George B. McClellan —who replaced the aging General Winfield Scott as supreme commander of the Union Army after the first months of the war—was beloved by his troops, but his reluctance to advance frustrated Lincoln. The combined forces of Robert E. Lincoln refused, and instead withdrew the Army of the Potomac to Washington.
Halleck, though he remained in command of the Army of the Potomac. On the heels of his victory at Manassas, Lee began the first Confederate invasion of the North. Despite contradictory orders from Lincoln and Halleck, McClellan was able to reorganize his army and strike at Lee on September 14 in Maryland, driving the Confederates back to a defensive position along Antietam Creek, near Sharpsburg.
Total casualties at the Battle of Antietam also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg numbered 12, of some 69, troops on the Union side, and 13, of around 52, for the Confederates. The Union victory at Antietam would prove decisive, as it halted the Confederate advance in Maryland and forced Lee to retreat into Virginia. Lincoln had used the occasion of the Union victory at Antietam to issue a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation , which freed all enslaved people in the rebellious states after January 1, He justified his decision as a wartime measure, and did not go so far as to free the enslaved people in the border states loyal to the Union.
Still, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side. Some , Black Civil War soldiers would join the Union Army by the time the war ended in , and 38, lost their lives. The Confederates gained a costly victory in the Battle of Chancellorsville , suffering 13, casualties around 22 percent of their troops ; the Union lost 17, men 15 percent.
Over three days of fierce fighting, the Confederates were unable to push through the Union center, and suffered casualties of close to 60 percent. Also in July , Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant took Vicksburg Mississippi in the Siege of Vicksburg , a victory that would prove to be the turning point of the war in the western theater. Despite heavy Union casualties in the Battle of the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania both May , at Cold Harbor early June and the key rail center of Petersburg June , Grant pursued a strategy of attrition, putting Petersburg under siege for the next nine months.
For most of the next week, Grant and Meade pursued the Confederates along the Appomattox River, finally exhausting their possibilities for escape. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Cotton planters were insistent upon raising cotton for profit and would not convert their land to food production for the armies.
Confederacy had to pass an impressment act to feed its armies - took food from civilian farms and plantations, by force in some areas.
Internal disintegration of slavery. Slaves ran away, some joined the army, others fled to freedom behind Union lines. Those who remained on the plantation, undermined the system and drastically decreased productivity.
Inability to raise enough finances to support the war. The Confederate Congress fiercely opposed taxes on cotton exports and the property of planters especially slaves and while wealthy planters had enough capital to fund a relatively large part of the war, most refused to buy Confederate bonds. Lincoln's evolving beliefs about slavery. Lincoln was a product of his time - a complicated world dominated by slavery.
Thus, when he entered the White House, Lincoln's attitudes about slavery were contradictory. On the one hand, Lincoln was antislavery, as he made clear in his statement that "I am naturally antislavery.
If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. On the other hand, he had a racist streak. He used the words "nigger" and "darky" in conversation, and he thought that blacks, whom he regarded as physically different from whites, should be deported to Liberia, Central America or somewhere else, since they couldn't live on equal terms with whites in America. At the beginning of his presidency, Lincoln believed slavery violated America's basic principles but he was reluctant to take dramatic action against it.
He remained so devoted to the American Constitution, with its protections of slavery, that he reluctantly supported the Fugitive Slave Act of At the same time, he made it clear he would prevent slavery's western expansion. It was this middle course that made Lincoln the Republican's most attractive presidential candidate in During his four years as president, Lincoln emerged as a great leader, one whose greatness was tied in his capacity for moral and political growth through real engagement with allies and critics alike.
And his greatest growth was his eventual belief that the slaves must be freed via an amendment to the Constitution that would guarantee their freedom at the end of the war. In his March 4, Second Inaugural Address, he says that everybody knows that slavery was the cause of the war "American slavery" not Southern slavery and warns that we may have to deal with the "terrible" consequences of the "legacy of slavery" for generations to come.
In his last speech on April 11, , Lincoln tackled the complex topic of reconstruction, especially as it related to the state of Louisiana. And for the first time in a public setting, Lincoln expressed his support for black suffrage. This statement so infuriated John Wilkes Booth, a member of the audience, who vowed, "That is the last speech he will make. Lincoln's qualities - "intellectually curious, willing to listen to criticism, attuned to the currents of northern public opinion, and desirous of getting along with Congress" - indicates that he would have managed Reconstruction better than his less qualified and stubborn successor, Andrew Johnson.
Lincoln was a crafty politician as well as a visionary, courageous leader. In order to get the 13th Amendment passed, he needed 20 impossible votes in the House of Representatives. Thus, he instructs his agents to trade political appointments for the votes of House members who had lost their seats in the election.
Lincoln plays fast-and-loose with the truth, promising one faction he'll meet with a peace commission from the Confederacy while reassuring another there would be no such talks. Lincoln stood in the middle of a great political fight between the Radical Republicans and the Conservative Republicans in the United States Congress: the Radical Republicans saw emancipation as the central focus of the war, while Conservative Republicans believed preserving the union was more important than emancipation.
