Transcript James L. Roark * Michael P. Johnson Patricia Cline Cohen * Sarah

James L. Roark ● Michael P. Johnson
Patricia Cline Cohen ● Sarah Stage
Susan M. Hartmann
The American Promise
A History of the United States
Fifth Edition
CHAPTER 15
The Crucible of War,
1861-1865
Copyright © 2012 by Bedford/St. Martin's
I. “And the War Came”
A. Attack on Fort Sumter
1. Symbolic importance
•
the spring of 1861, Major Robert Anderson and some eighty U.S. soldiers occupied Fort
Sumter at the entrance to Charleston harbor; to Southerners, the fort became a hated
symbol, reminding Southerners of the nation they had abandoned; Northerners saw Fort
Sumter as a symbol of federal sovereignty in the seceded states.
•
•
2. The presidents’ responses
decided to hold Fort Sumter, so he had to provision it; he avoided sending military
reinforcements; he knew he risked war, but his plan honored his promises to defend
federal property and to avoid using military force unless first attacked; masterfully
shifted the decision of war or peace to Davis; on April 9, 1861, Davis and his cabinet met
to consider the situation; according to Davis, the territorial integrity of the Confederacy
demanded the end of the federal presence; against the advice of his secretary of state,
Robert Toombs, Davis sent Confederate soldiers to bombard the fort, forcing Anderson to
surrender.
3. Defending the flag
Lincoln called for 75,000 militiamen to serve for ninety days to put down the rebellion;
several times that number rushed to defend the flag.
B. The Upper South Chooses Sides
1. The difficult choice
2. Border states
•
throughout the border states, but especially in Kentucky, the Civil War became a
“brothers’ war,” dividing families over the issue of slavery; in the end, only eleven of the
fifteen slave states joined the Confederate States of America; four of the seceding Upper
South states contained significant numbers of people who felt little affection for the
Confederacy; dissatisfaction was so rife in the western counties of Virginia that in 1863,
citizens voted to create a new state, West Virginia, loyal to the union.
II. The Combatants
A. How They Expected to Win
1. The Union’s advantages
•
had enormous advantages: greater population, more wealth, and better-developed industry, manufacturing,
agriculture, and infrastructure.
2. The South’s expectations
•
believed that they would triumph; saw themselves as warriors fighting in the tradition of the American
Revolution; confidence rested partly on its estimation of the economic clout of its principal crop, cotton;
believed that northern prosperity depended on the South’s cotton and that the crop would also make an ally.
3. The Confederate strategy
•
Confederacy devised a military strategy that recognized that a Confederate victory required only that the South
stay at home, blunt invasions, avoid battles that risked annihilating its army, and outlast the northern will to
fight; could win independence by not losing the war.
•
naval blockade designed to block the Confederacy from shipping cotton; Davis ceased exporting cotton, which
devastated the southern economy; Lincoln devised the Anaconda Plan, designed to cut the Confederacy in two
by targeting Virginia and the Mississippi Valley; neither side predicted the magnitude and duration of the war.
4. Anaconda Plan
B. Lincoln and Davis Mobilize
1. Davis’s potential
2. Lincoln’s experience
3. The realities of leadership
•
Davis had no gift for military strategy, yet he often intervened in military affairs; he was quarrelsome and
proud in the political arena, making enemies the Confederacy could ill afford; Lincoln proved himself a master
politician and shrewd leader; appointed the ablest men to his cabinet; eloquence helped galvanize northern
people in defense of the nation.
4. Supplying armies
•
the South building supplies from scratch and the North repurposing already established resources and troops;
federal army numbered only 16,000 men on the eve of the war; the Confederacy made prodigious efforts to
build new factories to produce war supplies, but the Confederate army nonetheless faced continual supply
shortages; supplying huge armies required new revenues, and both sides turned to the sale of war bonds and
the collection of taxes.
