9. THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

1861: THE WAR BEGINS

Fort Sumter just after the Confederates took control of the fort – April 1861
National Archives

Fort Sumter. With the formation of the Confederacy, vast numbers of Southern officers in the U.S. Army withdrew to the South and began to take command of the 100,000-man army called for by Davis. Canons designated for the federal or Union garrisons were seized by Confederate officials and gold and coin of the federal mints in the South were confiscated. South Carolina then demanded that federal troops vacate their various emplacements in the Charleston Harbor region. Union commander Robert Anderson refused and pulled his troops back to the most defensible position at Fort Sumter.  President Buchanan (who still had a couple of months to serve before Lincoln took over) attempted to reinforce the fort, but called off the effort when on January 9th a Union supply ship was fired on by shore batteries in Charleston. President Buchanan ultimately chose to do nothing in response, realizing that Lincoln was going to have to deal with the situation after his inauguration on March 4th. Thus the relief of Fort Sumter became the first order of the day for the new president.  But Lincoln could do little to help the heavily besieged fort.   On April 12th, Charleston shore batteries opened a withering fire on Fort Sumter.   After thirty-four hours of bombardment and with little food, water, or ammunition left, Anderson surrendered the fort to the Confederate forces.   The South was thrilled and the North was exasperated.

The ruins of Ft. Sumter at the war's end – 1865
National Archives

Lincoln's call to arms, and the South's response 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. Gearing up for war 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 strategies of war 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. Robert E. Lee 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. THE FIRST BATTLE OF MANASSAS (OR BULL RUN) The First Battle of Manassas or Bull Run3 (July 21)  gets the war underway The capital at Washington was surrounded by a number of forts held firmly by the Union.  Thus Virginia had to accept the loss to the Union of the northern part of the state, including Confederate General Robert E. Lee's plantation home in Arlington just across the Potomac River from Washington. But Virginia was not going to let that go unchallenged, and the Army of Virginia gathered forces to head north towards Washington.  Lincoln sent out the Army of the Potomac, with its 36,000 men under an inexperienced General Irvin McDowell, to stop them. The two armies soon met at the Bull Run creek near Manassas.  Then just as McDowell moved against the smaller Confederate force of around 20,000 men under General P.G.T. Beauregard, another Confederate force of around 12,000 men under General Joseph Johnston arrived unexpectedly on the scene, stealing from McDowell what he was hoping would be an easy victory. Meanwhile, spectators came out from Washington in their carriages and with their lunches to watch the spectacle. But the spectacle turned out to be much more than they had bargained for.  Both armies executed rather clumsy maneuvers with their inexperienced troops. In the end, the Confederates were able to hold their ground, with General Thomas Jackson standing like a stone wall with his troops. Thus he became known to his men as "Stonewall Jackson"! The Union lines began to break, and then a retreat turned into a humiliating rout of the Union troops.  The spectators themselves then took flight, racing all the way back to Washington with the troops when they realized what was happening. Fear that the Confederate troops might now even turn and continue to march on the capital seized the crowds. But it was not to be.  Both armies had suffered casualties far beyond what they had expected, approximately 850 men killed in the brief action, with several thousand wounded or captured or missing.  It proved to be a very sobering experience for both sides.  It now dawned on many that this civil war may indeed not be "over by Christmas." 3The Union tended to identify battles by a nearby body of water or creek; Confederates did so by the name of the closest town. Such was the case, for instance, also at Antietam Creek or the town of Sharpsburg (September 1862). Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard Joe Johnston Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson General McDowell and staff on the steps of Lee's abandoned home "Arlington" Fort Totten, Virginia – part of the Union defenses around Washington, D.C. Confederate soldiers posing - prior to the first battle of Bull Run First Battle of Bull Run – Lithograph by Jurz & Alison (1889) The Civil War uniforms At the beginning of the War, the American regular army was quite small. There were, however, numerous state militias.  These were the mainstay of the army in its first days – both North and South. At the Battle of Manassas or Bull Run in July, considerable confusion existed once the armies met in close combat – because of the diversity of the uniforms worn by the various state militias.  