Union victory and aftermath
Results
The causes of the war, the reasons for its outcome, and even
the name of the war itself are subjects of lingering contention today. The
North and West grew rich while the once-rich South became poor for a century.
The national political power of the slaveowners and rich southerners ended.
Historians are less sure about the results of the postwar Reconstruction,
especially regarding the second class citizenship of the Freedmen and their
poverty.
Historians have debated whether the Confederacy could have
won the war. Most scholars, such as James McPherson, argue that Confederate victory
was at least possible. McPherson argues that the North's advantage in
population and resources made Northern victory likely but not guaranteed. He
also argues that if the Confederacy had fought using unconventional tactics,
they would have more easily been able to hold out long enough to exhaust the
Union.
Confederates did not need to invade and hold enemy territory
to win, but only needed to fight a defensive war to convince the North that the
cost of winning was too high. The North needed to conquer and hold vast
stretches of enemy territory and defeat Confederate armies to win. Lincoln was
not a military dictator, and could only continue to fight the war as long as
the American public supported a continuation of the war. The Confederacy sought
to win independence by out-lasting Lincoln; however, after Atlanta fell and
Lincoln defeated McClellan in the election of 1864, all hope for a political
victory for the South ended. At that point, Lincoln had secured the support of
the Republicans, War Democrats, the Border States, emancipated slaves, and the
neutrality of Britain and France. By defeating the Democrats and McClellan, he
also defeated the Copperheads and their peace platform.
Many scholars argue that the Union held an insurmountable
long-term advantage over the Confederacy in industrial strength and population.
Confederate actions, they argue, only delayed defeat. Civil War historian
Shelby Foote expressed this view succinctly: "I think that the North fought that war with one hand behind its
back ... If there had been more Southern victories, and a lot more, the North
simply would have brought that other hand out from behind its back. I don't
think the South ever had a chance to win that War."
A minority view among historians is that the Confederacy
lost because, as E. Merton Coulter put it, "people
did not will hard enough and long enough to win." Marxist historian
Armstead Robinson agrees, pointing to a class conflict in the Confederates army
between the slave owners and the larger number of non-owners. He argues that
the non-owner soldiers grew embittered about fighting to preserve slavery, and
fought less enthusiastically. He attributes the major Confederate defeats in
1863 at Vicksburg and Missionary Ridge to this class conflict. However, most
historians reject the argument. James M. McPherson, after reading thousands of
letters written by Confederate soldiers, found strong patriotism that continued
to the end; they truly believed they were fighting for freedom and liberty.
Even as the Confederacy was visibly collapsing in 1864–65, he says most
Confederate soldiers were fighting hard. Historian Gary Gallagher cites General
Sherman who in early 1864 commented, "The
devils seem to have a determination that cannot but be admired." Despite
their loss of slaves and wealth, with starvation looming, Sherman continued, "yet I see no sign of let up – some few
deserters – plenty tired of war, but the masses determined to fight it
out."
Also important were Lincoln's eloquence in rationalizing the
national purpose and his skill in keeping the Border States committed to the
Union cause. The Emancipation Proclamation was an effective use of the
President's war powers. The Confederate government failed in its attempt to get
Europe involved in the war militarily, particularly Britain and France.
Southern leaders needed to get European powers to help break up the blockade
the Union had created around the Southern ports and cities. Lincoln's naval
blockade was 95 percent effective at stopping trade goods; as a result, imports
and exports to the South declined significantly. The abundance of European
cotton and Britain's hostility to the institution of slavery, along with
Lincoln's Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico naval blockades, severely decreased any
chance that either Britain or France would enter the war.
Historian Don Doyle has argued that the Union victory had a
major impact on the course of world history. The Union victory energized
popular democratic forces. A Confederate victory, on the other hand, would have
meant a new birth of slavery, not freedom. Historian Fergus Bordewich,
following Doyle, argues that:
The North's victory
decisively proved the durability of democratic government. Confederate
independence, on the other hand, would have established an American model for
reactionary politics and race-based repression that would likely have cast an
international shadow into the twentieth century and perhaps beyond."
Costs
The war produced at least 1,030,000 casualties (3 percent of
the population), including about 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease,
and 50,000 civilians. Binghamton University historian J. David Hacker believes
the number of soldier deaths was approximately 750,000, 20 percent higher than
traditionally estimated, and possibly as high as 850,000. The war accounted for
more American deaths than in all other U.S. wars combined.
