The American Civil War, Part 1 | War is Glory

We, the People of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled do declare and ordain, and it is hereby declared and ordained, That the Ordinance adopted by us in Convention, on the twenty-third day of May in the year of our Lord One Thousand Seven hundred and eighty eight, whereby the Constitution of the United States of America was ratified, and also all Acts and parts of Acts of the General Assembly of this State, ratifying amendment of the said Constitution, are here by repealed; and that the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of "The United States of America," is hereby dissolved.

- South Carolina Declaration of Secession, December 24, 1860 -

The streets of Washington buzzed with the news. Now seven states had seceded from the Union, and the country stood on the brink. The White House saw streams of officials entering and leaving as the president summoned the Cabinet and members of Congress to find a solution to the country's plight. Most believed that his inaction the previous December had led to this moment, while others pointed to the results of the election as the breaking point. Regardless of who was to blame, something had to be done. Federal troops in Fort Sumter were in a precarious position and calling for aid. A ship had been dispatched to resupply them but could not land its cargo because of fire from rebel batteries. As he sat in his office on the second floor of the White House, the President of the United States knew that he could not reunite the country. His term would end at noon the following day. His successor, whose election had precipitated the great crisis of the Union, would now have to solve it.

The Civil War was the greatest turning point in American history. Its roots stretch back beyond the country's founding to the institution of African slavery in the early 18th century and to the contests of national versus state power that shaped its first decades as a union. That issue was paramount in the minds of the American people in 1860 as they cast their votes in the presidential election. Did the states have the right to pass laws inside their own borders, or could the federal government mandate certain policies or regulations on the country as a whole? The recent Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford had crystalized the issue when Chief Justice Roger Taney had ruled that African slaves were not, and could not, be citizens of the United States and, as a result, that Southern slaveowners who brought their "property" into a free state could not have it taken from them without due process of law. In effect, the Dred Scott decision had legalized slavery everywhere in the United States, overturning the will of the people in sixteen free states that made up almost 75% of the national population.

The election in 1860 was the first referendum on the national crisis after Dred Scott. Four candidates stood for the presidency in this contest. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois won the Democratic Party's nomination on a platform of preserving slavery where it existed and maintaining the balance of national and state power. Southern Democrats, known as "fire-eaters," who wanted to see an explicit statement supporting slavery in the party platform, broke with their Northern counterparts and ran their own nominee, Vice President John Breckenridge of Kentucky. The Constitutional Union Party, made up of Southerners who supported slavery but opposed secession, hoped to win enough votes to throw the election into the House of Representatives and chose former Senator John Bell of Tennessee as their candidate. And the newly-formed Republican Party had a choice of three frontrunners, none of whom could command a majority, so they settled for the Illinois lawyer and former one-term congressman Abraham Lincoln. The election showed how deeply-divided the United States had become in the previous decade. It was really two contests, as Senator Douglas was the only candidate whose name appeared on the ballot in all 33 states. Lincoln and Douglas squared off in the North, while Douglas competed against both Breckenridge and Bell in the South. The results were dramatic: Lincoln, a no-name insurgent candidate crushed the establishment Douglas, winning eighteen states and a clear majority in the Electoral College. Breckenridge came in second with eleven states, then Bell with three and Douglas only one. Southerners were outraged at Lincoln's election, as he had not been on the ballot in more than a thousand slaveholding counties. Petitions for secession arrived in every Southern state capital, and in December, South Carolina became the first state to leave the Union. Its soldiers fired on Fort Sumter after a months-long siege, the first shots in the American Civil War.

Like our episodes about the two world wars in Season One, it is impossible to cover the entirety of the Civil War in only thirty minutes—this week and next. Our hope in these episodes is to give you a brief overview of the conflict's key figures and issues rather than delving deeply into every battle. Hopefully what you hear in the next two weeks will inspire you to take an interest in Civil War history, and we would love to hear from you with suggestions for topics for future episodes!

The Early Campaigns

The Confederate States of America had several important advantages over the United States in this war. It could wage a defensive campaign and allow the enemy to "punch itself out," thinking that the North's population would tire of war long before their own did. A majority of commissioned officers in the US Army also resigned their posts and joined the Confederate Army, giving the rebels a broader base of military knowledge. Unfortunately for the South, it lagged far behind the North in industrial and food production, railroad mileage, naval power, and overall numbers. If it was to survive, it needed outside help from European nations like Great Britain or France—which was never a possibility, as neither state would have ever supported a country that still permitted chattel slavery.

