Civil War

Origins

Most historians see the conflict as the product of a fundamental difference in conceptions about the nature of the American republic: Which was the “real America,” the North or the South? Was the United States a free republic with pockets of slavery or a slaveholding republic with pockets of freedom? The Republican Party argued that it was the former. When its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, was elected president in 1860, seven Southern states—South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas—seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. On April 12, 1861, after Lincoln refused to evacuate federal troops from Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, Confederate artillery bombarded the fort into surrender. Lincoln promptly called for 75,000 volunteers to quell the rebellion. Rather than remain in a Union that could be preserved only through violence, four more states—Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee—joined the Confederacy.

Mobilization and Grand Strategy

When the conflict began, the federal government could field only a small regular army of 16,000 men. The newly created Confederate regular army existed mainly on paper. Both sides relied overwhelmingly on volunteers to sustain the struggle, although this method of mobilization was eventually supplemented by a military draft. For the most part, mobilization was done through local communities and states. Prominent local leaders raised companies of troops, which were turned over to the state governor, who organized them into regiments of about 1,000 men each and assigned colonels to command them. The regiments were then mustered into national service but retained their state identities—the 33rd Virginia, 54th Massachusetts, and so on. It was not a perfect system, but in an era of limited national government it was the only workable one. Eventually about two million men wore Union blue; 800,000 donned Confederate gray. Most were volunteers: the draft accounted for just 6 percent and 11 percent of Union and Confederate enlistments, respectively.

The Confederacy had one key task: hold on to the de facto independence already gained. The task of the federal government was more difficult. It had to subdue the rebellious states, but not so viciously as to make a reunion impossible. It also had to worry about potentially driving some or all of the slaveholding border states—Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware—into the Confederacy through harsh policies, especially those that would undermine slavery. Both sides had to contend with internal dissent. The Confederacy had a substantial population of white Southern Unionists, to say nothing of 3.5 million slaves. The Lincoln administration faced the substantial political opposition of those opposed to preserving the [Page 125]Union through force of arms. Some of these actively sympathized with the Confederacy.

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