NEARLY A CENTURY AND A HALF AFTER ITS CONCLUSION, THE CIVIL War remains the central event in American history. The reasons for the war’s continued relevance lie not only in its great accomplishments—the preservation of the Union and the destruction of slavery—but in the fact that it raised so many questions that remain fundamental to Americans’ understanding of themselves as a nation. What should be the balance of power between local authority and the national government? Who is entitled to American citizenship? What are the concrete meanings of freedom and equality? These questions remain subjects of controversy today. In that sense, the Civil War is not yet over.
The Civil War permanently affected the future course of the development of the United States. It changed the nature of warfare, gave rise to today’s American nation-state, and destroyed the greatest slave society the modern world has known. In the physical destruction it brought to the South, the economic changes it produced throughout the nation, the new technologies it diffused, and the new ideas it spawned, the war altered the lives of several generations of Americans. The war produced a loss of life unprecedented in the national experience. Recent estimates suggest that over 700,000 combatants perished in the conflict, nearly outnumbering those who died in all other American wars combined. For those who lived through it, the Civil War would always remain the defining moment in their lives.
The Civil War is sometimes called the first modern war, although what constitutes “modernity” in warfare is a matter of interpretation. Certainly, it was the first war in which mass armies confronted each other on the field of battle wielding weapons of slaughter created by the Industrial Revolution. It was the first war, except the Crimean, in which the railroad transported troops and supplies, the first in which railroad junctions such as Chattanooga, Atlanta, and Petersburg became major military objectives. It was the first to demonstrate the superiority of ironclads over wooden ships, thus revolutionizing naval warfare, the first in which balloons observed the enemy’s lines and the telegraph made possible instantaneous communications between generals. The war saw the introduction of armored trains, hand grenades, and even primitive submarines.
Most important of all, the war took place soon after a revolution in arms manufacture had replaced the traditional musket, accurate only at short range, with the more modern rifle and bullet, easier to load and deadly at six hundred yards or more because of its grooved barrel. This development changed the nature of combat, giving those on the defensive—usually Southern armies—an immense advantage over attacking forces. By the end of the war, in the eastern theater, combat approximated what would later become typical of World War I, with armies fighting from behind elaborate trenches and fortifications for months on end. The war of rifle and trench produced the appalling casualty statistics of Civil War battles. At Gettysburg, there were fifty thousand dead, wounded, and missing. Total casualties numbered well over a million, in an American population of around thirty-two million.
Medical care during the Civil War was primitive; far more men perished of disease and inadequate treatment of wounds than on the battlefield. The Civil War was also the first in which large numbers of Americans were held in military prisons. Fifty thousand men died in these prisons, victims of overcrowding and inadequate diet and medical attention.
The war’s brutal realities were brought home with unprecedented immediacy to the public at large. Especially in the North, newspapers reported the results of battles on the following day and published long lists of the casualties. Via mass-produced images of camp and battle scenes, the infant art of photography carried the experience of war into millions of American homes. Although the camera at this time could only capture static scenes—for action, the press relied on artists’ sketches, which they published as engravings—it was the photograph that, as the New York Times put it, became “the Clio of the war.” Beginning in 1862, when photographers entered the battlefield to take pictures of the dead at Antietam, the horror of modern war became tangible. “Let him who wishes to know what war is,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, “look at this series of illustrations.”
Historians have long debated whether the Union’s victory was inevitable. Certainly, the Union overshadowed the Confederacy in manpower and economic resources. The population of the North and the loyal border states numbered over twenty million, while only nine million persons lived in the Confederacy, nearly four million of them slaves. In manufacturing, railroad mileage, and financial resources, the North far outstripped the South. But the Union, which had to conquer an area as large as western Europe, also had a far greater task. Moreover, the early Northern generals, trapped in an older conception of warfare as a genteel pursuit carried on by small, professional armies, proved unable to bring the North’s advantages in manpower and technology to bear on the battlefield. Not until 1864, when Ulysses S. Grant engaged in a long-term war of attrition against Lee’s forces and William T. Sherman brought the wrath of his army to the heart of Georgia, did the North find generals attuned to the realities of modern war.
Like the American patriots during the War of Independence, the Confederates could lose battle after battle and still win the war, if their opponents tired of the conflict. Thus, civilian morale—the will to fight—was a key military resource, and political leadership was crucial to victory. Lincoln proved far more successful than his Confederate counterpart, Jefferson Davis, in mobilizing public sentiment.
“It is war,” declared the nineteenth-century German historian Heinrich von Treitschke, “which turns a people into a nation.” The Civil War created the modern national state in America. It also profoundly altered the federal government’s relationship to the American economy. To mobilize the North’s economic resources, the Lincoln administration instituted the first national banking system and national currency; levied the first national taxes on income; imposed the first highly protective tariffs; and laid the foundation for the first transcontinental railroad. The transfer of political power at Washington from Southern planters to allies of Northern industrialists and merchants created the political conditions in which the United States emerged by century’s end as the greatest economic power on earth.
If the Civil War forms part of the nineteenth-century process of nation building, Lincoln’s Union was rather different from the nations being constructed in Europe. It was conceived as neither the reclamation of ancestral lands nor the institutional embodiment of a common ancestry, language, or culture. Rather, Lincoln insisted, the nation was the incarnation of a universal set of ideas centered on political democracy and human liberty. Indeed, he said, the ideals of the Declaration of Independence enabled immigrants—who could not “trace their connection by blood” to the nation’s birth—to nevertheless be fully accepted as American. The war had a universal significance precisely because the United States, by self-definition, embodied the idea that government should rest on popular consent and that all men should be free. These principles, of course, had been enunciated by the founding fathers but fatally compromised by the existence of slavery. Only with the destruction of slavery could the United States seriously claim to represent to the world the principle of human liberty.
