1861–65 April 12–13 July 21, February 6, February April 6–7, April 25, 1861 1861 1862 16, 1862 1862 1862 The Fort Sumter First Battle Fort Henry Fort Battle of New American bombarded of Bull Run captured Donelson Shiloh Orleans Civil War (Manassas) captured captured TIMELINE Chapter 6 The American Civil War: Confederate Defiance, 1861–1863 By the middle of the nineteenth century, U.S. military institutions had proven their worth in the Mexican War. Yet their greatest test would not involve a conflict with a foreign power. Far more Americans fought and died in the American Civil War of 1861–65 than in all other previous conflicts put together. Its numerous engagements ranged from huge pitched battles with tens of thousands of soldiers on a side, to small skirmishes and raids involving just a few dozen. Irregular operations occurred, particularly in western areas, but campaigns by large conventional armies predominated. The Union and the Confederacy each raised huge numbers of troops during the conflict, but effectively using them was problematic. The vast majority were volunteers with no military background. On both sides, officers with prior experience were few relative to the number needed, and no commander had previously handled armies as large as those created between 1861 and 1865, which sometimes exceeded 100,000 men. Similarly, no civilian administration had ever faced the problems of supporting such vast forces and developing effective strategies for them. In this chapter, students will learn about: Not for Distribution: Taylor & Francis • The causes of the American Civil War . • The tactics and technology used to fi ght Civil War battles . • The relative strengths and weaknesses of the Union and the Confederacy . • How each side mobilized manpower . • The initial strategies and the diplomacy pursued by both sides . • The major campaigns and battles in 1861 and 1862 . • The military signifi cance of the Emancipation Proclamation . June 25–July 1, August 29–30, Sept. 17, Sept. 22, 1862 October 8, Dec. 13, 1862 1862 1862 1862 1862 The Seven Second Battle Battle of Preliminary Battle of Battle of Days Battles of Bull Run Antietam Emancipation Perryville Fredericksburg (Manassas) Proclamation issued Causes Slavery was the fundamental issue that fueled the clash between Northern and Southern parts of the United States in 1861. Ever since, apologists for the Confederate cause have glossed over this point by claiming the war was over “states rights.” Southern states, however, only came to fear that the federal government might threaten their “rights” after the 1860 election of the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. Lincoln had campaigned on a platform Francis stating he would outlaw slavery in federal territories, though not in states where it already existed. & Yet his victory came solely from his popularity in the north, for he received no electoral votes from states south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Many Southerners thus concluded that they would eventually lack the political power to block attempts to ban slavery anywhere in the United States. Disagreement over slavery, however, was not the sole cause of the war. American slavery pre- dated the founding of the United States, and the institution had been tolerated since the country’s founding—for more than 80 years by 1860. Instead, it was slavery, combined with the spread of Taylor sectional interests and perspectives over the previous generation, which ripped the country apart after Lincoln’s election. In 1820, for example, national leaders had agreed to exclude slavery from the vast majority of federal territory at that time: All land above the line of latitude 36’ 30° excepting what became the state of Missouri. But following the “Missouri Compromise,” the debate over American slavery became more heated. Although abolitionist ideas were not then new, to that point they advocated the slow and gradual end of slavery. But the 1830s saw the birth of a “militant” abolitionist movement, whose leaders included William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, that demanded its immediate end. Their speeches and writings, along with abolitionist literature mailed by the American Anti-Slavery Society, produced sometimes violent backlashes in both the North and the South, including riots and attacks on post offices. Distribution: These initial clashes were relatively few and did not yet represent a national crisis over slavery. More alarming tensions began after the Mexican War, for the huge area acquired via the Mexican Cession reopened the question of slavery in the territories. During the war itself, for Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot proposed banning slavery from any territories acquired from Mexico (the “Wilmot Proviso”), which was rejected. But California’s efforts to gain statehood soon brought the issue to a head. The resulting Compromise of 1850 owed its Not passage in Congress more to the procedural engineering of Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas than to any genuine spirit of cooperation. California’s admission to the Union meant that free states now outnumbered slave states in the Senate. (Congressmen from slave states had long been a minority in the House of Representatives due to Northern population growth.) But Southerners gained a new strong Fugitive Slave Act whose provisions threatened the liberty of Northern blacks and also worried Northern whites. The latter groups soon acquired a greater appreciation for the horrors of slavery via Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin . 