American Civil War

From Academic Kids

Military history of the United States
Military history of the Confederate States

ConflictAmerican Civil War
PlacePrincipally in the southern United States; also in eastern, central and southwestern regions
ResultDefeat of seceding CSA
Battles of the American Civil War
United States of America
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USA flag 18611863. 34 stars, after the admission of Kansas to the Union

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18631864. 35 stars, after the admission of West Virginia).
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18641865. 36 stars, after the admission of Nevada.

Confederate States of America

CSA flag to May 1863
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May 1863

Briefly from March 1865

Abraham Lincoln Jefferson Davis
2,803,300 1,064,200
KIA: 110,070
Total dead: 359,528
Wounded: 275,175
KIA: 74,524
Total dead: 198,524
Wounded: 137,000+

The American Civil War was fought in the United States from 1861 until 1865 between the United States – forces coming mostly from the 23 northern states of the Union – and the newly-formed Confederate States of America, which consisted of 11 southern states that had declared their secession. There were various names used to describe the war itself, its combatants, armies, and battles (see the article Naming the American Civil War).


The division of the country

Seven states seceded shortly after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 – even before he was inaugurated. They were South Carolina (December 20, 1860), Mississippi (January 9, 1861), Florida (January 10, 1861), Alabama (January 11, 1861), Georgia (January 19, 1861), Louisiana (January 26, 1861), and Texas (February 1, 1861). These Deep South States, where slavery and cotton plantation agriculture were most dominant, formed the Confederate States of America (February 4, 1861), with Jefferson Davis as President, and with a Constitution closely modeled on the U.S. Constitution (see also Confederate States Constitution). After the Battle of Fort Sumter, South Carolina, Lincoln called for troops from all remaining states to recover the forts, resulting in the secession of four more states: Virginia (April 17, 1861), Arkansas (May 6, 1861), North Carolina (May 20, 1861), and Tennessee (June 8, 1861).

Four "slave states" did not secede, and one seceding state split; these five are known as the Border States. Delaware, which had voted for John C. Breckinridge, had few slaves and never considered secession. Maryland also voted for Breckinridge; its legislature rejected secession (April 27, 1861), but only after the rioting in Baltimore and other events had prompted a federal declaration of martial law. Missouri and Kentucky remained in the Union, but in both, factions organized "secessions", which were recognized by the Confederate States of America. In Missouri, the State government under Governor Claiborne F. Jackson, a southern sympathizer, evacuated the state capital of Jefferson City when it was attacked by northern Gen. Nathaniel Lyon on June 14, 1861.

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Map of the division of the states during the Civil War. Blue represents Union states, including those admitted during the war; light blue represents Union states which permitted slavery; Grayish blue represents Confederate states. Peach colored areas were territories. All other areas are grey.

The elected Missouri government, under Jackson, met in-exile at the town of Neosho, Missouri and adopted a secession ordinance that was recognized by the Confederacy on October 30, 1861 (see the Missouri secession controversy). Meanwhile the Union organized a competing government of the state by calling a constitutional convention, originally convened to vote on secession. Although Kentucky did not secede, for a time, it declared itself neutral in the conflict, and southern sympathizers organized a secession convention, and swore in a Confederate Governor, during a brief sojourn by the Confederate Army. Residents of the northwestern counties of Virginia organized a secession from Virginia and entered the Union (with a plan for gradual emancipation) in 1863 as West Virginia.

The southern half of the federal territory of New Mexico voted to secede, and was accepted into the Confederacy as the Territory of Arizona (not shown on the map), with its capital in Mesilla (now New Mexico).

California was a free state and a part of the Union. Lincoln had won a plurality there, but there was a number of Southern Sympathizers. 28% of its votes went to the Southern Democrat candidate, John C. Breckinridge. California was asked to keep its soldiers under state control and were used to keep the land routes between the Mississippi and the state open. California gold helped finance the Union war effort.[1] (http://www.militarymuseum.org/HistoryCW.html)

Origins of the conflict

For details see the main article Origins of the American Civil War. See also the Timeline of events leading to the American Civil War.