The Union Army, of course, wore its official navy-blue uniforms.  But the state militia uniforms were mixtures of navy blue, light blue, gray, green, red – on both sides, North and South.  Confederate militias however tended to favor the popular gray worn in the military academies by the cadets.  But the New York militia was also decked out in the same gray. The confusion proved deadly. As a result of this confusion, the South put the Dress Regulations into effect in September whereby all Confederate troops were to wear the gray uniforms: jackets, trousers, caps and greatcoats.  Soon thereafter, the New York militia felt compelled to re-uniform itself with the navy-blue colors of the North's regular army. In time, light blue trousers began to replace the navy-blue trousers of the Union army, fairly widely so, although the superior officers tended to stay with the all-navy uniform.  At the same time these same light blue trousers made their way into the Confederate armies as the Confederate soldier's trousers wore out and the only available replacements were those seized in a raid on Union supplies or even, when things got truly desperate, those stripped off dead Union troops. Indeed, the problem of resupplying new or replacement clothing became critical to the South.  The blockade had deprived it of imported cloth – a major problem for a society that produced enormous amount of cotton, but principally for export to clothing mills found in the North or in England.  Homespun uniforms, dyed with rust or acorn juices to an earth-colored tan or butternut, thus rather rapidly replaced the imported gray cloth worn by the Confederate soldier in the early years of the war.  Indeed, by the end of the war, any clothing that was still fit to wear became the uniform of the Confederate soldier. THE BATTLE FURTHER WEST The battle further west Over in the West, Missouri Governor Jackson's pro-slavery militia confronted in August a Union force that was less than half its size just southwest of Springfield at Wilson's Creek.  In the battle the Union army lost its commander, yet managed to hold off three assaults by the Confederates before running out of ammunition and having to retreat into Springfield.  The Confederates were themselves too exhausted to pursue, both sides having lost over 250 killed, over a thousand each wounded, making it the Bull Run of the West.  In theory it was a Confederate victory, but again, all the killing advanced the cause of neither side.  The basic profile of the Civil War was beginning to reveal itself. During that first year of the War there were a multitude of smaller North-South skirmishes and minor battles scattered all over the countryside, though the greatest number took place in Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri. Again, none of them proved conclusive, but all of them involved more killing and wounding (wounds themselves often proving fatal in the long run) on both sides. Ulysses S. Grant One of the battles occurred (November 7) at Belmont on the Missouri side of the Mississippi just opposite Columbus (Kentucky).  A portion of the Union Army of Tennessee had been advancing toward Columbus under a somewhat unknown Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant.  He had just scored a victory against the Confederates at nearby Paducah (Kentucky). Now at Belmont, he attacked a similar-sized army of Confederates.  The battle proved inconclusive, with both sides each losing over 600 killed or wounded. However, it attracted the attention of Lincoln because of the reports of Grant's impressive leadership.  Lincoln would see more of that in the months to come. "Battle of Belmont" Wikipedia   Gen. Polk (also an Episcopal clergyman)  establishes a Confederate stronghold at Columbus, Kentucky Gen. A.S. Johnston establishes a Confederate line across Northern Tennessee THE MASON-SLIDELL OR TRENT AFFAIR On November 8th, an American ship intercepted the British ship HMS Trent with two Confederate officials aboard who were heading for England in the hopes of securing British recognition of the new Confederacy.  Official recognition would have given the South considerable international leverage (even financial and military support) in the battle with the North. The Confederate officials, James Mason and John Slidell, were taken from the ship, causing a major uproar in both the South and in England.  The British demanded the release of the prisoners and an apology, underscoring their annoyance by strengthening their military presence in Canada. Several weeks later Lincoln officially distanced himself from the actions of the American ship's captain and had the two Confederates released, who then continued on to England.  But there they failed to receive the diplomatic recognition sought so dearly by the South.  Soon thereafter the diplomatic crisis facing the North blew over.    James Mason and John Slidel Go on to the next section:  1862 – Bloody Stalemate   Miles H. Hodges