The war had begun.  On April 15th, Lincoln called on the states for 75,000 volunteers to build up the Union army in preparation for the conflict ahead.  The Tennessee governor flatly refused, indicating his readiness to join the Confederacy – which Tennessee did on May 7th. Arkansas announced its decision to secede on May 6th.  Virginia voted in convention on April 17th to secede, confirmed in a popular referendum on May 23rd. And on May 20th North Carolina also joined the group of secessionists.  The Confederacy now had eleven members. Kentucky also refused to send troops to Lincoln, though Kentucky was not going to be joining the Confederacy but instead was going to remain neutral.  However, in a number of important ways, this proved to be strategically more beneficial to the Union than to the Confederacy.

Slave-holding Maryland and Delaware did not secede, in part because they were divided in opinion on the matter and in part because they were under the federal gun not to secede.  Lincoln was intent on not having the Union capital at Washington lose its link with the North by being surrounded by a rebellious South. Lincoln moved swiftly to stop any idea of Maryland seceding, declaring martial law,¹ sending troops in to secure strategic positions in the state, arresting large numbers of Maryland officials, and suspending the writ of habeas corpus,² despite the protest of Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney (himself a Marylander).

Missouri, like other border states, was divided in its loyalties.  But in the end a Missouri convention called to decide the matter chose almost unanimously to remain loyal to the Union.  Missouri Governor Jackson took the opposite position and called out the state militia to enforce his pro-slavery stance.  But he was attacked by federal forces, chased with his supporters out of the Missouri state capital, and pushed down into the southern part of the state.  The members of the convention choosing for the Union then took over the running of the state.  But Missouri would itself remain a center of the North-South struggle for the rest of the War.

In Virginia citizens of the western counties were opposed to Virginia's decision to secede from the Union and instead chose to secede from Virginia and the Confederacy, forming the new (pro-Union) state of West Virginia.

In the meantime, thousands of soldiers rushed to join the state militias both North and South, excited to get involved in this opportunity for personal glory.  But as with all such early rushes to war, the excitement would quickly subside once the cruel reality of war began to register.

In material terms, this was bound to be an unequal fight.  The North had three times the number of men eligible for military service as the South – Southern Blacks of course excluded.  And while the huge number of Southern Blacks provided work units supporting the Confederate army, they needed considerable supervising to ensure their cooperation, taking a good number of Whites out of military service.  Also, the emphasis of "Cotton as King" now would haunt the South because it had caused the region to ignore emerging industrial development. Thus the South fell way behind the North in the production of everything from ammunition and uniforms to canons and railroad engines.

On the other hand, Southerners had made up a disproportionately large percentage of America's experienced (Mexican-American War) army officer corps prior to the war. Most of these would quit the U.S. army to take assignments in the Confederate army.  The superior quality of the Confederate officers would show in the way the South tended to embarrass the Northern armies whenever they met in battle, at least during the first years of the war.  The fact that even with all this material superiority it took the North four years to bring the South to defeat stood in part as testimony to the superior military leadership found within the Confederate forces.

The purpose of war is to get an adversary to stop doing – or even being – what it is that a society pursuing war finds detestable in the thoughts and behavior of that adversary.  To get the adversary to yield in this matter requires an enormous amount of pressure put on the adversary. That pressure can take all kinds of forms, military, economic, psychological.  But whatever it takes, the object is always the same: to get the adversary to stop whatever it is that they have been doing – to just quit.

For the South, the strategy was simply to get the North to let the slave-holding states withdraw from the Union so that the South could continue to pursue its cultural dream of an elegant semi-feudal social order consisting of a genteel plantation society engaged in endless rounds of fancy social gatherings, the whole social program supported by the labors of multitudes of Black slaves.

For the North the goal of war – and thus the strategy involved – was much less uniform in inspiration, Northern groups often working at odds with each other. For some, the goal was to eradicate the institution of slavery from the entire North American continent.  For others it was to simply force the South to continue to honor its commitment to the unity of the United States of America, even if that meant backing off on the slavery issue.  Yet for others it was a similar hope of enforcing that unity, and ending slavery in America as well. This lack of unity of purpose would make things very difficult for anyone given presidential responsibility, as previous holders of the office of U.S. president had already discovered.  Thus the newly installed president Lincoln knew that he had been called to undertake a task of unimaginable difficulty.

