Chapter 21 - The Furnace of Civil War 1861-1865

 

Chapter Themes

The Civil War evolved into a total war to end slavery and transform the nation

Major Questions

What made Lincoln a great president?

Although Abraham Lincoln made and proceeded with many unconstitutional decisions and actions, they were made in order to save the Union. He understood that he might encounter opposition in his decisions but he knew he must do whatever was needed in order to save the precious democratic Union. Abraham Lincoln was a great president because he understood the importance of situations and knew how to act, whether or not it was constitutional. He was a great public speaker and he could relate situations to the people and he would act any way possible in order to preserve and to save the Union itself- Amanda - Becky

Why did the North win the Civil War?

The North won for many reasons: they had the majority of the populations, black men were able to enlist, and the blockaded of the Southern port. Because the North had the majority of the population that meant they had more men to fight therefore having an endless and expendable amount of troops. It also helped that 10% of the Union army were black men. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 declared “forever free” the slaves not only in the North but to the Confederate states still in rebellion. Because black men were free they began to enlist in the Union Army and Lincoln defended his policies toward blacks’ enlisting, in a letter stating: “You say you will not fight to free Negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you....” Lincoln’s other actions, like the blockade of Southern ports which caused the North to have better feed to maintain its troops while Southern troops lacked even shoes, help win the Civil War. 

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Chapter Outline

Bull Run Ends the "Ninety-Day War"

• Summer of 1861, a Union army of thirty thousand men drilled near Washington. Lincoln concluded that an attack on a smaller Confederate force at Bull run might be a try. If the attack is successful, it could demonstrate the superiority of Union arms and it may lead to the capture of Richmond. If Richmond fell, secession would be discredited, and the Union could be restored without economic and social system of the South
• July 21st, 1861, Yankee recruits swaggered out of Washington toward Bull run Congressmen and Spectators followed with lunch baskets to witness the fight not knowing that it could result and true violence/ At first, the battle went well for the yankees, but then Stonewall Jackson gray-clad warriors stood like a stone wall and confederate reinforcements arrive unexpectedly. Panic seized the Union troops and they fled in shameful confusion. The confederates themselves feasted on captured lunches
• The battle of bull run caused political conflict. Victory for the South was almost worse than defeat because it led to over-confidence.

"Tardy George" McClellan and the Peninsula Campaign

• In 1861 General George B, McClellan was given command of the Army of the Potomac. McClellan had seen plenty of fighting, first in the Mexican War and then as an observer of the Crimean War in Russia.
• He was like by his men and given the nick name “little Mac” because he was an excellent organizer and drillmaster injecting good morale into the Army of Potomac. But he was a perfectionist not getting the war isn’t perfect, didn’t like to run risk, his reports from head of Pinkerton’s Detective Agency were unreliable, and he was overcautious therefore getting call a “baboon” by the general.
• McClellan would drill his army without moving but toward Richmond until Lincoln demanded him to advance. He took a waterborne approach to Richmond, which lies at the western base of a narrow peninsula formed by the James and York Rivers (hence the name Peninsula Campaign).
• In 1862: he and about 100,000 men took to capture Yorktown (which took two month). When they were close to Richmond Lincoln sent reinforcements to chase “stonewall” Jackson. At halt to further Richmond, McClellan had “Jeb” Stuart’s Confederate horse soldiers rode completely around this army on reconnaissance while Robert E. Lee lunched a shocking counterattack – The Seven Days’ Battle (June 26- July 2, 1862)
• McClellan was drove back to the sea and the Union forces abandoned the Peninsula Campaign because it was a costly failure and Lincoln temporarily abandoned McClellan as commander of the Army if the Potomac. But in McClellan defense he had 10,000 casualties Lee had 20,000.
• If McClellan had succeeded in taking Richmond and ending the war in mid 1862- the Union would have probably have been restored with minimal disruption to the “peculiar institution” and Slavery would have survived, at least for a time.
• Lee had ensured that the war would endure until slavery was demolished and the Old South thoroughly destroyed, so Lincoln had no choice but to turn toward total war. Northern military plan had six components:
  1. Suffocate the South by blockading its coasts
  2. Liberate the slaves and undermine the very economic foundations of the Old South
  3. Cut the Confederacy in half by seizing control of the Mississippi River backbone
  4. Chop the Confederacy to pieces by sending troops through Georgia and Carolinas
  5. Decapitate it by capturing its capital at Richmond
  6. (Ulysses Grant’s idea) try everywhere to engage the enemy’s main strength and to grind it into submission.