III. Battling It Out, 1861–1862
A. Stalemate in the Eastern Theater
1. The Battle of Bull Run
•
35,000 troops for an attack on 20,000 Confederates defending Manassas, a railroad junction in
Virginia near Washington; fast-moving Confederate reinforcements blunted the Union attack and
then counterattacked; Union troops retreated in a panicky stampede; casualties at Bull Run
(known as Manassas to Southerners) were relatively light; the significance of the battle lay in the
lessons Northerners and Southerners drew from it: Southerners reaffirmed their belief in the
superiority of their fighting forces, and Northerners learned that victory would not be quick or
easy.
2. McClellan and the Union offensive
•
appointed George B. McClellan the commander of the Army of the Potomac; launched offensive
in May 1862; when McClellan was within six miles of Richmond, Confederate general Joseph
Johnston hit back; Johnston was wounded in the attack and replaced by Robert E. Lee, who
would become the South’s most celebrated general.
3. The Seven Days Battle and the Second Battle of Bull Run
•
Run—Lee initiated the Seven Days Battle, saving Richmond; Lincoln wired McClellan to abandon
the peninsula campaign and replaced him with General John Pope; in August 1862, at the second
battle of Bull Run, Lee’s smaller army battered Pope’s forces and sent them back to Washington;
Lincoln replaced Pope, restoring McClellan again to command.
4. The Battle of Antietam
5. The Battle of Fredericksburg
•
Fredericksburg, Union general Ambrose Burnside’s 122,000 Union troops faced 78,500
Confederates dug in behind a stone wall; half a mile of open ground separated the armies; one of
the Union’s worst defeats; by the end of the year, the North seemed no nearer to ending the
rebellion than it had been when the war began; military struggle in the East had reached
stalemate.
III. Battling It Out, 1861–1862
B. Union Victories in the Western Theater
1. Western goals
2. Confederate defeats
3. Tennessee
•
General Ulysses S. Grant emerged as the key northern commander; in February
1862, Grant captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on
the Cumberland; forced Confederates to withdraw from all of Kentucky and
most of Tennessee; Grant followed; in April, Union forces prevailed at the costly
battle of Shiloh in Tennessee; although no one knew it at the time, Shiloh
ended the Confederacy’s bid to control the western theater; by the end of 1862,
the far West and most—but not all—of the Mississippi valley lay in Union hands.
C. The Atlantic Theater
1. The U.S. Navy
2. Confederate innovations
3. The blockade tightens
•
each month Union fleet tightened its noose; by 1863, the South wanted to ship
cotton to pay for imports of the material it needed to fight the war, but the
federal blockade sealed off the Confederacy and weakened it dramatically.
III. Battling It Out, 1861–1862
D. International Diplomacy
1. King Cotton diplomacy
2. Why Europe remained neutral
• Cotton Diplomacy failed in part because of the
availability of cotton from other parts of the world;
trade between the Union and Britain—British war
materiel for American grain and flour—helped offset
the decline in textiles and encouraged Britain to
remain neutral; Union successes in the West
dissuaded Britain and France; in 1862, Lincoln
announced a new policy that made an alliance with
the Confederacy an alliance with slavery; since the
French and English outlawed slavery in their empires,
this was an alliance neither country was willing to
make.
IV. Union and Freedom
A. From Slaves to Contraband
1. Lincoln and black freedom
2. Congress and slavery policy
•
abolitionists argued that by seceding, Southerners had forfeited their right to constitutional
protection; Republican-dominated Congress refused to leave slavery policy entirely in Lincoln’s hands,
passing the Confiscation Act, which allowed the seizure of any slave who was employed directly by the
Confederate military.
•
3. Slaves press for freedom
4. Contraband of war
5. Lincoln’s antislavery initiatives
to calm Northerners’ racial fears, he offered colonization; blacks opposed these efforts; as Lincoln
developed his own initiatives, he snuffed out various federal commanders’ efforts to free rebels’ slaves
because he believed it would jeopardize northern unity; would not allow generals to free slaves;
events moved so rapidly, however, that Lincoln found it impossible to control federal policy on slavery.
