and patriarchal.”
Blacks, of course, viewed the practice of slavery quite differently. Though their numbers were nearly equal to the white population in the South-in 1860 four million blacks and five and a half million whites populated the eleven states that eventually seceded–their status as human chattel precluded them from exercising any control over their lives or the lives of their families. “A slave entered the world in a one-room dirt-floored shack,” wrote Geoffrey C. Ward in The Civil War. “Drafty in winter, reeking in summer, slave cabins bred pneumonia, typhus, cholera, tuberculosis. The child who survived to be sent to the fields at twelve was likely to have rotten teeth, worms, dysentery, malaria. Fewer than four out of one hundred slaves lived to be sixty.” Sold on the auction block, forbidden to read or write, subject to the whims of their masters, generations of slaves worked the hot fields of the South as voiceless cogs in the region’s agrarian machine.
In the Northern states of America, meanwhile, voices calling for abolition of the institution of slavery had grown progressively louder during the first half of the nineteenth century. By the1850s, most citizens were quite familiar with the living conditions in which blacks were forced to live in the South; they had been educated by an avalanche of abolitionist mailing campaigns, door-to-door visits, pamphlets, and meetings, all of which castigated Slave-holding as a shameful and wicked practice. Southerners, though, were defiant. This defiance could be traced in large measure to economic concerns, but Southerners also resented abolitionists’ appropriation of the moral high ground in the debate. After the 1831 Nat Turner Rebellion, in which Turner, a black freeman, led a slave revolt in Virginia that resulted in the deaths of fifty-seven whites, apologists for slavery defended the practice with renewed vigor, even going so far as to call it a good and moral institution.
The growing tension between North and South was evident in the nation’s political arena as well. As Western lands were brought into the Union, Southern congressmen jockeyed to have them admitted as slave states; Northerners, on the other hand, sought to include them as “free” states where
slavery was not allowed.
In the 1850s the government cobbled together a number of notable agreements designed to prevent a rupture in the Union. In the Compromise of 1850, the United States turned its attention to Western territories gained in the War with Mexico a few years before; California was admitted as a free state and slavery was prohibited in the District of Columbia, but the legislation called for state citizenry to determine the presence or absence of slavery in New Mexico and Utah, a principle known as popular sovereignty. The Compromise also included a controversial new Fugitive Slave Act that enabled slave owners to retrieve runaway slaves more easily from the North. Only four years later, however, a new law left the uneasy truce of 1850 broken in the dust.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 jettisoned the 1820 Missouri Compromise (which had outlawed slavery in territories north of Missouri’s southern boundary), calling instead for an arrangement wherein territories seeking statehood were left to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery within their respective borders. The Act outraged many Northerners and sparked the dissolution of the Whig Party and the creation of the Republican Party (largely composed of Whig Party remnants and Northern Democrats who were unhappy with their party’s pro-South stance). By 1860 the South viewed the Republican Party, which boasted a number of important abolitionist voices, as a direct threat to their way of life.
The 1854 legislation also resulted in bloodshed and escalating ill will between America’s Northern and Southern blocs. In 1855, when Kansans were called on to vote on whether to allow slavery, thousands of pro-slavery Missourians poured into Kansas to vote illegally. While the majority of the actual natives of Kansas were “free-soilers” opposed to slavery, the votes of the Missourians enabled slavery supporters to gain control of the territorial legislature. Furious free-soilers defiantly formed their own legislature and petitioned for admittance into the United States as a free state. Violence broke out between pro- and anti-slavery factions all along the Missouri-Kansas border, and the badly splintered nation’s spiral toward civil war accelerated.
Congressmen took to arming themselves before attending sessions of Congress, and in May 1856 House member Preston Brooks, a Southerner, violently beat Republican Charles Sumner in the Senate chambers after the latter gave a speech that included a stinging rebuke of slaveholders (Sumner was unable to return to his job for three years). The ugly incident further inflamed passions between the two sides, as Southern papers hailed Brooks as a defender of Southern honor and Northern commentators castigated him as the inevitable product of a region made mean and corrupt by slavery.
In 1857 the Supreme Court–which had a Southern majority at the time–ruled that Congress had no power to limit slavery in the Western territories. This decision, known as the Dred Scott case in reference to the slave who brought the suit, also held that blacks–whether free or enslaved-were inferior beings who could not hold U.S. citizenship, and ruled that slaves were the property of their owners no matter whether they had ever resided in
a free state.
