An Introduction to the American Civil War

The American Civil War is sometimes called the War Between the States, the War of Rebellion, or the War for Southern Independence. It began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, and lasted until May 26, 1865, when the last Confederate army surrendered. The war took more than 600,000 lives, destroyed property valued at $5 billion, brought freedom to 4 million black slaves, and opened wounds that have not yet completely healed more than 125 years later. The chief and immediate cause of the war was slavery. Southern states, including the 11 states that formed the Confederacy, depended on slavery to support their economy. Southerners used slave labor to produce crops, especially cotton. Although slavery was illegal in the Northern states, only a small proportion of Northerners actively opposed it. The main debate between the North and the South on the eve of the war was whether slavery should be permitted in the Western territories recently acquired during the Mexican War (1846-1848), including New Mexico, part of California, and Utah. Opponents of slavery were concerned about its expansion, in part because they did not want to compete against slave labor. By 1860, the North and the South had developed into two very different regions. Divergent social, economic, and political points of view, dating from colonial times, gradually drove the two sections farther and farther apart. Each tried to impose its point of view on the country as a whole. Although compromises had kept the Union together for many years, in 1860 the situation was explosive. The election of Abraham Lincoln as president was viewed by the South as a threat to slavery and ignited the war. During the first half of the 19th century, economic differences between the regions also increased. By 1860 cotton was the chief crop of the South, and it represented 57 percent of all U.S. exports. The profitability of cotton, known as King Cotton, completed the South's dependence on the plantation system and its essential component, slavery. Most of the cotton crop was grown on large plantations that used black slave labor, such as this one on the Mississippi River. The North was by then firmly established as an industrial society. Labor was needed, but not slave labor. Immigration was encouraged. Immigrants from Europe worked in factories, built the railroads of the North, and settled the West. Very few settled in the South. The South, resisting industrialization, manufactured little. Almost all manufactured goods had to be imported. Southerners therefore opposed high tariffs, or taxes that were placed on imported goods and increased the price of manufactured articles. The manufacturing economy of the North, on the other hand, demanded high tariffs to protect its own products from cheap foreign competition. Before the Civil War, the federal government's chief source of revenue was the tariff. There were few other sources of revenue, for example, neither personal nor corporate income taxes existed. The tariff paid for most improvements made by the federal government, such as roads, turnpikes, and canals. To keep tariffs low, the South preferred to do without these improvements. The expanding Northwest Territory, which was made up of the present-day states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota, was far from the markets for its grain and cattle. It needed such internal improvements for survival, and so supported the Northeast's demands for high tariffs. In return, the Northeast supported most federally financed improvements in the Northwest Territory. As a result, although both the South and the West were agricultural, the West allied itself with the Northern, rather than the Southern, point of view. Economic needs sharpened sectional differences, adding to the interregional hostility. In the early days of the United States, loyalty to one's state often took precedence over loyalty to one's country. A New Yorker or a Virginian would refer to his state as "my country." The Union was considered a "voluntary compact" entered into by independent, sovereign states for as long as it served their purpose to be so joined. In the nation's early years, neither North nor South had any strong sense of the permanence of the Union. New England, for example, once thought of seceding, or leaving the Union, because the War of 1812 cut off trade with England. As Northern and Southern patterns of living diverged, their political ideas also developed marked differences. The North needed a central government to build an infrastructure of roads and railways, protect its complex trading and financial interests, and control the national currency. The South depended much less on the federal government than did other regions, and Southerners therefore felt no need to strengthen it. In addition, Southern patriots feared that a strong central government might interfere with slavery. Up to 1860 only a few extremists in the South, called "fire-eaters," wanted to apply the doctrine of secession to create a separate Southern country. Moderates of both North and South kept hoping to compromise their differences over slavery, tariffs, and the territories in the forum of the Congress of the United States. Compromise was possible as long as neither side controlled the Senate. With the admission of Alabama in 1819, the Senate became perfectly balanced. However, vast territories in the West and Southwest, acquired through the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican War, would soon be petitioning for statehood. North and South began a long and bitter struggle over whether the territories would enter the Union as free or slave states. The Civil War was the central event in the lives of most of the men who served in the armed forces. Many of them had never traveled more than a few miles beyond their homes, and the war took them to places they otherwise would not have seen, made them participants in great events, and often left them with scars that constantly reminded them of how much they had sacrificed. During the postwar years, thousands of men joined veterans' organizations such as the Grand Army of the Republic in the North and the United Confederate Veterans in the South. They revisited the sites of their battles, raised monuments to commemorate their service, and, in large numbers, wrote reminiscences about their part in the war. For black men who fought for the Union, the war provided the strongest possible claim for full citizenship. They had risked their lives, along with their white comrades in the military, and they argued that they should have the right to vote and otherwise live as full members of American society.

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Bibliography: Catton, Bruce. The Centennial History of the Civil War. 3v. (1961-65); Commager, Henry Steele, ed. The Blue and the Gray: The Story of the Civil War as Told by Participants. 2v. (1973); Davis, William C. and Wiley, Bell I. Shadows of the Storm (1981); Foote, Shelby. The Civil War: A Narrative. 3v. (1958-74); Keylin, Arlene and Bowen, Douglas J., eds. New York Times Book of the Civil War (1980); Leckie, Robert. None Died in Vain: The Saga of the American Civil War (1990); McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. (1988); Mitchell, Reid. Civil War Soldiers (1988); Smith, Page. Trial by Fire: A People's History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (1982); Stampp, Kenneth M. The Imperiled Union (1980); Ward, Geoffrey C. The Civil War: An Illustrated History (1990).