At the start of the war he thought that preserving the Union was the most important thing, and that emancipation was something that he was not sure he had the right to tackle because it was Constitutionally protected. As the war continued, Lincoln came to understand that, as president, he had powers as commander-in-chief when a military necessity was at issue to be able to do something about the slaves.
The slaves were being used to help the South - they dug the trenches, cooked for the soldiers, and protected the home front when the soldiers went off to war. These facts enabled him to support emancipation as a military necessity. And to do that, he needed a constitutional amendment to end slavery - and thus he moved to the radical side of the party. Lincoln became such an advocate of emancipation that he supported and used his political clout to help pass the controversial 13th Amendment freeing the slaves.
He came to this decision largely because he understood that the Emancipation Proclamation was a war time act and as such, could be ignored when the war was over. Only a Constitutional Amendment would prohibit the states coming back into the union from re-establishing slavery. Until the 20th Century, most historians accepted the following statistics about Civil War human costs:. Over , Americans died , Union; , Confederate.
Two of every three died of disease. One-fifth of all the black soldiers about 37, died in the War. Some small towns whose young men had joined in a single regiment lost their entire populations of young men. However, newer estimates have been suggested by historian David J. About , Americans died - 20 percent more than previously estimated.
Today, this would translate into 7. Notably absent from Hacker's research are the total deaths of black men of military age. Slavery was prohibited in the United States - but slaves received little political, social, or economic equality. After the war, a legal framework for equality was created in the form of the 13, 14, 15th Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of However, legal rights for freedmen and women not only failed to bring about their equality in American life, it also failed to bring an end to racism in American society or to usher in a period of economic freedom for African Americans.
The decision to free the slaves on paper via the 13th Amendment did nothing to give them real access to political, economic, or social freedom - thus setting into motion years of Jim Crow laws and racial violence across the nation.
After the war, both the North and South made laws subordinating African Americans. Nineteen of 24 states did not allow the freed slaves to vote. By , all southern states had passed laws disenfranchising and segregating African Americans.
It was not until that any real political and social freedom was enforced in the U. Those supporting egalitarian rights for the freed blacks were soundly defeated. The Civil War was a complex struggle between four groups: Confederates, Unionists, abolitionists, and egalitarians. The first three were victorious by - only the egalitarians lost the war. Confederates and Unionists - Within 12 years after the war was over, the North and South were economically reunited and the nation's economy was on the way to making the U.
Egalitarians - They lost, not only because the amendments had no way to guarantee equality in the South, but because white supremacy continued in the form of Jim Crow laws. Emancipation merely forced white people - in the North and South - to redefine their world, but not to change their racist opinions about black people. The South was devastated. Economic structure was destroyed - especially given that they lost almost their entire labor force with passage of the 13th Amendment.
Many major cities were in ruin - Richmond , Atlanta , Charleston. Cotton crops were destroyed - retreating Confederates burned most crops to prevent capture by federal troops; remaining cotton was confiscated by Union agents as contraband of war. Centralized, federal power, not decentralized state power was the victorious format for the United States government. The Union's victory ensured that the US was not a voluntary union of sovereign states, but instead was a single nation in which the federal government took precedence over the individual states.
The financial foundations were laid for the modern industrial state. Government spending by both the north and south increased dramatically during the war. The Lost Cause Argument gained credence in the South. As such, it argued the following:.
Slavery was merely one issue in the war; it was not important or central to the war's causation; the real reason for the war was a difference of opinion about the Constitution. The South believed that the North had seriously limited their Constitutional rights and the right of the Southern states to make their own political, economic, and social decisions.
The real issue then, was not slavery but liberty - the need of the South to liberate itself from the oppression of Northern industrialists who advanced their interests through taxes, railroad subsidies, and growing industrialization at the expense of Southern planters and farmers.
The Confederate soldiers not only fought a noble battle of honor in the name of liberty, they also fought a better fight than the enemy. They were defeated only by"overwhelming numbers and resources" as Robert E. For three long years, from to , Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia staved off invasions and attacks by the Union Army of the Potomac commanded by a series of ineffective generals until Ulysses S.
Grant came to Virginia from the Western theater to become general in chief of all Union armies in In the meantime Union armies and river fleets in the theater of war comprising the slave states west of the Appalachian Mountain chain won a long series of victories over Confederate armies commanded by hapless or unlucky Confederate generals. In General William Tecumseh Sherman led his army deep into the Confederate heartland of Georgia and South Carolina, destroying their economic infrastructure while General George Thomas virtually destroyed the Confederacy's Army of Tennessee at the battle of Nashville.
By the spring of all the principal Confederate armies surrendered, and when Union cavalry captured the fleeing Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Georgia on May 10, , resistance collapsed and the war ended.
The long, painful process of rebuilding a united nation free of slavery began. Civil War Article. National Archives The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. Library of Congress For three long years, from to , Robert E.
James McPherson is a leading Civil War historian.
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