Based on 1860 census figures, 8 percent of all white males
aged 13 to 43 died in the war, including 6 percent in the North and 18 percent
in the South. About 56,000 soldiers died in prison camps during the War. An
estimated 60,000 men lost limbs in the war.
Union army dead, amounting to 15 percent of the over two
million who served, were broken down as follows:
• 110,070
killed in action (67,000) or died of wounds (43,000).
• 199,790
died of disease (75 percent was due to the war, the remainder would have
occurred in civilian life anyway)
• 24,866
died in Confederate prison camps
• 9,058
killed by accidents or drowning
• 15,741 other/unknown
deaths
• 359,528
total dead
In addition there were 4,523 deaths in the Navy (2,112 in
battle) and 460 in the Marines (148 in battle).
Black troops made up 10 percent of the Union death toll,
they amounted to 15 percent of disease deaths but less than 3 percent of those
killed in battle. Losses among African Americans were high, in the last year
and a half and from all reported casualties, approximately 20 percent of all
African Americans enrolled in the military lost their lives during the Civil
War. Notably, their mortality rate was significantly higher than white
soldiers:
[We] find, according to the revised official data, that of
the slightly over two millions troops in the United States Volunteers, over
316,000 died (from all causes), or 15.2 percent. Of the 67,000 Regular Army
(white) troops, 8.6 percent, or not quite 6,000, died. Of the approximately
180,000 United States Colored Troops, however, over 36,000 died, or 20.5
percent. In other words, the mortality "rate" amongst the United States
Colored Troops in the Civil War was thirty-five percent greater than that among
other troops, notwithstanding the fact that the former were not enrolled until
some eighteen months after the fighting began.
Burying Union dead on
the Antietam battlefield, 1862
Confederate records compiled by historian William F. Fox
list 74,524 killed and died of wounds and 59,292 died of disease. Including
Confederate estimates of battle losses where no records exist would bring the
Confederate death toll to 94,000 killed and died of wounds. Fox complained,
however, that records were incomplete, especially during the last year of the
war, and that battlefield reports likely under-counted deaths (many men counted
as wounded in battlefield reports subsequently died of their wounds). Thomas L.
Livermore, using Fox's data, put the number of Confederate non-combat deaths at
166,000, using the official estimate of Union deaths from disease and accidents
and a comparison of Union and Confederate enlistment records, for a total of 260,000
deaths. However, this excludes the 30,000 deaths of Confederate troops in
prisons, which would raise the minimum number of deaths to 290,000.
While the figures of 360,000 army deaths for the Union and
260,000 for the Confederacy remained commonly cited, they are incomplete. In
addition to many Confederate records being missing, partly as a result of
Confederate widows not reporting deaths due to being ineligible for benefits,
both armies only counted troops who died during their service, and not the tens
of thousands who died of wounds or diseases after being discharged. This often
happened only a few days or weeks later. Francis Amasa Walker, Superintendent
of the 1870 Census, used census and Surgeon General Data to estimate a minimum
of 500,000 Union military deaths and 350,000 Confederate military deaths, for a
total death toll of 850,000 soldiers. While Walker's estimates were originally
dismissed because of the 1870 Census's undercounting, it was later found that
the census was only off by 6.5%, and that the data Walker used would be roughly
accurate.
Analyzing the number of dead by using census data to
calculate the deviation of the death rate of men of fighting age from the norm
suggests that at least 627,000 and at most 888,000, but most likely 761,000
soldiers, died in the war. This would break down to approximately 350,000
Confederate and 411,000 Union military deaths, going by the proportion of Union
to Confederate battle losses.
Deaths among former slaves has proven much harder to
estimate, due to the lack of reliable census data at the time, though they were
known to be considerable, as former slaves were set free or escaped in massive
numbers in an area where the Union army did not have sufficient shelter,
doctors, or food for them. University of Connecticut Professor James Downs
states that tens to hundreds of thousands of slaves died during the war from
disease, starvation, exposure, or execution at the hands of the Confederates,
and that if these deaths are counted in the war's total, the death toll would
exceed 1 million.
