Chapter 15 (1861-1865)
Crucible of Freedom Civil War
Mobilizing For War
-Both North and South were unprepared for war.
-North had a small army of sixteen thousand men, mostly in the West.
-One-third of the Union officers resigned to join the Confederacy.
-No strong president since James Polk and Lincoln was viewed as a “yokel”
-Union
-The federal government had levied no direct tax structure
-Never imposed a draft.
-Confederacy
-No tax structure
-No navy
-Two tiny gunpowder factories
-Poorly equipped
-Unconnected railroad lines.
-Recruitment and Conscription
-Largest army organization created in America
-2 million in Union
-800,000 in Confederate
-Recruitment depended on local efforts than national or state.
-Citizens opened recruiting offices in hometowns, held rallies, and signed up volunteers.
-Union instituted examinations for officers.
-As casualties mounted, military demand soon exceeded the supply of volunteers.
-Confederacy enacted the first conscription law: All able-bodied white men aged eighteen to thirty-five were required to serve in the military for three years.
-The act antagonized the southerners. Opponents charged that the draft was an assault on state sovereignty.
-20-Negro law exempted an owner or overseer of twenty or more slaves from service.
-New conscription law of 1864 required all soldiers to stay in the duration of the war.
-After recruitment, the Confederacy had to supply it.
-South relied on arms and ammunition imported from Europe, weapons from federal arsenals, and guns captured on the battlefield.
-Assigned ordnance contracts to privately owned factories like the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, provided loans to establish new factories, and created government-owned industries like the giant Augusta Powder Works in Georgia.
-Clothes were more difficult:
-Southern soldiers frequently went without shoes
-Supplying the South was difficult:
-railroads that fell into despair or were captured
-an economy that relied more heavily on producing tobacco and cotton than food.
-Union invasion early in the war.
-the Impressment Act was passed, which authorized army officers to take food from farmers at prescribed prices. It also empowered agents to impress slaves into labor for the army
-Union supplement was easier
-The Enrollment Act of March 1863 made every able-bodied white male citizen aged twenty to forty-five eligible for draft into the Union army.
-Offered two means of escaping the draft
-Substitution
-Paying a $300 fee to the government.
-Financing the War
-The federal government met its revenue needs from tariff duties and income from the sale of public lands.
-Gross national product rose to 15%
-Neither the Union nor Confederates wanted to impose tax, but did so in 1861.
-Both sides turned to war bonds: to loans from citizens to be repaid by future generations. But must be paid in gold or silver coin.
-Both sides agreed to print paper money.
-Legal Tender Act issued $150 million of “greenbacks”
-Greenbacks would only work if the public has confident in the government that issued it. The Union officials made the greenbacks legal to pay most public and private debts. But the Confederacy never made it legal, and suspicions rose. By printing more money in the south, it suffered from an inflation rate over 9,000 percent!
-The National Bank Act established that banks could obtain a federal charter and issue national bank notes. It gave private bankers the right to purchase war bonds.
-Political Leadership in Wartime
-Democrats wanted to prosecute the war without conscription, without the National Bank Act, and without the abolition of slavery.
-Lincoln became a Radical Republican
-Jefferson Davis (Confederate President) suffered from frequent resignation in his cabinet. His main objective is to secure the independence of the South from the North.
-The Confederate Constitution guaranteed the sovereignty of the Confederate states and prohibited the Confederate Congress from enacting protective tariffs and from supporting internal improvements.
-The parties in the South agreed to suspend party rivalries, but rather, it encouraged disunity.
-Securing the Union’s Borders
-Lincoln moved to safeguard Washington that was bordered by two slave states.
-A week after Fort Sumter, a Baltimore mob attacked a Massachusetts regiment bound for Washington, but troops protected the capital. Lincoln then dispatched federal troops to Maryland, where he suspended the writ of habeas corpus (a court order requiring that the detainer of a prisoner bring that person to court and show cause for his detention)
-Lincoln authorized the Union army in Kentucky, a slave state with a Unionist legislature and a thin chance of staying neutral. He stationed troops under General Ulysses S. Grant across the Ohio River from Kentucky in Illinois. When the Confederates invaded, the state turned to Grant and became part of the Union. Missouri was ravaged by four years of fighting between Union and Confederate troops and between bands of guerrillas and bushwhackers, a name for Confederates. Missouri never left the union. West Virginia was admitted to the Union.
-In Ex parte, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that Lincoln had exceeded his authority in suspending the writ of habeas corpus in Maryland. Lincoln ignored the ruling.
In Battle (1861-1862)
-Armies, Weapons, and Strategies
-The North had 3.5 times as many white men of military age and two-thirds of its railroad track.
-Its goal was to force the South back into the Union, whereas the South was fighting merely for its independence.