B. From Contraband to Free People
1. The Emancipation Proclamation
•
July 17, 1862, Congress passed a second Confiscation Act; freed all slaves of rebel masters; by July,
Lincoln had drafted a preliminary emancipation proclamation that promised to free all slaves in the
seceding states on January 1, 1863; he described emancipation as an “act of justice,” but it was the
increasing casualty lists that finally brought him around.
•
2. Criticisms
exempted the loyal border states and the Union-occupied areas of the Confederacy, which caused
some to ridicule the act, but Lincoln had no power to free slaves in loyal states; by presenting
emancipation as a “military necessity,” Lincoln hoped he had disarmed his conservative critics; Lincoln
issued the final Emancipation Proclamation as promised on January 1, 1863.
IV. Union and Freedom
C. The War of Black Liberation
1. Black soldiers
2. Unequal treatment
3. Black courage
V. The South at War
A. Revolution from Above
1. Building the army
•
Davis faced the task of building an army and navy from scratch, supplying them from
factories that were scarce and anemic, and paying for it all from a treasury that did not
exist; finding eager soldiers proved easiest; hundreds of officers defected from the U.S.
Army and hundreds of thousands of rebels volunteered.
2. Economy and finances
•
•
•
printed paper money, which caused inflation; manufactured more than most people
thought possible, but it never produced what the South needed.
3. Government Intrusion—War-making
3. Government intrusion
drafting able-bodied white males, confiscating food and goods for below-market rates,
and legally impressing slaves; conflicted with the South’s traditional values of states’
rights and unfettered individualism; but popular commitment to the new nation endured
despite the strain.
B. Hardship Below
1. The poor
•
the price of flour increased tenfold; government took 10 percent of harvests as a tax; in
the spring of 1863, bread riots broke out in a dozen cities and villages across the South;
Confederate efforts at social welfare all failed; when the war ended, one-third of the
soldiers had already gone home.
2. Class conflict
V. The South at War
C. The Disintegration of Slavery
1. The practical destruction of slavery
• practical destruction of slavery was the product of
war; the war disrupted the routine, organization, and
discipline of bondage and in large parts of the South;
slaves got to the fields late, worked indifferently, and
quit early; balance of power between master and
slave gradually shifted.
2. Shift in master-slave balance of power
• some slaveholders fled, leaving their slaves behind;
many more took their slaves with them, giving slaves
new opportunities to resist bondage; throughout the
course of the war, slaves undermined white mastery
and expanded control over their own lives.
VI. The North at War
A. The Government and the Economy
1. Republican economic programs
•
•
•
When the war began, the United States had no national banking system, no national
currency, and no federal income or excise taxes; secession of eleven slave states cut the
Democrats’ strength in Congress in half and destroyed their capacity to resist Republican
economic programs; led to the Legal Tender Act of 1862, which created a national
currency and paper money, the National Banking Act of 1863, and the Internal Revenue
Act.
2. Integrating the West
the Homestead Act offered 160 acres of public land to settlers who would live and labor
on it; the Pacific Railroad Act provided federal assistance for a transcontinental railroad.
3. Agriculture and industry
created of the Department of Agriculture; passed the Land-Grant College Act, which set
aside public land to support universities that emphasized “agriculture and mechanical
arts”; Lincoln administration immeasurably strengthened the North’s effort to win the
war, but ideas also permanently changed the nation.
B. Women and Work at Home and at War
1. Assuming masculine tasks
•
women stepped into jobs vacated by men, particularly in manufacturing; also into
essentially new occupations such as government secretaries and clerks; the number of
women working for wages rose 40 percent during the war.