The War at Sea

• The North attempted for a blockade but of course is impossible to cover entire coast, so they focused on major ports, using boats from warships to ferries
• Even though blockade was poor Britain stayed away from South to prevent future war
• Blockade skyrocketed prices and swift steamers were able to sneak past the blockade to make a high profit.
• Yankee ships stopped British freighters going to a midpoint with reasoning that the goods were intended to go to South
• Southerners rebelled with a iron coating an old wooden ship and took some Union ships, but Union responded with their own small ironclad and beat the south.
• Britain and France had already built several ironclads, but this was the first battle-testing of these new craft. these powerful ironclads became the future of naval battles and made the old wooden ones obselete.

The Pivotal Point: Antietam

• Robert E. Lee got a victory over General John Pope at Second Battle of Bull Run(August 29-30, 1862)
• Lee moved into Maryland hoping to strike a blow that would encourage foreign intervention and get the Border State and its sisters to withdraw from the Union-->marylanders did not respond
• Critical battle at Antietam Creek, Maryland: McClellan ("Little Mac") was restored to active command of main Northern army, got lucky with finding Lee's battle plans, succeeded in halting Lee at Antietam on September 17, 1862, in one of the bitterest and bloodiest days of the war
• more or less a draw militarily: but Lee retired across Potomac, McClellan-removed from his field command for the 2nd and final time
• most decisive battle of the Civil War-->Jefferson Davis never again so near a victory as on that day, the British and French gov'ts on the verge of diplomatic mediation:a form of interference sure to be resented by the North
• long-awaited "victory" that Lincoln needed for launching his Emancipation Proclamation-->preliminary on September 23, 1862, final on January 1, 1863
• Civil War became more of a moral crusade, since fate of slavery and the south it had sustained was sealed

A Proclamation Without Emancipation

Blacks Battle Bondage

• Blacks mostly enlisted in the Union armies, most of the from the slave states, but many from free soil North. Blacks accounted for a bout 10 percent of the total enlistments in the Union forces on land and sea and included two Massachusetts regiments raised largely through the efforts of the ex-slave Frederick Douglas.
• With reasons of Pride and Prejudice and Principle, the Confederacy could not bring itself to enlist blacks in the army a month before the war ended. Meanwhile, thousands were forced into labor battalions the building of fortifications the supplying of armies and other war connected activities. slaves were the stomach of the confederacy, they kept the economy and plantations going while the white men fought.
• tens of thousands of blacks fled their plantations and revolted against arriving union armies with or without an emancipation proclamation. Twenty five thousand joined shermans march through Georgia in 1864 and it caused problems in supply and discipline.

Lee's Last Lunge at Gettysburg

• After Antietam Lincoln replaced McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac with General A.E. Burnside, whose over-elaborate side-whiskers came to known as “burnsides” or “sideburns.”
• Burnside launched a rash frontal attack on Lee's strong position at Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1862, on December 13, 1862. More than ten thousand Northern soldiers were killed or wounded in casualties nicknamed “Burnside’s Slaughter Pen."

• During the battle at Chancellorsville, Virginia on May 2-4, 1863, Hooker was badly beaten, but not before Jackson was mortally wounded. Hooker was replaced by General George G. Meade.
• As Lee moved his Confederate force to the north again (this time to Pennsylvania), he was met by Meade's force at Gettysburg on July 1-3, 1863.
• The failure of General George Pickett's magnificent but futile charge finally broke the back of the Confederate attack.
• Pickett's charge has been called the "high tide of the Confederacy." It defined both the northernmost point reached by any significant Southern force and the last real chance for the Confederates to win the war.

The War in the West

• Ulysses S. Grant became Lincoln's general for the North.
• His first major victory came when his troops captured Fort Henry and Fort Donelson on the Tennesse and Cumberland Rivers in February 1862.
• this victory riveted kentucky more securely to the union and opened the gateway to the strategically important region of tennesse, as well as georgia and the heart of dixie.
• After this victory, grant tried to capture the mississippi valley at corinth, but was defeated at Shiloh. the battle at Shiloh showed that there would be no quick end to the war in the west.