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Slave "patrollers," mostly poor whites, were given the authority to stop, search, whip, maim, and even kill any slave who violated the slave codes. In their agitation against the South, abolitionists cited the slave codes as example of the barbarism of Southern society. Above a woodcut from the abolitionist Anti-Slavery Almanac (1839) depicts the capture of a fugitive slave by a slave patrol.

On the eve of the Civil War, the United States was a nation divided into four quite distinct regions: the Northeast, with a growing industrial and commercial economy and an increasing density of population; the Northwest, now known as the Midwest, a rapidly expanding region of free farmers where slavery had been forever prohibited under the Northwest Ordinance; the Upper South, with a settled plantation system and (in some areas) declining economic fortunes; and the Southwest, a booming frontier-like region with expanding cotton economy. With two fundamentally different labor systems at their base, the economic and social changes across the nation's geographical regions – based on wage labor in the North and on slavery in the South – underlay distinct visions of society that had emerged by the mid-nineteenth century in the North and in the South.

Before the Civil War, the Constitution provided a basis for peaceful debate over the future of government, and had been able to regulate conflicts of interest and conflicting visions for the new, rapidly expanding nation. For many years, compromises had been made to balance the number of "free states" and "slave states" so that there would be a balance in the Senate. The last slave state admitted was Texas in 1845, with five free states admitted between 1846 and 1859. Kansas's admission as a slave state had recently been blocked, and it was due to enter as a free state instead in 1861. The rise of mass democracy in the industrializing North, the breakdown of the old two-party system, and increasingly virulent and hostile sectional ideologies in the mid-nineteenth century made it highly unlikely, if not impossible, to bring about the gentlemanly compromises of the past (such as the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850) necessary to avoid crisis.

Sectional tensions changed in their nature and intensity rapidly during the 1850s. The United States Republican Party was established in 1854. The new party opposed the expansion of slavery in the Western territories. Although only a small share of Northerners favored measures to abolish slavery in the South, the Republicans were able to mobilize popular support among Northerners and Westerns who did not want to compete against slave labor if the system were expanded beyond the South. The Republicans won the support of many ex-Whigs and Northern ex-Democrats concerned about the South's disproportionate influence in the Senate, the Buchanan administration, and the Supreme Court.


16th President (1861-1865)
Abraham Lincoln
16th President


In addition to Lincoln's presidential victory, the slave states had lost the balance of power in the Senate and were facing a future as a perpetual minority after decades of nearly continuous control of the presidency and the Congress. Southerners also felt they could no longer prevent protectionist tariffs such as the Morrill Tariff, which generally placed a greater burden upon the South.

The Southern justification for a unilateral right to secede cited the doctrine of states' rights, which had been debated before with the 1798 Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, the Hartford Convention during the War of 1812, and the 1832 Nullification Crisis with regard to tariffs.

Before Lincoln took office, seven states seceded from the union, establishing a rebel government, the Confederate States of America on February 9, 1861. They took control of federal forts and property within their boundaries, with little resistance from President Buchanan. Ironically, by seceding, the rebel states weakened any claim to the territories that were in dispute, cancelled any obligation for the North to return fugitive slaves, and assured easy passage of many bills and amendments they had long opposed. The Civil War began when Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire upon Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina on April 12, 1861. There were no casualties in this battle but there would be in the years to come.

Narrative summary

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Battles of the American Civil War by Theater, Year

Lincoln's victory in the presidential election of 1860 triggered South Carolina's secession from the Union. Lincoln was not even on the ballot in nine states in the South. Leaders in South Carolina had long been waiting for an event that might unite the South against the antislavery forces. Once the election returns were certain, a special South Carolina convention declared "that the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states under the name of the 'United States of America' is hereby dissolved." By February 1, 1861, six more Southern states had seceded. On February 7, the seven states adopted a provisional constitution for the Confederate States of America and established their capital at Montgomery, Alabama. The pre-war peace conference of 1861 met at Washington, D.C. The remaining southern states as yet remained in the Union. Several seceding states seized federal forts within their boundaries; President Buchanan made no military response.