-The North
-Had more men, but needed to defend long supply lines and occupy captured areas.
-More railroads. But was often destroyed by the guerillas.
-New Weapons
-Submarine, the repeating rifle, and the multibarreled Gatling gun.
-Trenches provided protection against rifle fire.
-At the Battle of Fredericksburg, Confederate troops attacked the Union forces uphill over open terrain.
-At Gettysburg, Union armies shredded the charging southerners.
-Anaconda plan
-Proposed by General Winfiled Scott
-Union blockading the southern coastline and to thrust, like a huge snake, down the Mississippi River.
-Scott expected that sealing off and severing the Confederacy would make the South recognize the futility of secession and bring southern Unionists to power. But he overestimated the strength of Unionist spirit in the South.
-Stalemate in the East
-Confederates moved their capital from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia.
-Union armies tried to reach the capital. But they had to dislodge a Confederate army encamped at Manassas Junction.
-Lincoln ordered General Irvin McDowell to attack.
-First Battle of Bull Run
-Amateur armies clashed in bloody chaos.
-After Bull Run, Lincoln replaced McDowell with General George B. McClellan as the Army of the Potomac, the main Union army force.
-McClellan formulated a plan to attack the Confederates (Peninsula Campaign)
-The army would move by water to the tip of the peninsula formed by the York and James Rivers and then move northwestward to Richmond.
-Advantages:
-Water transport than railroads reduced the supply lines.
-By moving Southeast, it threatened the South’s supply lines.
-The plan unfolded fine at first, but he overestimated the Confederates’ strength and refused to launch a final attack without reinforcements.
-General Robert E. Lee took command of the Confederacy’s Army.
-The Seven Days’ Battles cost the South nearly twice as many men as the North and ended in virtual slaughter of Confederates at Malvern Hill.
-McClellan panicked and Lincoln called off the campaign.
-At the Second Bull Run, Confederates struck North and won. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson then invaded Maryland. Hoping to seize Maryland, Lee could then threaten Washington, improve the prospects of peace candidates in the North’s election, and induce Britain and France to recognize the Confederates as an independent nation.
-The Battle of Antietam proved a strategic victory for the North because lee called off his invasion. (Important because the South was never recognized by the foreign nations)
-Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamtion, a war measure that freed all slaves under rebel control.
-Lincoln replaced McClennan with General Ambrose Burnside because he had “the slows.”
-At Battle of Fredericksburg, Burnside led 122,000 federal troops against 78,500 Confederates. He captured the town of Fredericksburg. Lee was shaken by the northern casualties.
-The War in the West
-Grant controlled the West.
-Confederate forces under generals Albert Sidney Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard tried to relieve the Union pressure on Corinth by a surprise attack on Grant’s army near Shiloh. Grant called for reinforcements. Unions won.
-Confederacy had stripped the defenses of New Orleans. Union forces took the city in late April.
-Union armies were joined by Mexican-American companies and drove a Confederate army from Texas out of New Mexico.
-The Soldiers’ War
-Soldiers on both sides shared a vision of military life as a transforming experience in which they became warriors. To serve in combat was to achieve “manhood.”
-At least 250 women disguised as men.
-Military training proved notoriously weak, and much of army life was tedious and uncomfortable.
-Food was horrible.
-Confederate diets were small in portion.
-Both sides were infested with diseases by poor sanitation.
-Confederates enlisted to defend slavery, which they paired with liberty.
-Union soldiers in the South had become agents of liberation; they harbored fugitives who fled behind federal lines.
-Ironclads and Cruisers: The Naval War
-North began the war with over forty active warships against none for the South.
-Confederate’s ironclad, Merrimac, attacked Union’s ships. It destroyed two northern warships.
-Union’s Monitor fought against Merrimac.
-South constructed other ironclads and the first submarine, but could never build enough to beat the North.
-The Diplomatic War
-Confederates began to campaign to gain European recognition of its independence.
-The southerners reasoned that Britain, dependant on its cotton, would break the Union blockade and provoke a war with the North.
-The Confederacy send James Mason to Britain and John Slidell to France to lobby for recognition.
-When a Union ship captain boarded the British vessel, Trent, which was carrying Mason and Slidell, and brought the two men to Boston as prisoners, British tempers exploded. Lincoln released the two.
-Neither Britain or France recognized the South as a nation.
Emancipation Transforms the War (1863)
-From Confiscation to Emancipation
-Confiscation Act, which authorized the seizure of all property used in military aid of the rebellion, including slaves. Slaves who had been employed directly by the armed rebel forces and who later fled to freedom became “captives of war.”
-Radicals agreed with black abolitionist Frederick Douglass that “to fight against slaveholders without fighting against slavery, is but a half-hearted business.”