On land, the Civil War saw armies battle each other in two major theaters, the Eastern and Western, divided by the Appalachian Mountains. During the war's first two years, the Confederates managed to hold off the Union very successfully in their many campaigns to capture Richmond, VA, the rebel capital. In the west, on the other hand, Union commanders were able to use rivers and railroads to outmaneuver and destroy several Confederate armies and set the table for ultimate victory. Over the entire military establishment sat the two presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, elected to the Confederate presidency in February 1861. Lincoln had some military experience, but Davis had more, so the Union leader relied heavily on the War Department for professional advice—which proved less than useful in the war's first two years. The Union's commanding general, Winfield Scott, was a veteran of almost fifty years' service and had fought in the War of 1812, various campaigns against Native Americans, and the Mexican War of 1846-48. Now 79 years old, he was unlikely to take the field and allowed his subordinates to run their departments and armies with little guidance from the War Department. The Confederates had no commanding general, and Davis gave his generals significant latitude as well; their greater experience than those on the other side contributed to their early successes.

Both sides believed that the war would be short in its first year, and that after a great battle somewhere between Washington and Richmond, a peace agreement would be reached and settle the issues of slavery and national versus state power. The Union moved first in July 1861, when the Army of the Potomac met the rebel Army of Northern Virginia at Bull Run Creek near the town of Manassas Junction. The blue-coated Union troops swept forward in a rush, scattering the Confederates and driving them up Henry House Hill, where a regiment of Virginia Military Institute cadets stood ready under the eyes of their commander, Colonel Thomas Jackson. As rebel soldiers fled the field in disorder, Jackson remained steady as shells burst around him. One of his fellow officers shouted to his men, "Look! There is Jackson, standing like a stone wall!" He was then shot and killed, but he gave an immortal name to the Virginian commander. The cadets held their ground and repelled the Union advance, sending them flying back down the hill. Rebel cavalrymen under Jeb Stuart then crashed into their flank, turning the retreat into a route. The First Battle of Bull Run was a clear Confederate victory, and Jackson's role in it meant that he was soon destined to rise through the ranks very quickly.

Across the mountains, the Union swept through Kentucky thanks to rapid action by General Ulysses S. Grant to capture several key forts on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. His Army of the Tennessee then advanced south, where it met a Confederate army under Albert Sydney Johnston, universally regarded by both sides as the best rebel general of the war. The Battle of Shiloh was far larger than Bull Run, in terms of both men in the field and losses on each side. The rebels launched a surprise attack late in the afternoon that overwhelmed the Union pickets, and victory seemed assured. Grant was away meeting with his superior, General Henry Halleck, and command on the field fell to his second, William Tecumseh Sherman (who is familiar to longtime listeners of this podcast). Sherman organized a defense and his men held the line, though at great cost. Johnston was killed during the fighting, and when the Union counterattacked at dawn the following day, the rebels retreated and gave up western Tennessee.

The loss of life in these first two engagements of the Civil War proved that this war would be longer and more costly than anything the American people had suffered before. Nearly five thousand men had been killed or wounded at Bull Run, more than any who had died in the United States' expansion across North America. Shiloh was far worse, taking the lives of nearly 24,000 men in just two days, more than twice as many as had died in the eight-year War of Independence. Larger armies, more advanced weaponry, and a desire on both sides to see the enemy utterly destroyed made the Civil War the deadliest conflict in American military history—even when counting just the Union or Confederate soldiers killed separately.

Southern Ascendancy

The war in the West soon devolved into one of maneuver with few major battles as Halleck's "team" of Grant and Sherman slowly moved down the Mississippi toward the great fortress-town of Vicksburg. Attention thus shifted back to the East, where a new Union commanding general, George McClellan, drafted a plan to invade Virginia and capture the Confederate capital and government. He landed the Army of the Potomac, which outnumbered the Army of Northern Virginia two-to-one, at the tip of the Yorktown Peninsula in July 1862. Unfortunately, the ever-cautious McClellan then delayed, giving the Confederate General Joseph Johnston time to prepare defenses around Richmond. When the Union finally attacked, the Confederates held them back in a desperate seven days of fighting—in which Johnston was wounded. Davis turned to his senior military advisor in Richmond, Robert E. Lee, and sent him into the field to take command. Lee worked with "Stonewall" Jackson and coordinated a brilliant campaign far to the north in the Shenandoah Valley that threatened Washington, DC, and Lincoln ordered McClellan to retreat. He then stripped the general of his command and turned to John Pope to lead the army in the East.