Losses were far higher than during the recent defeat of
Mexico, which saw roughly thirteen thousand American deaths, including fewer
than two thousand killed in battle, between 1846 and 1848. One reason for the
high number of battle deaths during the war was the continued use of tactics
similar to those of the Napoleonic Wars at the turn of the century, such as
charging. With the advent of more accurate rifled barrels, Minié balls and
(near the end of the war for the Union army) repeating firearms such as the
Spencer Repeating Rifle and the Henry Repeating Rifle, soldiers were mowed down
when standing in lines in the open. This led to the adoption of trench warfare,
a style of fighting that defined much of World War I.
The wealth amassed in slaves and slavery for the
Confederacy's 3.5 million blacks effectively ended when Union armies arrived;
they were nearly all freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Slaves in the
border states and those located in some former Confederate territory occupied
before the Emancipation Proclamation were freed by state action or (on December
6, 1865) by the Thirteenth Amendment.
The war destroyed much of the wealth that had existed in the
South. All accumulated investment Confederate bonds was forfeit; most banks and
railroads were bankrupt. Income per person in the South dropped to less than 40
percent of that of the North, a condition that lasted until well into the 20th
century. Southern influence in the U.S. federal government, previously considerable,
was greatly diminished until the latter half of the 20th century. The full
restoration of the Union was the work of a highly contentious postwar era known
as Reconstruction.
Emancipation
Slavery as a war issue
While not all Southerners saw themselves as fighting to
preserve slavery, most of the officers and over a third of the rank and file in
Lee's army had close family ties to slavery. To Northerners, in contrast, the
motivation was primarily to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery. Abraham
Lincoln consistently made preserving the Union the central goal of the war,
though he increasingly saw slavery as a crucial issue and made ending it an
additional goal. Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation
angered both Peace Democrats ("Copperheads")
and War Democrats, but energized most Republicans. By warning that free blacks
would flood the North, Democrats made gains in the 1862 elections, but they did
not gain control of Congress. The Republicans' counterargument that slavery was
the mainstay of the enemy steadily gained support, with the Democrats losing
decisively in the 1863 elections in the northern state of Ohio when they tried
to resurrect anti-black sentiment.
Emancipation
Proclamation
The Emancipation Proclamation enabled African-Americans,
both free blacks and escaped slaves, to join the Union Army. About 190,000
volunteered, further enhancing the numerical advantage the Union armies enjoyed
over the Confederates, who did not dare emulate the equivalent manpower source
for fear of fundamentally undermining the legitimacy of slavery?
During the Civil War, sentiment concerning slaves,
enslavement and emancipation in the United States was divided. In 1861, Lincoln
worried that premature attempts at emancipation would mean the loss of the Border
States, and that "to lose Kentucky
is nearly the same as to lose the whole game." Copperheads and some
War Democrats opposed emancipation, although the latter eventually accepted it
as part of total war needed to save the Union.
At first, Lincoln reversed attempts at emancipation by
Secretary of War Simon Cameron and Generals John C. Frémont (in Missouri) and
David Hunter (in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida) to keep the loyalty of
the Border States and the War Democrats. Lincoln warned the Border States that
a more radical type of emancipation would happen if his gradual plan based on
compensated emancipation and voluntary colonization was rejected. But only the
District of Columbia accepted Lincoln's gradual plan, which was enacted by
Congress. When Lincoln told his cabinet about his proposed emancipation
proclamation, Seward advised Lincoln to wait for a victory before issuing it,
as to do otherwise would seem like "our
last shriek on the retreat". Lincoln laid the groundwork for public
support in an open letter published letter to abolitionist Horace Greeley's
newspaper.
In September 1862, the Battle of Antietam provided this
opportunity, and the subsequent War Governors' Conference added support for the
proclamation. Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on
September 22, 1862, and his final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.
In his letter to Albert G. Hodges, Lincoln explained his belief that "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is
wrong ... And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me
an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling ... I
claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have
controlled me."
Lincoln's moderate approach succeeded in inducing Border
States, War Democrats and emancipated slaves to fight for the Union. The
Union-controlled Border States (Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware and West
Virginia) and Union-controlled regions around New Orleans, Norfolk and
elsewhere, were not covered by the Emancipation Proclamation. All abolished
slavery on their own, except Kentucky and Delaware.