Everyone of that generation, Lincoln said in his second inaugural address, understood that slavery was “somehow” the war’s cause. Slavery lay at the root of the crisis that produced the war, and Union victory eradicated slavery from American life, bringing the entire nation, in Lincoln’s words, a “new birth of freedom.” Yet the war left it to future generations to confront the numerous legacies of slavery and to embark on the still unfinished quest for racial justice.
As early as the debates over the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, slavery had been a divisive issue in American politics. By the 1850s, slavery had expanded relentlessly westward, while in the North a dynamic economy based on free labor had been consolidated. In that decade, the issue of slavery’s further expansion and long-term future shattered the political system. The election of Lincoln, a man publicly committed to stopping slavery’s spread and to seeking its “ultimate extinction,” propelled most of the slave states to leave the Union and form the Confederate States of America. The South’s refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Lincoln presidency and his refusal to accept secession led directly to war.
Begun to preserve the old Union, the war eventually became a crusade for emancipation, producing one of the greatest social revolutions of the nineteenth century. The old image of Lincoln single-handedly abolishing slavery with the stroke of his pen has long been abandoned, for too many other Americans—politicians, reformers, soldiers, and slaves themselves—contributed to the coming of emancipation. Nonetheless, the Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, profoundly altered the nature of the war and the future course of American history.
It was the proclamation, more than any other single wartime event, that transformed a war of armies into a conflict of societies. Although it freed few slaves on the day it was issued, since it applied almost exclusively to areas under Confederate control, it made protecting the freedom of the emancipated slaves a task of the Union army, ensuring that Union victory would produce a social revolution within the South and a redefinition of the place of blacks in American life. Emancipation liquidated the largest concentration of property in the United States. In 1860, the economic value of slaves as property exceeded the combined value of all the nation’s railroads, banks, and factories. There could now be no going back to the prewar Union. A new system of labor, politics, and race relations would have to replace the shattered institution of slavery.
The war linked Union and liberty in a potent new combination. Emancipation demonstrated that the newly empowered national state could expand the realm of freedom. Among reformers, the war inspired a shift from antebellum anti-institutionalism, which saw the purification of the individual as the route to social change, to a state-centered vision in which political power could be harnessed to social betterment. Emancipation would long remain a model of social change, a touchstone for movements demanding other forms of liberation.
The war not only ended slavery but produced a radical change in the answer to the question, who is an American? Before 1860, the definition of those entitled to enjoy the “blessings of liberty” protected by the Constitution was defined by race. In the Dred Scottdecision of 1857, the Supreme Court decreed that no black person could be a citizen of the United States. The enlistment of 200,000 black men in the Union armed forces during the second half of the war altered blacks’ relationship to the nation. Within the army, black soldiers were anything but equal to white. They were confined to segregated units and initially paid less than whites. Nonetheless, by proving themselves in battle and playing a central role in winning the war, blacks staked a claim to equal citizenship in the postwar Republic. The inevitable consequence of black military service, one senator observed in 1864, was that “the black man is henceforth to assume a new status among us.” Before the Civil War, the abolitionist movement, a small minority of the Northern population, had advanced the idea of a national citizenship whose members enjoyed the equal protection of the laws, regardless of race. In the war’s aftermath, this principle was written into the laws and the Constitution.
Like all wars, the conflict encouraged an identification of patriotism with unconditional loyalty to the existing administration. North and South, dissent was widely viewed as akin to treason. Nonetheless, as the war progressed, it exacerbated existing social tensions within both societies and created new ones. Many Northerners attuned to traditional notions of local autonomy feared the growing power of the national government and resented the fact that manufacturers and financiers were reaping the profits of wartime prosperity while workers saw their wages undermined by inflation. The prospect of a sweeping change in blacks’ status called forth a racist reaction. By 1863, as casualties mounted, Northern Democrats subjected the Lincoln administration to withering criticism. In that year, the introduction of conscription (with men able to avoid military service if they were wealthy enough to pay a penalty or provide a substitute) provoked the New York City draft riots. This assault upon all the symbols of the new order being created by the war—draft offices, the homes of wealthy Republicans, industrial establishments, and the city’s black population—became the most violent civil upheaval in the nation’s history other than the South’s rebellion itself. The Confederacy, too, was racked by internal conflict. After an initial burst of patriotic enthusiasm, many non-slaveholders became convinced that they were bearing an unfair share of the war’s burdens.
After the war ended, the loyalties it had created helped the Republican Party retain national dominance into the twentieth century. The Grand Army of the Republic, the organization of war veterans, became a fixture of Republican politics and a presence in every Northern community. In the South, the Confederate experience came to be remembered as the Lost Cause, a noble struggle for local rights and individual liberty (with the defense of slavery conveniently forgotten).
Slowly, the Southern understanding of the war gained national dominance. It became a cliché that the South lost on the battlefield but won the battle over historical memory. By the turn of the century, as soldiers from North and South fought side by side in the Spanish-American War, the Civil War was recalled as a conflict of brother against brother in which both sides fought for noble causes—union for the North, local self-determination for the South. The displacement of slavery from a central role in the war’s causes and conduct accorded with the new racial realities of the age of Jim Crow and the national retreat from the ideal of racial equality. Not until the 1960s, under the impact of the civil rights revolution, did most historians restore emancipation to center stage in their accounts of the Civil War, and it has remained there ever since.
However we remember the Civil War, there is no doubt that it transformed the nation. As the abolitionist Wendell Phillips put it soon after the war ended, Americans were “never again to see the republic in which we were born.”