2. Contributing from home
3. Wartime nurses
VI. The North at War
C. Politics and Dissent
1. Partisanship
2. Resisting the draft
•
Draft law of March 1863 gave Democrats another grievance; poor
men opposed Union provisions that allowed a draftee to hire a
substitute or to pay a $300 fee to get out of his military
obligation; linking the draft and emancipation, Democrats argued
that Republicans employed unconstitutional means (the draft) to
achieve an unconstitutional end (emancipation); racist mobs went
on rampages in northern cities.
•
3. Stifling dissent
Lincoln believed Democratic opposition to the war was more
threatening to national survival than Confederate armies; in
September 1862, Lincoln placed under military arrest any person
who discouraged enlistments, resisted the draft, or engaged in
“disloyal” practices; led to the imprisonment of 14,000 people,
most in the border states.
VII. Grinding Out Victory, 1863–1865
A. Vicksburg and Gettysburg
1. The Siege of Vicksburg
•
stronghold of Vicksburg, on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, stood between Union forces and complete
control of the river; in May 1863, Union forces under Grant laid siege to the city to starve out the enemy; the
siege succeeded, and on July 4, 1863, nearly 30,000 rebels marched out of Vicksburg, stacked their arms, and
surrendered unconditionally.
•
•
2. The Battle of Gettysburg
July 4, 1863, the nation received the news that Union forces had defeated General Lee at Gettysburg,
Pennsylvania.
3. Turning points
victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg proved to be the turning point of the war; Confederacy could not replace
the nearly 60,000 soldiers who were captured, wounded, or killed; Lee never launched another major offensive
north of the Mason-Dixon line.
B. Grant Takes Command
1. General in chief
•
September 1863, Union troops under Grant routed the Confederate army at Chattanooga; the victory opened
the door to Georgia and confirmed Lincoln’s estimation of Grant; in March 1864, Lincoln asked Grant to come
east to become the general in chief of all union armies; once in Washington, Grant implemented his grand
strategy of a war of annihilation.
•
•
2. Fighting in Virginia
Virginia—Grant and Lee met in early 1864 in northern Virginia at the Wilderness, a dense tangle of scrub oaks
and small pines; approximately 18,000 Yankees and 11,00 rebels fell; the battle at Spotsylvania Court House
cost Grant another 18,000 and Lee 10,000; Grant kept moving and fought Lee at Cold Harbor, where he
suffered 13,000 additional casualties to Lee’s 5,000; twice as many Union soldiers as rebel soldiers died in the
four weeks of fighting in Virginia, but, since Lee had only half as many troops as Grant, his losses were
equivalent; Grant then began a siege that immobilized both armies and dragged on for nine months.
3. Sherman’s March to the Sea
Sherman invaded Georgia; took Atlanta and Savannah and destroyed the will of the southern people during
his “March to the Sea.”
VII. Grinding Out Victory, 1863–1865
C. The Election of 1864
1. The Democratic challenge
2. Republican triumph
•
Capture of Atlanta in September turned the political tide in favor of the Republicans;
Lincoln took 55 percent of the popular vote and won in the electoral college 212 to
55; had a mandate to continue the war until slavery and the Confederacy were
dead.
D. The Confederacy Collapses
1. Abandoning the rebellion
•
more and more Confederates turned their backs on the rebellion because they had
been battered into submission; wives begged husbands to stay home; number of
deserters grew dramatically; half of the 900,000 Confederate soldiers had been
killed or wounded.
•
February 1, 1865, Sherman’s troops stormed out of Savannah into South Carolina;
Lee abandoned Petersburg on April 2, and Richmond fell the next day; Grant
pursued Lee for one hundred miles until Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865, at
Appomattox Court House, Virginia; after four years, the war was over.
•
Five days later, President Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s
Theater on April 14; Vice President Andrew Johnson became president; the man who
had led the nation through the war would not lead it in its postwar search for a just
peace.
2. The end of the war
3. Lincoln assassinated