American civil war (1861-5), the most important event in the history of the USA. It resulted from a fundamental disagreement between two sections, North and South, about the place of chattel slavery in the Union. Without the slavery question there would have been no war. The southern emphasis on ‘states rights’ was essentially a coded phrase for the defence of slavery. By the 1840s a pro-slavery ideology had grown up in the Deep South which argued that slavery was a positive good and by 1860 this had become popular throughout the entire South and imbued it with a strong feeling that the slave states enjoyed a unique culture. Increasing numbers of secessionists claimed that this culture could only be protected by gaining independence. The war itself was detonated by the refusal of the slave states to accept the decision of the 1860 presidential election, which had seen the first Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, sweep the northern states but did not gain a single electoral vote in the South. From December 1860-February 1861 seven states in the Deep South passed ordinances of secession, occupied federal installations, and called out their militias. These states set up their own Confederacy with a pro-slavery constitution headed by a Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, and this new government located its capital initially at Montgomery, Alabama. The rebel government was eager to remove the two remaining federal outposts on their territory, at Pensacola in Florida and at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour. After a stand-off lasting four months, the Confederacy bombarded the latter on 12-13 April 1861.

President Lincoln responded by issuing a proclamation calling for 75, 000 volunteers for three months to suppress a rebellion against federal authority. Virtually all participants believed that the conflict would be short. Perhaps it would have been if the seceded states had remained only seven in number; however, four important states of the Upper South, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas, seceded rather than co-operate in the ‘coercion’ of their sister slave states. They added not only to the Confederacy's population and territory but also to its sparse industrial resources. However, geography placed Virginia and Tennessee especially in the very front line should military operations escalate. So large was the Confederacy that a number of influential figures doubted whether it could be physically occupied and placed their hopes in the naval blockade which was announced on 19 April. Certainly, the South's geographical advantages added to a prevailing sense of overconfidence that independence could be achieved easily.

A widespread belief in a short war was buttressed in the North by an awareness of a great disparity in resources. The total population of the USA in 1860 was 31, 443, 321. Of these the population of the southern states was 8, 726, 644 (of whom 3, 953, 760 were slaves). The Border States (Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri) had a population of 3, 588, 729. Throughout 1861-2 ensuring the loyalty of the Border States remained a top priority for the Lincoln administration. Should secession be limited to eleven states then the northern states could mobilize 4 million fighting men to the Confederacy's 1, 100, 000. The industrial disparity was even greater. The states of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania alone produced more manufactured goods than the entire Confederacy. The South could produce sufficient food to feed itself but lacked the means to transport it. In 1860 only 9, 000 miles (14, 481 km) of the American total of 31, 000 miles (49, 879 km) of railway track could be found in the South, and southern engineers had completed only nine of the 470 locomotives built before 1860. Yet a material disparity in itself does not guarantee victory and Lincoln's main problem was in mobilizing and organizing the great resources available to him for waging war.

The secession crisis had generated the largest arms race yet seen in North America. In the North the 75, 000 volunteers were soon supplemented, and by 1 July 1861 300, 000 men had been raised, the majority for three years. Jefferson Davis had succeeded in raising 200, 000 Confederate volunteers by August 1861. These hosts on both sides were difficult to command. The men believed that they were civilians in uniform and enjoyed all their previous rights; they were not deferential to their officers, who were often elected. Many incompetents had to be weeded out by commissions boards over the next year. Important politicians, such as John C. Frémont, Benjamin F. Butler, and Nathaniel P. Banks, were awarded generals' commissions. Consequently, armies on both sides were subject to political influences, but especially those Union forces that were encamped near Washington, known by the summer as the Army of the Potomac, because the process of congressional and presidential elections continued unabated despite the war.

Political pressure helped shape the first campaign. The elderly general-in-chief, Winfield Scott preferred to launch a well-prepared campaign in the Mississippi basin relying on the economic strangulation of the South. This concept was strategically sensible but was unacceptable to public opinion because it would work slowly. The press dubbed it the ‘Anaconda Plan’. The power of the press and propaganda was potent throughout the conflict. In the spring of 1861 the Confederacy decided to move its capital to Richmond, Virginia, a mere 100 miles (161 km) from Washington. A clamour developed that the federal army should move ‘on to Richmond’. The result was an advance towards Centreville and a Confederate defensive victory at first Bull Run. However, Confederate forces were disorganized by their success and could not exploit it. McClellan was appointed to command the Army of the Potomac and began an energetic programme of consolidation, reorganization, and training. In November he replaced Scott as general-in-chief and became overburdened by his dual role. The first lull in the eastern theatre ensued, but this brought immense political dissatisfaction with the war's conduct and culminated in the creation of the Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War on 20 December 1861. This body was highly critical of McClellan's conciliatory policy, which stressed that the war aimed at the restoration of the Union and not the destruction of slavery.