Less than a month later, on March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as President of the United States. In his inaugural address, he argued that the Constitution was a more perfect union than the earlier Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, that it was a binding contract, and called the secession "legally void". He stated he had no intent to invade southern states, but would use force to maintain possession of federal property. His speech closed with a plea for restoration of the bonds of union. The South, particularly South Carolina, ignored the plea, and on April 12, the South fired upon the Federal troops stationed at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina until the troops surrendered.

Lincoln called for all of the states in the Union to send troops to recapture the forts and preserve the Union. Most Northerners believed that a quick brutal victory for the Union would crush the nascent rebellion, and so Lincoln only called for volunteers for 90 days. This resulted in four more states voting to secede. Once Virginia seceded, the Confederate capital was moved to Richmond, Virginia.



Eastern Theater 1861–1863






Western Theater 1861–1863

While the Confederate forces had numerous successes in the Eastern theater, they crucially failed in the West. Confederate forces were driven from Missouri early in the war as result of the Battle of Pea Ridge. Leonidas Polk's invasion of Kentucky enraged the citizens who previously had declared neutrality in the war, turning that state against the Confederacy.

Nashville, Tennessee fell to the Union early in 1862. Most of the Mississippi was opened with the taking of Island No. 10 and New Madrid, Missouri, and then Memphis, Tennessee. New Orleans, Louisiana, was captured in May, 1862, allowing the Union forces to begin moving up the Mississippi as well. Only the fortress city of Vicksburg, Mississippi prevented unchallenged Union control of the entire river.

Braxton Bragg's second Confederate invasion of Kentucky was repulsed at the confused and bloody Battle of Perryville and he was narrowly defeated by William S. Rosecrans at the Battle of Stones River in Tennessee.

The one clear Confederate victory in the West was the Battle of Chickamauga in Tennessee, near the Georgia border, where Bragg, reinforced by the corps of James Longstreet (from Lee's army in the east), defeated Rosecrans despite the heroics of George Henry Thomas and forced him to retreat to Chattanooga, which Bragg then besieged.

The Union's key strategist and tactician in the west was Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who won victories at Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, driving Confederate forces out of Tennessee.

Trans-Mississippi Theater 1861–1865


This small battle smashed any possibilty of the Confederacy taking New Mexico and the far west territories. In April, Union volunteers from California pushed the remaining Confederates out of present-day Arizona at the Battle of Pichaco Peak. In the eastern part of the United States, the fighting dragged on for three more years, but in the Southwest the war was over. [3] (http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/117glorietaraton/117facts3.htm)


Fall of the Confederacy 1864–1865

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Jefferson Davis
First and only President of the Confederate States of America


Union forces in the East attempted to maneuver past Lee and fought several battles during that phase of the Eastern campaign, known as Grant's Overland Campaign. An attempt to outflank Lee from the south failed under Butler, who was corked into the Bermuda Hundred river bend. Grant was tenacious and, despite astonishing losses (over 66,000 casualties in six weeks), kept pressing the Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. He pinned down the Confederate army in the Siege of Petersburg, where the two armies engaged in trench warfare for over nine months.

After two failed attempts (under Sigel and David Hunter) to seize key points in the Shenandoah Valley, Grant finally found a commander, Philip Sheridan, aggressive enough to prevail in the Valley Campaigns of 1864. Sheridan was sent as a result of a raid by the aggressive Jubal Early, whose corps reached the outer defenses of Washington, alarming the federal government, before withdrawing back to the Valley. Sheridan proved to be more than a match for Early, and defeated him in a series of battles, decisively at Cedar Creek, and proceeded to destroy the agricultural and industrial base of the Valley, similar to the scorched-earth tactics Sherman would employ in Georgia.