Since the Emancipation Proclamation was based on the
President's war powers, it only included territory held by Confederates at the
time. However, the Proclamation became a symbol of the Union's growing
commitment to add emancipation to the Union's definition of liberty. The
Emancipation Proclamation greatly reduced the Confederacy's hope of getting aid
from Britain or France. By late 1864, Lincoln was playing a leading role in
getting Congress to vote for the Thirteenth Amendment, which made emancipation
universal and permanent.
Texas v. White
In Texas v. White, 74 U.S. 700 (1869) the United States
Supreme Court ruled that Texas had remained a state ever since it first joined
the Union, despite claims that it joined the Confederate States; the court
further held that the Constitution did not permit states to unilaterally secede
from the United States, and that the ordinances of secession, and all the acts
of the legislatures within seceding states intended to give effect to such
ordinances, were "absolutely
null", under the constitution.
Reconstruction
Reconstruction began during the war, with the Emancipation
Proclamation of January 1, 1863 and continued until 1877. It comprised multiple
complex methods to resolve the outstanding issues of the war's aftermath, the
most important of which were the three "Reconstruction Amendments" to
the Constitution, which remain in effect to the present time: the 13th (1865),
the 14th (1868) and the 15th (1870). From the Union perspective, the goals of
Reconstruction were to consolidate the Union victory on the battlefield by
reuniting the Union; to guarantee a "republican
form of government for the ex-Confederate states; and to permanently end
slavery”—and prevent semi-slavery status.
President Johnson took a lenient approach and saw the
achievement of the main war goals as realized in 1865, when each ex-rebel state
repudiated secession and ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. Radical Republicans
demanded proof that Confederate nationalism was dead and that the slaves were
truly free. They came to the fore after the 1866 elections and undid much of
Johnson's work. In 1872 the "Liberal
Republicans" argued that the war goals had been achieved and that
Reconstruction should end. They ran a presidential ticket in 1872 but were
decisively defeated. In 1874, Democrats, primarily Southern, took control of
Congress and opposed any more reconstruction. The Compromise of 1877 closed
with a national consensus that the Civil War had finally ended. With the
withdrawal of federal troops, however, whites retook control of every Southern
legislature; the Jim Crow period of disenfranchisement and legal segregation
was about to begin.
Memory and
historiography
The Civil War is one of the central events in American
collective memory. There are innumerable statues, commemorations, books and
archival collections. The memory includes the home front, military affairs, the
treatment of soldiers, both living and dead, in the war's aftermath, depictions
of the war in literature and art, evaluations of heroes and villains, and
considerations of the moral and political lessons of the war. The last theme
includes moral evaluations of racism and slavery, heroism in combat and behind
the lines, and the issues of democracy and minority rights, as well as the
notion of an "Empire of
Liberty" influencing the world.
Professional historians have paid much more attention to the
causes of the war, than to the war itself. Military history has largely
developed outside academe, leading to a proliferation of solid studies by non-scholars
who are thoroughly familiar with the primary sources, pay close attention to
battles and campaigns, and write for the large public readership, rather than
the small scholarly community. Bruce Canton and Shelby Foote are among the
best-known writers. Practically every major figure in the war, both North and
South, has had a serious biographical study. Deeply religious Southerners saw
the hand of God in history, which demonstrated His wrath at their sinfulness,
or His rewards for their suffering. Historian Wilson Fallin has examined the
sermons of white and black Baptist preachers after the War. Southern white
preachers said:
God had chastised them
and given them a special mission – to maintain orthodoxy, strict Biblicism,
personal piety, and traditional race relations. Slavery, they insisted, had not
been sinful. Rather, emancipation was a historical tragedy and the end of
Reconstruction was a clear sign of God's favor.
In sharp contrast, Black preachers interpreted the Civil War
as:
God's gift of freedom.
They appreciated opportunities to exercise their independence, to worship in
their own way, to affirm their worth and dignity, and to proclaim the
fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Most of all, they could form
their own churches, associations, and conventions. These institutions offered
self-help and racial uplift, and provided places where the gospel of liberation
could be proclaimed. As a result, black preachers continued to insist that God
would protect and help him; God would be their rock in a stormy land.
