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American civil war - Part 1
1.0 Introduction
The American Civil War was one of the earliest true industrial wars. Railroads, the telegraph, steamships, and mass-produced weapons were employed extensively. The mobilization of civilian factories, mines, shipyards, banks, transportation and food supplies all foreshadowed the World War I. It remains the deadliest war in American history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 7,50,000 soldiers and an undetermined number of civilian casualties. Historian John Huddleston estimates the death toll at ten percent of all Northern males 20-45 years old, and 30 percent of all Southern white males aged 18-40. That must have been a horrible period.
The war was fought from 1861 to 1865 in the United States after several Southern slave states declared their secession and formed the Confederate States of America.
2.0 Causes of the American civil war
The name Civil War is misleading because the war was not a class struggle, but a sectional combat having its roots in political, economic, social, and psychological elements so complex that historians still do not agree on its basic causes. It has been characterized, in the words of William H. Seward, as the "irrepressible conflict". In another judgment the Civil War was viewed as criminally stupid, an unnecessary bloodletting brought on by arrogant extremists and blundering politicians. Both views accept the fact that in 1861 there existed a situation that, rightly or wrongly, had come to be regarded as insoluble by peaceful means.
2.1 Unfair taxation
The history and economy of the North were very different from those of the South. Factories developed in the North, while large cotton plantations developed in the South. The Southern plantation owners relied on slave labour for economic success. Their crops were sold to cotton mills in England, and the ships returned with cheap manufactured goods produced in Europe. By the early 1800s, Northern factories were producing many of those same goods, and Northern politicians were able to pass heavy taxes on imported goods from Europe so that Southerners would have to buy goods from the North. These taxes angered Southerners.
2.2 States' rights
Southerners felt that the Federal government was passing laws, such as import taxes, that treated them unfairly. They believed that individual states had the right to "nullify", or overturn, any law the Federal government passed. They also believed that individual states had the right to leave the United States and form their own independent country. Most people in the North believed that the concepts of "nullification" and "states' rights" would make the United States a weaker country and were against these ideas.
2.3 Slavery
Meanwhile, in the North, many religious groups worked hard to end slavery in the United States. They were morally opposed to the idea that one person could "own" another. Abolitionists in the North wrote books, published newspapers spreading their ideas about slavery, and often assisted slaves to freedom when they ran away from their masters. Southerners believed that abolitionists were attacking their way of life and that the Federal government was not doing enough to protect their "property" from running away. Southerners were also concerned that new states were entering the Union that did not permit citizens to own slaves, because the more "free" states that entered the Union, the weaker Southerners' influence in the Federal government would become.
In the days of the American Revolution (1776 onwards) and of the adoption of the Constitution (1789 onwards), differences between North and South were dwarfed by their common interest in establishing a new nation. But sectionalism steadily grew stronger. During the 19th century the South remained almost completely agricultural, with an economy and a social order largely founded on slavery and the plantation system. These mutually dependent institutions produced the staples, especially cotton, from which the South derived its wealth. The North had its own great agricultural resources, was always more advanced commercially, and was also expanding industrially.
2.4 The Missouri Compromise and its repeal
Missouri applied for statehood on December 18, 1818. Shortly after, John Tallmadge of New York presented an amendment that would require that Missouri abolish slavery as a condition for admission as a state. From here the debate began. The South felt that the U.S. government had no power to restrict slavery, which was protected under the Constitution. The North felt that slavery was evil and should be restricted to the current slave states. In 1819, Maine put in its application for statehood. Then a compromise developed.
By 1820, this compromise had been realized as two bills were passed. The first made Maine the 23rd state. The second admitted Missouri as a slave state and set the parallel 36°30' as the dividing line between enslaved and free states as the country continued to expand. This compromise was successful. Although some people continued to argue over slavery, most people began to view the compromise as sacred.
In 1854 the Missouri Compromise was repealed as part of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. At the time, debates were occurring over where the transcontinental railroad would run. Illinois senator Stephen Douglas desired it to run through Chicago, and he needed Southern support. This would be no easy task. He achieved this by making a deal. He turned the Nebraska Territory into two states (Nebraska and Kansas). These states, despite being north of the 36°30' parallel, would be either slave or free based on the principle of popular sovereignty. With the passage of this bill the Missouri Compromise was effectively undone. Three years later, in 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled in the case Dred Scott v. Sanford, more famously known as the Dred Scott decision, that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, officially opening up all new states to slavery.
The repeal of the Missouri Compromise was more impactful, according to historian Robert Forbes, than the compromise itself. While it effectively settled the question of slavery from 1820 to 1854, its repeal began the sectarian conflict that eventually brought the nation into the Civil War.
2.5 The elections of 1860
The "wedges of separation" caused by slavery split large Protestant sects into Northern and Southern branches and dissolved the Whig party. Most Southern Whigs joined the Democratic party, one of the few remaining, if shaky, nationwide institutions. The new Republican party, heir to the Free-Soil party and to the Liberty party, was a strictly Northern phenomenon.