Meanwhile, Sherman marched from Chattanooga to Atlanta, Georgia, defeating Generals Joseph E. Johnston and John B. Hood. The fall of Atlanta on September 2, 1864, was a significant factor in re-electing Abraham Lincoln. Leaving Atlanta, and his base of supplies, Sherman's army marched with an unclear destination, laying waste to much of the rest of Georgia in his celebrated Sherman's March to the Sea, reaching the sea at Savannah, Georgia in December, 1864. Burning towns and plantations as they went, Sherman's armies hauled off crops and killed livestock to retaliate and to deny use of these economic assets to the Confederacy, a consequence of Grant's scorched earth doctrine. When Sherman turned north through South Carolina and North Carolina to approach the Virginia lines from the south, it was the end for Lee and his men, and for the Confederacy.


Reasons for the Outcome


  • Strong compatible railroad links between Union cities, which allowed for the relatively quick movement of troops. (It should be noted, however, that the Confederacy had more railroads per capita than any other country at the time.)
  • The Union's larger population and greater immigration during the war, allowing for a larger pool of potential conscripts.
  • The Union's more established government, which may have resulted in less infighting and a more streamlined conduction of the war.
  • The recruitment of African-Americans, including many freed slaves, into the Union Army after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, thus allowing the Union to tap a population source their enemy ideologically refused to use. In the final weeks of the war, the Confederacy relented and began to allow African-Americans to enlist in the army, but this was only a token effort.
  • The Confederacy's possible squandering of resources on early audacious conventional offensives and its failure (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HZY/is_1_14/ai_78397581) to fully use its advantages in guerilla warfare against Union communication and transportation infrastructure.
  • The Confederacy's failure to win military support from any foreign powers, mostly due to the Battle of Antietam, and a well-timed release of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Major land battles

Main article: Battles of the American Civil War


Battle (State) Dates Confederate
Union Commander Conf. Forces Union Forces Victor Casualties
Battle of Gettysburg


July 13, 1863 Robert E. Lee George G. Meade 75,000 82,289 Union 51,112 (23,049 Union and 28,063 Conf.)
Battle of Chickamauga


September 1920, 1863 Braxton Bragg William Rosecrans 66,326 58,222 Conf. 34,624 (16,170 Union and 18,454 Conf.)
Battle of Chancellorsville


May 14, 1863 Robert E. Lee Joseph Hooker 60,892 133,868 Conf. 30,099 (17,278 Union and 12,821 Conf.)
Battle of Spotsylvania Court House


May 819, 1864 Robert E. Lee Ulysses S. Grant 50,000 83,000 Conf. 27,399 (18,399 Union and 9,000 Conf.)
Battle of Antietam


September 17, 1862 Robert E. Lee George B. McClellan 51,844 75,316 Union 26,134 (12,410 Union and 13,724 Conf.)
Battle of the Wilderness


May 57, 1864 Robert E. Lee Ulysses S. Grant 61,025 101,895 Unknown 25,416 (17,666 Union and 7,750 Conf.)
Second Battle of Manassas


August 2930, 1862 Robert E. Lee John Pope 48,527 75,696 Conf. 25,251 (16,054 Union and 9,197 Conf.)
Battle of Stones River


December 31, 1862 Braxton Bragg William S. Rosecrans 37,739 41,400 Union 24,645 (12,906 Union and 11,739 Conf.)
Battle of Shiloh


April 67, 1862 Albert Sidney Johnston
P.G.T. Beauregard
Ulysses S. Grant 40,335 62,682 Union 23,741 (13,047 Union and 10,694 Conf.)
Battle of Fort Donelson


February 1316, 1862 John B. Floyd
Simon B. Buckner
Ulysses S. Grant 21,000 27,000 Union 19,455 (2,832 Union and 16,623 Conf.)
Dead soldiers lie where they fell on the field at Antietam
Dead soldiers lie where they fell on the field at Antietam

Other major land battles included First Bull Run, The Seven Days, Perryville, Fredericksburg, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, the Siege of Petersburg, and the battles of Franklin and Nashville. There was also Jackson's Valley Campaign, the Atlanta Campaign, Red River Campaign, Missouri Campaign, Valley Campaigns of 1864, and many coastal and river battles.