Pope failed to prepare for the inevitable attack by Lee and was badly beaten at a second battle at Bull Run Creek in August, and Lincoln recalled McClellan to recover the situation. With Lee's army now moving into Maryland—which was already beset by pro-secessionist sentiments—the Union needed a quick victory to drive Lee back and save the strategic situation. McClellan learned of his enemy's battle plans through a fortunate set of circumstances, but he failed to take advantage of this when the two armies met at Antietam Creek south of the village of Sharpsburg, MD. The Battle of Antietam was the bloodiest single day in American military history, and while the Union won the day, it was hardly covered in glory. More than 24,000 men were killed or wounded, and the Union's only success had been the capture of a bridge by the division of Ambrose Burnside late in the day. Lincoln was furious at McClellan for his failure and dismissed him a second time, promising never again to recall him to service. McClellan resented the president's decision for the rest of his days—and he turned his dismissal into a political weapon when he ran for president against Lincoln in 1864.

Burnside now took command of the Army of the Potomac in December 1862 with orders to again march on Richmond. He planned a quick march to the Rappahannock River at the town of Fredericksburg, VA, where he would catch Lee out of position away from Richmond. Halleck, now promoted to commanding general of the Union Army, disliked Burnside's plan and delayed sending him the pontoon bridges necessary to cross the river for three weeks. By the time they arrived, Lee was entrenched above the heights of Fredericksburg, but Burnside attacked nonetheless. Union casualties at Fredericksburg were astonishing, twelve thousand to only five thousand rebels thanks to the high ground and a low stone wall that protected the Confederates from enemy fire. The defeat broke Burnside's spirit, and he was replaced by Joseph Hooker, the Army of the Potomac's fifth commander in only eighteen months.

It was at this point that Lee and Jackson believed they could win the war with a final assault on the Union and then a triumphant march on Washington. Hooker had moved upriver to the town of Chancellorsville in a dense forest known simply as "the Wilderness." Jackson devised a brilliant but risky attack that involved splitting the Army of Northern Virginia into two wings and sending each to attack Hooker's troops on both flanks. The attack in late April went off well, but it began too late in the day for Jackson's men to finish off their Union foes. As darkness fell, the brave general moved forward with his aides between the lines, hoping to find a path through the forest in which to hit the enemy the next morning. Then, shots rang out, and Jackson was hit. He had been fired on by his own men, who had mistaken the group for a Union patrol. He survived the wounds but lost his left arm, but sadly for the Confederate cause, he developed pneumonia and died a week after the Battle of Chancellorsville. General Lee commented on hearing of his best commander's death, "General Jackson lost his left arm, and now I have lost my right." However, he intended to press forward despite the loss and planned a new invasion of the North, this time aimed at southern Pennsylvania.

The Abolition of Slavery

For the most part, politics as usual in Washington ended when the Southern Democrats withdrew from Congress during "Secession Winter." The Republicans had an overwhelming majority in both houses and passed all legislation necessary to support the army and win the war. However, there was opposition to the war and Lincoln's near-dictatorial use of executive power—for example when he suspended free speech and legal protections for slavery supporters in Maryland. Many opponents were abolitionists, who thought that the administration was not doing enough to end slavery in the conquered Southern lands, and Lincoln needed to get them off his back. He drafted an executive order in early 1862 that would abolish slavery in all lands conquered by the Union after its publication but waited for a victory on the battlefield before he issued it. When McClellan "won" at Antietam, the president knew the time had come. The Emancipation Proclamation declared that all slaves captured by the Union after January 1, 1863, would be immediately freed; it did not emancipate those poor souls living in the slaveholding border states that had not seceded, nor did it free anyone who lived in areas already under Union occupation. However, it succeeded in bringing the abolitionists over to the cause of war, and recruitment numbers swelled as the war reached its turning points in the summer of 1863.

Before becoming president, Abraham Lincoln had made comments that were, in some people's eyes, favorable toward slavery, such as stating that he did not believe that Africans were equal to whites in the eyes of God. But as the war progressed and Lincoln heard stories of slavery's horrors and met abolitionists like Frederick Douglass who shared their experiences with him, he grew more convinced that this war should end with the final abolition of slavery. To jump ahead in the narrative, as victory grew near in 1864, Republicans in Congress proposed a Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution that would end the practice of slavery or involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crimes. Abolitionist generals like Sherman also aided in former slaves' transition to freedom by giving them the property that had been "requisitioned" from their masters. These moves by the Army generated serious controversy—that I hope Joe will bring up in our discussion—but they set the table for the eventual ending of slavery. The Senate passed the Thirteenth Amendment in April 1864 and the House of Representatives (after serious political wrangling on Lincoln's part) in January 1865. It was then ratified by the required number of states in December of that year. While the war did not begin solely on the issue of slavery, its end corresponded with the ending of the greatest shame in all of American history.