The Dred Scott decision further aggravated sectionalism and galvanized abolitionists, who felt that the decision might extend slavery. “To the utter amazement of the abolitionists,” wrote Alan Axelrod and Charles Phillips in What Every American Should Know about American History, “the court had invoked the Bill of Rights in a ruling that denied freedom to a black slave. For the southern slave-owners, the decision implied that slavery was safe–and according to the reading should be protected–everywhere in the nation.”
In 1860, though, disagreement within the Democratic Party over slavery led to a formal split between the two wings. Northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas for the presidency of the United States, while John C. Breckenridge was the nominee of the Southerners. The Republicans, meanwhile, nominated the moderate Abraham Lincoln, who was able to secure the presidency by carrying the North. The South viewed Lincoln’s ascension to the highest position in the land as an unmitigated disaster. One Southern paper called his election the greatest evil ever to befall the country, and he was burned in effigy in town squares across the South. Of greater import, however, was the reaction of the South Carolina legislature: they called for a convention to discuss seceding from the Union.
After years of negotiation and compromise, both sides sensed that confrontation was inevitable. Other issues were important factors in the Civil War–property rights, states’ rights, Southern disaffection with the might of the Northern industrial economy–but slavery was the major issue, and the very nature of the institution precluded satisfactory compromise. As Lincoln once wrote to a Southern politician, “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.”
The War Turns Hot!!
On December 20, 1860, South Carolina announced its secession from the United States. Other slave-holding states followed, citing the supremacy of states’ rights over federal law. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana all left the Union before Lincoln’s March 1861 inauguration. Texas followed suit as well, ignoring the words of Governor Sam Houston, who was removed from office for his efforts to keep the state in the Union:
“Let me tell you what is coming…. Your fathers and husbands, your sons and brothers, will be herded at the point of the bayonet…. I tell you that, while I believe with you in the doctrine of States’ Rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union.”
In February 1861 delegations from the seven seceding states met in Alabama and drafted a Confederate Constitution. Jefferson Davis was elected president of the new Confederate States of America. In the following months–as the first blood of the American Civil War was shed–Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina joined their fellow slave-holding states under the Confederate Flag.
In April 1861 Confederate forces fired on a Union garrison at Fort Sumter, located in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. This attack is regarded as the opening engagement of the Civil War (or the War between the States, as it was known in the South). Lincoln responded with a naval blockade. Avenues of discussion seemed exhausted; the North would have to preserve the Union by force.
The North did have some significant advantages. “Omitting the deeply divided border states of Kentucky and Missouri,” observed Robert Paul Jordan in The Civil War, “five and a half million white Southerners faced a total white population of some twenty million. The Union boasted more than eight out of ten factories, more than 70 percent of railroad mileage, all the fighting ships, and most of the money. What the South did have was faith and a consummate will to fight: faith in its cause and the will that springs like a well of strength when one’s homeland must be defended.” The South also had General Robert E. Lee, a brilliant military strategist who outmaneuvered Union forces for much of the war.
The Union Army’s early bid to capture Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, was foiled by their defeat at Bull Run in July 1861, one of several early Confederate victories. Union forces returned to the same region a year later, only to be driven into retreat by Lee-led rebel forces in the Seven Days’ Battle. Seizing the momentum, Lee made a push for Maryland and Pennsylvania that was checked by Union General George B. McClellan in September 1862 (this clash featured a September 17 battle at Antietam Creek in Maryland that proved to be the single bloodiest day of the entire Civil War). That same month, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order which abolished slavery in the Confederacy (but not in slave states such as Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland, which had remained in the Union).
By late 1862 and early 1863 it was clear that the conflict was going to be a long and bloody one. In December 1862 the Federalist forces of the North lost another big battle, this time at Fredericksburg, Virginia. In early May 1863, Lee guided the rebel army to yet another important victory in Virginia, at Chancellorsville, but he lost his best general, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, to friendly fire in the process. Further west, however, Union troops under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant sliced through the Deep South and assumed control of the Mississippi River in the Vicksburg Campaign. Grant’s triumph came in the same month–July 1863–that the Confederate Army suffered a costly and demoralizing loss at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The Battle of Gettysburg decimated Lee’s forces, and the defeat marked a significant turn in the fortunes of the Confederacy.
In March 1864 Lincoln appointed Grant to head all Union troops. The president had been bitterly disappointed with the unassertive performances of Grant’s predecessors, but Grant proved an implacable and effective leader. Relying on superior numbers, Grant and his generals systematically pushed their Confederate foes southward, and Lee and Grant engaged their armies at several memorable junctions. But while the Union army finally had the upper hand, Lincoln’s job was in jeopardy; Northern voters were weary of the bloodshed, and the Democrats had nominated George B. McClellan, the hero of Antietam, who vowed to end the war.
In September 1864, however, the North learned that Union troops under the command of General Willia