nomination by the Republican-Union coalition in 1864 in an effort to win the support of border states. As president, Johnson showed his regional prejudice by supporting southern whites, many of them ex-rebels, who attempted to block the extension of political rights to African Americans. This defiance was embodied in the so-called Black Codes (1865–1866), state laws that restricted former slaves with regard to working conditions, landownership, and political rights.
These developments convinced many Republicans that ex-Confederates intended to reinstate slavery and negate the sacrifices incurred in suppressing the rebellion. The Republican-controlled Congress responded with support for the Freedmen’s Bureau (created in 1865) to aid ex-slaves and a civil rights act (1866) that explicitly extended citizenship to African Americans and authorized federal protection of their right to the “full and equal benefit of all laws.” Congress refused to admit senators and representatives from states that Johnson claimed had been reconstructed. The bitter dispute between the president and Congress on these issues prompted Republicans to craft the Fourteenth Amendment, which placed the provisions of the 1866 civil rights statute in the Constitution. The first section of the amendment clarified the muddled question of citizenship by stating, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” American citizenship, in short, spanned the levels of federalism. The second section eliminated the three-fifths clause related to congressional representation and penalized southern representation in Congress for denying the right to vote for any federal or state office to “any male inhabitants” twenty-one years old and US citizens. Section 3 barred individuals who had supported the rebellion from holding state or national office, unless Congress removed this disability. The amendment gave Congress the power to enforce these provisions—a formidable expansion of federal authority.
To counter southern defiance of the war’s outcome, Congress enacted the Reconstruction Acts (1867) over Johnson’s veto. These laws placed southern states under military supervision and stipulated conditions for their return to the union, beginning with revised constitutions that provided for black suffrage. Readmission also required that each southern state ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Johnson used various tactics to try to impede these objectives. Incensed by his disregard of congressional mandates, particularly his removal of army generals who sought to uphold federal law in the military occupation zones, Republicans in Congress impeached the president. Johnson avoided removal by one vote in the Senate trial in 1868, the year Ulysses Grant was elected president. As these events unfolded, Democrats vehemently denounced Reconstruction policy, censuring Republicans for “centralizing” power and promoting an “Africanization” of southern society. Claiming that America was a white man’s country, Democrats argued that the federal government lacked the authority to overturn states’ rights or “meddle with the rights of the people.”34
Southern terrorism against black voters in 1868 helped persuade Republicans to approve the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which provided that citizens could not be denied the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Its ratification in 1870 expanded the reach of federal power, but the amendment’s prohibition against state interference with voting rights applied only to males, to the disappointment of supporters of female suffrage.35
Congress readmitted the former Confederate states to the union between 1868 and 1870, under governments composed of southern white unionists, Republicans who had relocated to the South, and blacks. But readmission intensified rather than diminished racial harassment and intimidation, which included the murder of white unionists, federal soldiers, and blacks, as unrepentant Confederates strove to recapture control of their state governments. A reign of terror swept through the South from the end of the 1860s to the mid-1870s as conservatives drove pro-unionists from power to “redeem” southern society. Congressional Republicans responded to civil rights violations with three enforcement acts that authorized federal marshals to arrest individuals who conspired to interfere with the right to vote. The third statute, the so-called Ku Klux Klan Act, was aimed at the suppression of night riders who terrorized citizens (both white and black), and it authorized the president to use the US Army to punish offenders and restore order. President Grant dispatched troops to southern states on more than a hundred occasions.36
Protecting African Americans in the former Confederacy was beyond the capacity of the national government. Only 6,000 US soldiers were assigned to southern duty, far too few to police the hundreds of communities where illegal activities occurred. Yet even hundreds of thousands of Union blue-coats probably could not have overcome southern racism, hatred of federal dictates, and embitterment at the Yankee invasion. The problem confronting the federal government was massive and beyond Washington’s political and fiscal means, given the prevalence of racism and anti-Yankeeism embedded in southern culture and the increased opposition in the North to national intervention that overrode “local self-government.”37 Faced with this reality, a growing number of northern Republicans disengaged from policing southern society. The political costs of pursuing the civil rights goals of the 1860s became too high for most northerners by the early 1870s.38
The Panic of 1873, which threw the country into a deep depression that lasted until 1878, was instrumental in this shift of sentiment.39 Hard times brought high unemployment, a sharp rise in bankruptcies, and finger-pointing by both parties claiming that the other had caused the crisis. The depression cooled Republican support of Reconstruction even before an “electoral tidal wave” swept the country in 1874, netting Democrats ninety-three additional seats in Congress. This massive partisan turnover, in which fifty-four Republican incumbents were defeated, gave Democrats a solid majority in the House. The Republican majority in the Senate was reduced, as victories in state legislative elections allowed the Democratic Party to pick US senators. The economic downturn was not the only cause of this electoral carnage. Still, 1874 was a classic case of depression politics whereby voters vent their frustrations by turning against the party in power.40
When Congress convened in late 1875, the Republicans were more attentive to economic matters than to Reconstruction. Yet neither party was unified on key subjects, such as monetary policy and railroad regulation. The economic and political repercussions of the depression, plus the new Democratic majority in the House, undercut the motivation to continue an aggressive campaign against southern racial terrorism. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who became president in 1876 after a special committee awarded him disputed southern electoral votes, withdrew the last contingent of federal troops from the South.41 The federal courts put an exclamation point on this transition with rulings between 1874 (U.S. v. Cruikshank) and 1883 (Civil Rights Cases and U.S. v. Harris) that stripped the teeth from federal civil rights law. Subsequent violations reverted to southern courts, where white juries seldom convicted whites of abusing blacks.