He had therefore a dual set of responsibilities, as he understood the challenge personally.  He was determined fully, almost regardless of the costs involved, to maintain the unity of the federal Union.  That meant full war against any states undertaking rebellion against the Union.  But he also had to provide the North with a rallying point that would unite all these conflicting Northern viewpoints.  Failure in holding such unity of purpose in the North would be to deliver the South the victory it sought.

As far as the slavery issue went, Lincoln was very cautious about waving the flag of Abolitionism, because not only would it complicate the task of keeping the North united, it would merely steel the resolve of the South to continue its struggle, regardless of the costs involved.  After all, the purpose of war is to weaken the resolve of the adversary, not strengthen it.

Nonetheless, Lincoln well understood that the slavery issue was at the heart of the crisis that had split the Union.  One way or another the slavery issue could no longer be allowed to infect America's national health.  Slavery was going to have to disappear.  But just how that would happen, Lincoln seemed to have no particular strategy in mind. He seemed resolved to leave that question up to the fortunes of war – and to God, on whom he relied ever-heavier as the war between the Northern and Southern states dragged on.

What Lincoln was clear on was his military-economic strategy by which he intended to force the Southern states to give up their rebellion and once again take their place as full members of the Union. Basically, his strategy (aided tremendously in its conception by his military advisor, the old warrior General Winfield Scott) was to surround and isolate the South militarily – north, south, east and west – and thus shut down their cotton-export economy on which the Southern dream depended so completely.

This was going to hurt the textile mills of the North, which depended heavily on the ability to acquire Southern cotton. But that would be one of the sad prices of war.  But Lincoln was aware that this war was going to be costly – very costly – on a number of fronts.  But the Union had to be preserved at all costs, or there would be no very good future for any of the states, North or South.

And thus it was that in pursuit of this strategy of strangulation (the Anaconda Strategy as it was termed), the Civil War was conducted simultaneously on a number of key fronts.  The most important front was the one that developed in Northern Virginia, the spiritual heartland of the South.  Another was the maritime front that extended from the Chesapeake in Virginia, south along the Carolina and Georgia coasts, around Florida, and into the Gulf of Mexico just south of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.  Another was along the Mississippi River, which separated the Confederate states of the Deep South (Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana) from the Confederate states of the Southwest (Texas and Arkansas).  A fourth front was at the very center of the North-South border, basically within the states of Kentucky and Tennessee (and the northwestern section of Georgia).  Four different fronts, and four different armies (or navies), all trying to tighten the noose around the rebellious South.

Not only would the political task of maintaining unity at home against the partisan political interests of ambitious Northern politicians be a constant challenge for Lincoln, but perhaps even weightier would be the task of finding military leaders able to understand Lincoln's strategy of war.  Again, soldiers are notorious for wanting to win battles (and thus battlefield fame) without seeming to understand how that connects with the larger challenge of winning the war that has called forth these battles.  General Washington understood this.  So did General Winfield Scott. But Washington was long dead, and the very elderly Scott was not far behind him. Lincoln needed a wise, not just an ambitious, general to supervise the military portion of his general strategy.  Lincoln would soon discover how difficult it would be to find just such a general.

At first Lincoln turned to the veteran general, Robert E. Lee, asking him to take command of the Union troops.  But when Virginia declared itself to be withdrawing from the Union as a member of the new Confederacy, Lee understood that his loyalties to Virginia stood well before his loyalties to the Union and turned down the offer. In due course, the Confederacy would come to see in Lee what Lincoln had observed and make Lee the commanding general of the South's military (although former general and now Confederate president Jefferson Davis actually seemed to want – and often undertook – that responsibility himself).

¹Martial law is a much stricter form of law than civil law, enforced by military authority operating under the emergency conditions of war.

²A written summons issued by a court of law allowed to any person being held in detention without a formal charge or trial first having taken place, requiring that the authority holding that person show a specific cause under the law for the detention, or else requiring the immediate release of that person for failure to show just cause.