Major naval battles

Main article: Battles of the American Civil War


Civil War leaders

One of the reasons that the US Civil War wore on as long as it did and the battles were so fierce was that leaders on both sides had formerly served in the United States Armed Forces together, many, including Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, during the Mexican-American War between 1846 and 1848. Most were graduates of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, where Lee had been commandant for 3 years in the 1850s.

Significant Southern leaders included Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, James Longstreet, P.G.T. Beauregard, John Mosby, Braxton Bragg, John Bell Hood, James Ewell Brown (JEB) Stuart, William Mahone, Judah P. Benjamin, Jubal Early, and Nathan Bedford Forrest.



Although not being allowed to fight in the civil war due to the fact that she was a woman, Clara Barton became the leader of the Union of Nurses and was widely known as the "Angel of the Battlefield." She experienced the horror of 16 wars, helping behind the lines to heal the injured soldiers. Clara organized a relief program that helped to better distribute supplies to wounded soldiers of both the North and South.


As slavery and constitutional questions concerning states' rights were widely viewed as causes for the war, the victorious Union government sought to end slavery and to strip the states of their powers to define citizenship and to deny residents fundamental rights.

During the early part of the war, Lincoln, to hold together his war coalition of Republicans and War Democrats, emphasized preservation of the Union as the sole Union objective of the war, but with the Emancipation Proclamation, announced in September 1862 and put into effect four months later, Lincoln adopted the abolition of slavery as a second mission. The Emancipation Proclamation declared all slaves held in territory then under Confederate control to be "then, thenceforth, and forever free." It had little initial effect but served to commit the United States to the goal of ending slavery. The Proclamation would be put into practical effect in Confederate territory captured over the remainder of the war.

The border States of Missouri and Maryland moved during the course of the war to end slavery, and in December 1864, the Congress proposed the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, barring slavery throughout the United States; the 13th Amendment was fully ratified by the end of 1865. The 14th Amendment, defining citizenship and giving the Federal government broad power to require the States to provide equal protection of the laws was adopted in 1868. The 15th Amendment guaranteeing black Americans the right to vote was ratified in 1870. The 14th and 15th Amendments reversed the effects of the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857, but the 14th Amendment, in particular, had unanticipated and far-reaching effects.

The expansion of fundamental rights under the 14th Amendment's first clause, requiring due process and equal protection for all citizens, was not anticipated by its sponsors. Under this clause the Supreme Court later recognized such rights as the right to abortion, the right to contraceptives, the right to medical treatment, and the right to marry.



Many of the Union military leaders, such as Sheridan, Sherman, and Custer would take the concept of scorched earth and apply it to the Indian Wars on the Great Plains, which resulted in ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide.


A good deal of ill will among the Southern survivors resulted from the consequent shift of political power to the North, the destruction inflicted on the South by the Union armies as the end of the war approached, and the Reconstruction program instituted in the South by the Union after the war's end. Bitterness about the war continued for decades after the war ended. Many southerners still do not accept the outcome, and it entrenched northern antipathy toward the south. Confederate flags and bumper stickers that say "The South shall rise again" are sometimes seen in various parts of the South. Heated political debates still occur over the use of symbols like Confederate Flags and images of Lincoln in public life. When asked, the flag's proponents argue that it does not signify any type of prejudice or racism, but is instead a symbol of the bond the southern states share; others, especially black Americans, disagree.


Histories and biographies

Novels about the war

See also

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External links

  • Alexander Hamilton Stephens' Cornerstone Speech[4] (http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=76)

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