-Each Union defeat reminded northerners that the Confederacy, with a slave labor force in place, could commit a higher proportion of its white men to battle. And so the idea of emancipation sounds very favorable.
-Congress passed the second Confiscation Act, authorizing the seizure of the property of all persons in rebellion and stipulated that slaves who came within Union lines “shall be forever free.” (Also authorized the president to employ blacks as soldiers).
-As of January 1, 1863, all slaves under rebel control are declared freedom.
-did not end slavery everywhere or free “all the slaves.” But it changed the war.
-Crossing Union Lines
-Some slaves became free or fled their plantations. Few were freed by northern assaults, but to be reenslaved by Confederates.
-After 1862, slaves who crossed Union lines were considered free and masters were not able to retrieve them.
-Freedmen served in army camps as cooks, teamsters, and laborers.
-Were treated unequally.
-Deduction in clothing, rations, medicine, and earning compare to a Yankee (Union) soldier. Often faced prejudice.
-Congress created Freedmen’s Bureau, which had responsibility for the relief, education, and employment of former slaves.
-The law also stipulated that forty acres of abandoned or confiscated land could be leased to each freedman or southern Unionist.
-First time Congress provided for the redistribution of confiscated Confederate property.
-Black Soldiers in the Union Army
-First year of war, the Union had rejected African-American soldiers.
-After the second Confiscation Act, Union generals formed black regiments. It was only after the Emancipation Proclamation did large-scale enlistment begun.
-Blacks fought with a passion.
-Black recruitment offered new opportunities separate regiments under white officers.
-Blacks were less likely than whites to be killed in action but more likely to die of illness.
-Jefferson Davis ordered all blacks taken in battle to be sent back to the states which they came, where they were reenslaved or executed.
-Blacks faced inequities in their pay.
-Whites earned $13/month plus $3.50 clothing allowance.
-Blacks earned $10/month, with clothing deducted.
-In June 1864 Congress belatedly equalized the pay of black and white soldiers
-Military service became a symbol of citizenship for blacks.
-The use of black soldiers was seen by northern generals as a major strike at the Confederacy.
-Slavery in Wartime
-Some remained faithful to their owners
-Others were torn between loyalty and lust for freedom
-A small number of former slaves received land; many worked for wages on the plantations; and some served as members of a black Union army regiment.
-No general uprising of slaves occurred
-Confederacy continued impress thousands of slaves to toil in war plants, army camps, and field hospitals.
-Wartime conditions reduced the slaves’ productivity.
-Slave-master relationship weakened.
-Performed their labors inefficiently
-Destroyed property.
-Commonly refused to work.
-Confederate Congress in 1864 considered the drastic step of impressing slaves into its army as soldiers in exchange for their freedom at the war’s end.
-Jefferson Davis then changed his mind. It was never acted.
-The Turning Point of 1863
-North started out bad, but improved later.
-The turning point was the Battle of Fredericksburg.
-Lee attacked Cemetery Ridge in the center of the North’s defensive line.
-Confederate cannon sank into the ground
-Union fire wiped out the rebel charged.
-Confederate bodies littered the field. Unions won.
-Vicksburg.
-Vicksburg was protected by hills, forests, and swamps. It can only be attacked over a thin strip of dry land to its east and south.
-Grant had to find a way to get his army south of the city.
-His solution lay in moving his troops far to the west of the city and down to a point on the river south of Vicksburg.
-Grant swung in a large semicircle to capture Jackson, Mississippi and then to Vicksburg.
-The civilians were reduced to eating mules and even rats.
-General John C. Pemberton surrendered to Grant on July 4.
-Battle of Chickamauga
-Under General William S. Rosecrans, the Union won against Braxton Bragg’s Confederate army.
War and Society, North and South
-The War’s Economic Impact: The North
-Some industries fared poorly.
-The loss of southern markets damaged the shoe industry in Massachusetts, and a shortage of raw cotton sent the cotton-textile industry into a tailspin.
-Industries directly related to the war effort benefited from huge government contracts.
-Federal government went into the railroad business by establishing the United States Military Railroads (USMRR) to carry troops and supplies to the front.
-The Republicans in Congress actively promoted business growth during the war.
-Sponsored Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, providing development of a transcontinental railroad from Omaha to San Francisco.
-Issued greenbacks and created national banking system.
-Brought a measure of uniformity to the nation’s financial system.
-Homestead Act granted 160 acres of public land to settlers after 5 years of residence on the land. (embodied the party’s ideal of “free soil, free labor, free men”)
-Morrill Land Grant Act gave states to fund the establishment of universities.
-The war benefited the wealthy more than the average citizen.
-Excise taxes and inflation hurt the average citizens.
-The war’s Economic Impact: The South
-Shattered the South’s economy.
-Wrecked the South’s railroads
-Cotton production sank from more than 4 million bales in 1861 to 300,000 bales in 1865 as Union invasions took their toll on production.