168 Civil War: Confederate Defiance, 1861–1863 The 1850s witnessed a succession of crises that continued to enflame sectional tensions. Stephen Douglas soon destroyed the 1850 Compromise by championing the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. This law revoked the older ban on slavery in federal territories established by the Missouri Compromise, allowing residents of these regions to decide the question themselves— an idea known as “popular sovereignty” that had been championed in the election of 1848. When settlers in the Kansas Territory tried to vote on the issue in 1854–55, both abolitionist and pro-slavery groups sought to sway the outcome, generating a political crisis and widespread violence in “Bleeding Kansas.” In the 1857 Dred Scott case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled slavery could not be banned in federal territories, claiming that such would violate the Fifth Amendment’s protection of property. But Chief Justice Roger Taney went further, claiming blacks were not and could never be U.S. citizens. Northerners, already alarmed over previous developments and crises—including an attack on Massachusetts Senator and abolitionist Charles Sumner on the Senate floor in 1856—were shocked by the decision. Growing Northern sym- pathy for abolitionism in turn upset Southerners, particularly the support John Brown received after his failed raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, and subsequent execution in 1859—a raid whose Francis purpose was to acquire arms to facilitate a slave revolt against Southern slaveholders. Ironically, most white Southerners did not own slaves. Of those who did, most had one or & perhaps a few. But about half of Southern slaves lived on large plantations owned by rich land- holders who comprised a tiny proportion of the entire white population. Nonetheless, slavery was a form of racial domination that shaped all of Southern society. Even the poorest white family was free. Moreover, many regarded slaveowning as a means to improve their economic and social status. A different dynamic operated in the north, where land prices were high and industrialization had dramatically increased the number of free urban laborers. Many poor Taylor Northerners dreamed of moving west to start their own farms—hopes threatened by the Distribution: for Not Figure 6.1 Photographs of the Exterior of Fort Sumter the Day After Its Surrender Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-35206, LC-DIG-ppmsca-35219, and LC-DIG- ppmsca-35221 Civil War: Confederate Defiance, 1861–1863 169 prospect of wealthy Southerners moving into new territories and buying large tracts of land to farm with slaves. Just as many in the South came to believe that all Northerners were aboli- tionists (most were not, and in many areas prejudices against blacks were strong), many in the north came to believe in a “slave power” or “slavocracy” that was trying to manipulate the federal government for the benefit of Southern interests. These were the underlying anxieties that successive political crises exacerbated in the late 1840s and 1850s, leading to the final one that almost destroyed the United States. Secession and War As the country became more polarized, it lacked the leaders and institutions that had previously been able to forge a national consensus. The Whig political party disintegrated in the 1850s, and by the 1860 election the Democrats had split, with Southern and Northern wings each running different candidates (Stephen A. Douglas and John C. Breckinridge, respectively). Many of the men who in earlier years possessed the standing to craft a possible compromise, Francis such as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun, had died by the early 1850s. Among younger politicians, perhaps Stephen A. Douglas had the ability to do so. But any pos- & sibility of his championing a national reconciliation was squandered with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and his subsequent efforts to preserve the Union were too little, too late. Instead, four presidential candidates ran in the election of 1860. Northern states provided all the electoral votes Abraham Lincoln needed to win the presi- dency. For many Southerners, the North’s ability to win the executive branch outright posed a mortal danger to slavery within the United States, though Lincoln and the Republicans only Taylor sought to ban it from federal territories, and abolitionists were a minority among the region’s population. South Carolina was the first to act on these fears, declaring its secession from the Union on December 20, 1860.