Some historians have argued that the Civil War had little effect on the fundamentals of government in the United States.42 This claim is true to the extent that a primary goal of the Civil War was to preserve, not dismantle, the federal structure, a point the Supreme Court affirmed during Reconstruction.43 Yet the contention that the war had a minimal impact on governance sidesteps the outcome of the conflict, which settled the question of where ultimate authority rested. The surrender at Appomattox confirmed that this power resided in the national government. Moreover, the three so-called Civil War amendments to the Constitution (1865–1870) gave the national state significant legal authority with regard to citizenship and rights, although this authority was more potential than actual for several decades. The establishment of a national banking system linked the US Treasury and the financial community in new and important ways, such as the functioning of the currency system and debt operations.44 During the early years of Reconstruction the federal government intervened politically and militarily in southern governance in unprecedented ways. This expansion of federal power during the wartime crisis provided a model for further national activism in later years.
After Appomattox the Union army was largely disbanded, and the massive wartime outlay of federal monies was drastically reduced. But these contractions were normal reactions to the return of peace, at least in the United States. Every major war in American history has been followed by the rapid demobilization of the military and the reinstatement of a peacetime fiscal mentality. Federal expenditures in 1865 and the federal debt level of 1866 were not equaled until 1917. But federal outlays in the 1870s were five times higher than in the 1850s; controlling for inflation and population growth reduces the interdecade comparison to a tripling of expenditures, which was still a significant jump.45 The wartime experience ratcheted up the national government’s financial activities, and a similar phenomenon occurred at the state and local levels. Boston’s expenditures averaged $16.90 per capita between 1854 and 1857, compared with $40.97 between 1868 and 1871; wartime inflation explains only part of the increase. Other large cities registered similar spikes in spending, as did northern states. The war, in other words, recalibrated public finance. These fiscal changes also made government a more tempting target of corruption, as witnessed in the Grant administration and in New York City in the 1870s.46
Federal employment also underwent significant growth, doubling between 1851 and 1871 and nearly tripling between 1861 and 1881. Fifteen hundred civilians worked for the federal government in Washington, DC, in 1851; this number rose to 6,000 in 1871 and then doubled during the 1870s. Some of the additional federal workers joined the new federal agencies created between 1861 and 1871, such as the Department of Agriculture, the Internal Revenue Bureau, the Commission of Immigration, the Office of Education, and the Justice Department.47
Comprehensive employment figures for state and local governments are not available, but it is reasonable to suppose that the number of civil servants increased in these governments as well, given their policy actions. Boston, for instance, constructed the Chestnut Hill Reservoir and built a pleasure drive around it, opened a city hospital, provided aid to the families of veterans (partially reimbursed by the state), undertook health inspections in conjunction with the Tenement House Act (1868), expanded the size of its police force, and established a Department of Health (1873). New York State adopted a number of new policies between 1861 and the mid-1870s, when the state oscillated between Democratic and Republican regimes. A sampling of these actions includes the establishment of state normal schools and institutions for the blind and insane, the creation of a board of health and tenement house regulations for New York City, the regulation of saving banks, the establishment of free schools and compulsory education, and steps toward the creation of Adirondack State Park.48 Notwithstanding the difficulty of gauging the extent to which the Civil War and Reconstruction influenced these developments, the evidence shows that a notable expansion of governance occurred between 1861 and 1877.
Equally significant for statebuilding was the war’s impact on nationalism. Expressions of nationalist sentiments were visible in various settings, such as in the orations of clergy, some of whom became military chaplains; in campaign rhetoric; and in the display of the American flag on the battlefield. Lincoln articulated feelings of patriotic unity in his Gettysburg Address, in which he referred to the United States as a “nation” five times, but not once to the “union.” The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), a fraternal organization of former Union soldiers, kept alive the memory of wartime sacrifices and persuaded Congress to recognize Memorial Day as a national holiday, in addition to lobbying for veterans’ pensions. Battlefields were recognized as sacred places, and Gettysburg became a national park. These sentiments reached into Congress, where veterans from both sides served during the Gilded Age and later. Ties to the nation strengthened by the war, the martyrdom of Lincoln, and the struggles during Reconstruction reinforced more concrete actions that fostered American statebuilding. America’s defense of the national union may have influenced nationbuilding elsewhere, such as in Canada, Germany, Italy, and Japan. Statebuilding was in the air in various parts of the world in the 1860s and early 1870s.49
The expansion of the national government during the Civil War slowed in its aftermath, but the identities produced by the conflict lingered for generations, providing a baseline from which later expressions of patriotism developed. Nationalism was not embraced in every part of the nation. The sectional bifurcation that characterized American political culture before 1860 deepened after the war. Spurred by bitter memories of Union troops ravaging parts of the South and Yankee reforms afterward, the majority of white southerners doggedly resisted federal intervention during Reconstruction and used terrorism to build their own conservative alternative. Based on racism and opposition to federal centralization, the South developed a one-party polity of Democrats that lasted a hundred years. This unique sectional politics had an immense influence on subsequent governance in the United States.