-Invading Union troops occupied the South’s food-growing region.
-Planters were to blame also.
-Grew cotton instead of food.
-The manpower drain that hampered food production reshaped the lives of southern white women.
-Often left in charge of farms and plantations, women faced new challenges and chronic shortages.
-Southern press urged the revival of home production after factory-made goods became scarce.
-Dealing with Dissent
-Confederacy
-Dissent took two forms
-Vocal group of states’ rights activist spent much of the war attacking Jefferson Davis’s government as a despotism.
-Loyalty to the Union flourished among a segment of the Confederacy’s common people.
-Nonslaveholding small farmers who predominated here saw the Confederate rebellion as a slaveowners’ conspiracy.
-The Confederate government responded mildly to popular disaffection.
-Congress gave Jefferson Davis the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, but Davis used his power only sparingly, by occasionally and briefly putting areas under martial law
-Union
-“War Democrats” conceded that war was necessary to preserve the Union while “Peace Democrats” demanded a truce and a peace conference.
-The Democrats in the Midwest mobilized the support of farmers of southern background and the urban working class, especially recent immigrants, who feared losing their jobs to an influx of free blacks.
-This volatile brew of political, ethnic, racial, and class antagonisms in northern society exploded into antidraft protests in several cities and riots began to form.
-Lincoln sent troops to stop the riots.
-After suspending the writ of habeas corpus in Maryland, he barred it nationwide in 1863 and authorized the arrest of rebels and those engaged in “any disloyal practice.”
-Davis lacked the institutionalization of dissent while Lincoln did not unleash a reign of terror against it.
-The Medical War
-The United States Sanitary Commission, organized early in the war by civilians to assist the Union’s medical bureau depended on women volunteers.
-Mary Ann “Mother” Bickerdyke served the sick and wounded Union soldiers as both nurse and surrogate mother.
-Some 3,200 women served the Union and the Confederacy as nurses.
-Dorothea Dix became the head of the Union’s nursing corps.
-Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross.
-Sally Tompkins was commissioned a captain for her work for the Confederacy.
-Belle Boyd served the Confederacy as both a nurse and a spy.
-Male doctors were unsure about how to react to women in the wards.
-Some saw the potential for mischief, but others viewed nursing and sanitary work as potentially useful.
-The War and Women’s Rights
-Few women worked more effectively for their region’s cause than Anna E. Dickinson.
-She threw herself into hospital volunteer work and public lecturing.
-Northern women’s rights advocates hoped that the war would yield equality for women as well as freedom for slaves.
-Not only should a grateful North reward women for their wartime services, but it should recognize the link between black rights and women’s rights.
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony organized the Woman’s National Loyal League.
-Its goal was to gather four hundred thousand signatures on a petition calling for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery, but Stanton and Anthony used the organization to promote woman suffrage as well.
-The war did not bring women significantly closer to economic or political equality.
-Women in government offices and factories continued to be paid less than men.
The Union victorious (1864-1865)
-The Election of 1864
-Republicans nominated Lincoln.
-The Radicals insisted that only Congress, not the president, could set the requirements for readmission of conquered states and criticized Lincoln’s reconstruction standards as too lenient. They nominated Salmon P. Chase.
-To isolate the Peace Democrats and attract prowar Democrats, the Republicans formed the National Union party and put Andrew Johnson as vice president.
-The Democrats nominated George B. McClellan.
-Lincoln won.
-Sherman’s March Through Georgia
-Hood led his Confederate army north toward Tennessee in the hope of luring Sherman out of Georgia. But he refused.
-Sherman proposed to abandon his supply lines altogether, march his army across Georgia to Savannah, and live off the countryside as he moved along.
-He would break the South’s will to fight, terrify its people, and “make war so terrible…that generations would pass before they could appeal again to it.”
-Sherman began by burning Atlanta and forcing the evacuation of most of its civilian population.
-They destroyed everything that could aid Southern resistance—arsenals, railroads, munition plants, cotton gins, cotton stores, crops, and ripping up tracks.
-Toward Appomattox
-Union troops entered Richmond.
-Lee made a last-ditch effort to escape from Grant and reach Lynchburg.
-His route was blocked.
-On April 9, Lee surrendered at the Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia.
-Grant entered in his customary disarray while Lee appeared in full dress uniform.
-April 14, Lincoln entered Ford’s Theater when an unemployed pro-Confederate actor, John Wilkes Booth, entered Lincoln’s box and shot him in the head.
-April 15, Andrew Johnson became president.
-The Impact of the War
-The war did not ruin the national economy, only the southern part of it.
-Confederates lost 60% of its wealth because it was offset by northern advances.
-Economic modernization
The greenbacks provided a national currency.