Lost Cause
Memory of the war in the white South crystallized in the
myth of the "Lost Cause",
shaping regional identity and race relations for generations. Alan T. Nolan
notes that the Lost Cause was expressly "a
rationalization, a cover-up to vindicate the name and fame" of those
in rebellion. Some claims revolve around the insignificance of slavery; some
appeals highlight cultural differences between North and South; the military
conflict by Confederate actors is idealized; in any case, secession was said to
be lawful. Nolan argues that the adoption of the Lost Cause perspective
facilitated the reunification of the North and the South while excusing the "virulent racism" of the 19th
century, sacrificing African-American progress to a white man's reunification.
He also deems the Lost Cause "a
caricature of the truth. This caricature wholly misrepresents and distorts the
facts of the matter" in every instance.
Beardian
historiography
The interpretation of the Civil War presented by Charles A.
Beard and Mary R. Beard in The Rise of American Civilization (1927) was highly
influential among historians and the general public until the Civil Rights
Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The Beards downplayed slavery, abolitionism,
and issues of morality. They ignored constitutional issues of states' rights
and even ignored American nationalism as the force that finally led to victory
in the war. Indeed, the ferocious combat itself was passed over as merely an
ephemeral event. Much more important was the calculus of class conflict. The
Beards announced that the Civil War was really:
[A] social cataclysm
in which the capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West drove
from power in the national government the planting aristocracy of the South.
The Beards themselves abandoned their interpretation by the
1940s and it became defunct among historians in the 1950s, when scholars
shifted to an emphasis on slavery. However, Beardian themes still echo among
Lost Cause writers.
Civil War
commemoration
The American Civil War has been commemorated in many
capacities ranging from the reenactment of battles, to statues and memorial
halls erected, to films being produced, to stamps and coins with Civil War
themes being issued, all of which helped to shape public memory. This varied
advent occurred in greater proportions on the 100th and 150th anniversary. Hollywood's take on the war has been
especially influential in shaping public memory, as seen in such film classics
as Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone with the Wind (1939), and more recently
Lincoln (2012). Ken Burns produced a notable PBS series on television titled
The Civil War (1990). It was digitally remastered and re-released in 2015.
Technological
significance
There were numerous technological innovations during the
Civil War that had a great impact on 19th century science. The Civil War was
one of the earliest and most prime examples of an "industrial war", in which technological might is used to
achieve military supremacy in a war. New inventions, such as the train and
telegraph, delivered soldiers, supplies and messages in a time where horses
were considered to be the fastest way to travel. It was also in this war where
countries used aerial warfare, in the form of reconnaissance balloons, to a
significant effect. It saw the first action involving steam-powered ironclad
warships in naval warfare history. Repeating firearms such as the Henry rifle,
Spencer rifle, Colt revolving rifle, Triplett & Scott carbine and others,
first appeared during the Civil War; they were a revolutionary invention that
would soon replace muzzle-loading and single-shot firearms in warfare, as well
as the first appearances of rapid-firing weapons and machine guns such as the
Agar gun and the Gatling gun.
In works of culture
and art
Literature
• Gone with
the Wind (by Margaret Mitchell)
• An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (by Ambrose Bierce)
• Texar's
Revenge, or, North against South (by Jules Verne)
Film
• The Birth
of a Nation (1915, USA)
• The
General (1926, USA)
• Gone with
the Wind (1939, USA)
• The Red
Badge of Courage (1951, USA)
• The Horse
Soldiers (1959, USA)
• Shenandoah
(1965, USA)
• The Good,
the Bad and the Ugly (1966, Italy-Spain-FRG)
• Glory
(1989, USA)
• Gettysburg
(1993, USA)
• The Last
Outlaw (1993, USA)
• Cold
Mountain (2003, USA)
• Gods and
Generals (2003, USA)
• North and
South (miniseries)
• Abraham
Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012, USA)
• Lincoln
(2012, USA)
• 12 Years
a Slave (2012, USA)
• Free
State of Jones (2016, USA)
Video games
• Sid
Meier's Gettysburg! (1997, USA)
• Sid
Meier's Antietam! (1999, USA)
• American
Conquest: Divided Nation (2006, USA)
• Forge of
Freedom: The American Civil War (2006, USA)
• The
History Channel: Civil War – A Nation Divided (2006, USA)
• History
Civil War: Secret Missions (2008, USA)
• Call of
Juarez: Bound in Blood (2009, USA)
• Darkest
of Days (2009, USA)
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