Sherman Scorches Georgia

• General Grant transferred to east Tennessee theater, where Confederates had driven Union forces from Chickamauga into Chattanooga, then laid siege.Grant won a series of desperate engagements in November 1863(Missionary Ridge, Lookout Mountain) Chattanooga liberated and way opened for invasion of Georgia.
• General William Tecumseh Sherman in charge of conquest-->captured Atlanta in September 1864 and burned the city in November.
• left supply base, lived off country for 250 miles, weeks later emerged at Savannah
• Sherman's "Blue Bellies" cut a 60 mile swath of destruction through Georgia: burned buildings, tore up railroad rails, bayoneted family portraits, ran off with valuable "souveniers"
• one of Sherman's major purposes was to destroy supplies destined for Confederate army and to weaken the morale of the men at the front by waging war on their homes
• Sherman was a pioneer practitioner of "total war", his success attested by increasing numbers of Confederate desertions
• after seizing Savannah, Sherman's army moved into South Carolina, destruction worse, many Union soldeiers believed this state, the "hell-hole of secession" had provoked the war-->capital city, Columbia, burst into flames-->army continued north, deep in North Carolina by war's end

The Politics of War

• The election of 1864 fell right in the middle of the war. The Congressional Committee on the Conduct of War tried to keep Lincoln out of office becuase they resented the expanding power of the president.
• Lacking a leader due to the death of Stephen A. Douglas, the democratic party split into two seperate parties. The War Democrats who supported Lincoln and his office and the Peace Democrats who did not. At the extreme were copperheads who obstructed the war through attacks on Lincoln and against emancipation.
• Clement L. Vallandigham was part of the copperheads party. He spread the word that the war was cruel and wicked and that it should be ended. Lincoln banished him to Confederate lines claiming that if he liked them so much he should go join them.
• Vallandigham fled to Canada and ran for governor of Ohio there. He did not win. He later went back to his home state before the war ended but was not further prosecuted. He inspired Edward Everett Hale to write the book "A Man Without a Country".

The Election of 1864

• As the election approached, Lincolns authority depended on his retaining Republican support, while spiking the threat from the Peace Democrats and Copperheads. Republican party executed a clever maneuver. Joining with the War Democrats, it proclaimed itself to be the Union party. Thus the Republican party passed temporarily out of existence.
• Lincoln was accused of lacking force, of being over ready to compromise, of having not won the war, and shocking many sensitive souls by his ill timed and earthy jokes. Lincoln ran with Andrew Johnson, a loyal war democrat from Tennessee,who had been a small slave owner when the conflict began. He was placed in the Union party in order to attract War democrats and the voters in the border states.
• Lincoln was in Jeopardy of losing his presidency against McClelan but when Lincoln Triumphed, desertions from the South increased sharply. 

Grant Outlasts Lee

• President Lincoln chose General Grant to lead the assault on the Confederate capital of Richmond.
• Grant had 100,000 men and engaged Lee in a series of battles in the Wilderness of Virginia (Wilderness Campaign).
• On June 3, 1864, Grant ordered the frontal assault on Cold Harbor.
• Thousands of Union soldiers were killed within a matter of minutes, but Grant's strategy of losing two men and killing one Confederate worked.
• He captured Richmond and cornered Lee.
• On April 9, 1865, Lee was forced to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia (a significant portion of the Confederate army) at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, effectively ending the Civil War.

The Martyrdom of Lincoln

• Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865
• His death caused his good parts to shine through and he was seen even better.
• Southern supporters rejoiced due to Lincoln's will to keep at was, but later realized that it made tensions worse between North and South than if he was alive.
• The southeners recognized that lincoln'skindliness and moderation would have been the most effective shields between them and vindictive treatment by the Union.

The Aftermath of the Nightmare

• Over 600,000 men died in action or of disease, over a million were killed or seriously wounded
• Direct monetary costs totaled $15billion, does not include continuing expenses(pensions, interes on national debt), intangible costs cannot be calculated(dislocations, disunities, wasted energies, lowered ethics, blasted lives, bitter memories, burning hates)
• National gov't emerged unbroken, nullification and secession laid to rest
• Civil War=supreme test of American democracy, proved itself-->great English Reform Bill of 1867:Britain=true political democracy
• African-Americans in a position to claim their rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness
• Nation united politically again, danger of unleashing the slave power on Caribbean neighbors and transformation of area from Panama to Hudson Bay into an armed camp averted