The crucial point was reached in the presidential election of 1860, in which the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, defeated three opponents - Stephen A. Douglas (Northern Democrat), John C. Breckinridge (Southern Democrat), and John Bell of the Constitutional Union party. Lincoln's victory was the signal for the secession of South Carolina (Dec. 20, 1860), and that state was followed out of the Union by six other states-Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.
Immediately the question of federal property in these states became important, especially the forts in the harbor of Charleston, S.C. The outgoing President, James Buchanan, a Northern Democrat who was either truckling to the Southern, proslavery wing of his party or sincerely attempting to avert war, pursued a vacillating course. At any rate the question of the forts was still unsettled when Lincoln was inaugurated, and meanwhile there had been several futile efforts to reunite the sections, notably the Crittenden Compromise offered by Sen. J. J. Crittenden. Lincoln resolved to hold Fort Sumter. The new Confederate government under President Jefferson Davis and South Carolina were equally determined to oust the Federals.
3.0 The Union (North) and the Confederacy (South)
On paper, the Union outweighed the Confederacy in almost every way. Nearly 21 million people lived in 23 Northern states. The South claimed just 9 million people - including 3.5 million slaves - in 11 confederate states. Despite the North's greater population, however, the South had an army almost equal in size during the first year of the war.
The North had an enormous industrial advantage as well. At the beginning of the war, the Confederacy had only one-ninth the industrial capacity of the Union. But that statistic was misleading. In 1860, the North manufactured 97 percent of the country's firearms, 96 percent of its railroad locomotives, 94 percent of its cloth, 93 percent of its pig iron, and over 90 percent of its boots and shoes. The North had twice the density of railroads per square mile. There was not even one rifleworks in the entire South. The South was at a severe disadvantage when it came to manufacturing, but the Confederacy managed to keep its guns firing by creating ammunition from melted-down bells from churches and town squares.
All of the principal ingredients of gunpowder were imported. Since the North controlled the navy, the seas were in the hands of the Union. A blockade could suffocate the South. Still, the Confederacy was not without resources and willpower.
The South could produce all the food it needed, though transporting it to soldiers and civilians was a major problem. The South also had a great nucleus of trained officers. Seven of the eight military colleges in the country were in the South.
The South also proved to be very resourceful. By the end of the war, it had established armories and foundries in several states. They built huge gunpowder mills and melted down thousands of church and plantation bells for bronze to build cannon.
The South's greatest strength lay in the fact that it was fighting on the defensive in its own territory. Familiar with the landscape, Southerners could harass Northern invaders.
The military and political objectives of the Union were much more difficult to accomplish. The Union had to invade, conquer, and occupy the South. It had to destroy the South's capacity and will to resist - a formidable challenge in any war.
"We had the poorest commissary arrangements, and all I could get for my men was salt and hard crackers. I made the convalescents shoot squirrels, ground hogs, pheasants, and turkeys with which to make soup for the men." - from the memoirs of Archibald Atkinson Jr., a Confederate surgeon
Southerners enjoyed the initial advantage of morale: The South was fighting to maintain its way of life, whereas the North was fighting to maintain a union. Slavery did not become a moral cause of the Union effort until Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
When the war began, many key questions were still unanswered. What if the slave states of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware had joined the Confederacy? What if Britain or France had come to the aid of the South? What if a few decisive early Confederate victories had turned Northern public opinion against the war? Indeed, the North looked much better on paper. But many factors undetermined at the outbreak of war could have tilted the balance toward a different outcome.
4.0 Major events of the war
4.1 The Gettysburg Campaign
The Battle of Gettysburg, fought over of the first three days of July in 1863, was one of the climactic events in American history. Confederate General Robert E. Lee's bold offensive into northern territory resulted in the epic clash of two great armies with perhaps 1,75,000 soldiers, tens of thousands of horses and mules, more than 600 cannons, and hundreds of supply wagons and ambulances, all of which had traveled from Virginia to south-central Pennsylvania. Here, the two armies suffered a combined total of more than 51,000 men killed, wounded, and missing. Lee's army then walked back to Virginia where it continued to fight for almost two more years.
Late on July 4, 1865 Lee began to retreat toward the Potomac River in the midst of a heavy rain. His cavalry guarded a wagon train of wounded men reputed to be seventeen miles in length. Meade pursued cautiously, for the heavy fighting had decimated his own army. A rain-swollen Potomac River halted Lee's retreat, but before Meade could attack, Lee's engineers built a pontoon bridge across the river that enabled the southern army to cross in safety on July 13.
Shortly after the fighting ended, the initial steps were taken in a process that would eventually lead to the transformation of the bloody and debris-strewn Pennsylvania countryside into a precious shrine and a symbolic center of American culture. Since then, generations of political leaders and veterans, scholars and creative artists, popular commentators, and casual visitors have looked to the Pennsylvania battlefield for answers to core questions about the American experience. While the meanings they have found at the hallowed ground have varied, Gettysburg remains one of the nation's primary symbols of heroic struggle and devotion to principle, of fratricidal conflict and eventual reunion, of national purpose and dynamic commitment to the ideal of equality.
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