The American civil war: The Union and the Confederacy, 1861.
(Click to enlarge)

Despite rising discontent with ‘champagne and oysters on the Potomac’—a sarcastic reference to McClellan's penchant for elaborate reviews of his troops, the federal government made rapid progress in suppressing the Confederacy by the spring of 1862. Indeed by March of that year it looked as if the optimistic view that the civil war would be short was the right one. A series of successful amphibious operations on the coastal littoral of the Carolinas was followed by the seizure of New Orleans (the greatest city in the Confederacy) on 24-5 April 1862. An early Confederate victory at Wilson's Creek, Missouri, in August 1861 was followed by crushing Union victory at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, 6-8 March 1862 which made incursions into the south-west possible. In Tennessee, Grant seized Forts Henry and Donelson, which led to the fall of Nashville on 25 February 1862. The Confederate forces, commanded by Albert Sidney Johnston, launched a counterstroke and took Union troops by surprise at Shiloh on 6 April, Grant recovered, parried the Confederate blows, and then threw in a counter-attack in co-operation with Don Carlos Buell's Army of the Ohio. This success enabled the overall commander in the west, Halleck, to concentrate 130, 000 men and occupy Memphis.

But appearances were deceptive and the war was actually taking the form that would prevail for a further three years. Although military operations took place in the areas west of the Mississippi, and in Arkansas, there were three central theatres of operations: first, the west centred in western Tennessee and Mississippi, where the Union attempted to complete its stranglehold of the Mississippi basin; second, eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, focused around the railway junction of Chattanooga; and third, northern Virginia between the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers. As strategic movement over such huge distances was dependent on the railway, railway junctions assumed an enormous importance in all three theatres. The eastern theatre was the most sensitive politically and also bore more on the attention of the great European powers. Great Britain and France sympathized with the Confederacy, the former having awarded the Confederacy belligerent rights in 1861; France was supporting a puppet government in Mexico; but neither would enter the war, thus transforming its character, until the Confederacy could demonstrate that it could win its independence by its own exertions; and that meant winning a battle on northern soil. By the spring of 1862 Confederate armies had given scant evidence that they were capable of such efforts.


The American civil war: principal campaigns, 1861-5.
(Click to enlarge)

In April 1862 McClellan set out on his ‘grand campaign’ designed to seal the Confederacy's doom by an amphibious operation up the peninsula between the James and York rivers, occupying Yorktown and the Confederate capital at Richmond. He was relieved of his duties as general-in-chief and replaced by Halleck. Lincoln had disliked McClellan's plan, preferring a direct advance towards Manassas Junction and thence on Richmond from the north. He ordered that a corps be retained at Fredericksburg to cover Washington. But McClellan advanced so cautiously that he permitted a Confederate concentration before the city. An initial Confederate counterstroke at Seven Pines (31 May-1 June) was bungled and the Confederate commander Johnston was severely wounded. In a fateful decision Davis replaced him with Lee, who had meanwhile encouraged Jackson to carry out his campaign in the Shenandoah which distracted Lincoln's attention; he was then ordered to join Lee's forces before Richmond and help turn McClellan's right. In a brilliantly conceived operation (and despite several tactical repulses) Lee's Army of Northern Virginia in the Seven Days battles succeeded in driving McClellan back to Harrison's Landing, shattering his nerves and political prestige. However, Lee failed to secure his ultimate objective, the destruction of the Army of the Potomac.

Thereupon Lee moved to tighten his hold on the initiative, defeated the Army of Virginia at second Bull Run and then crossed over into Maryland, determined to seek an outright Confederate victory at the earliest opportunity. McClellan's army had been evacuated from the peninsula and covered Washington. One of Lee's orders detailing the dispersal of his army was found by Union troops and enabled McClellan to attack him at Antietam before his concentration was complete. Yet McClellan's attack was clumsy and poorly co-ordinated; Lee was able to parry his blows. Nonetheless, he was forced to evacuate Maryland, and this meagre strategic success enabled Lincoln to issue the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on 22 September. His move widened the social dimension of the war and freed all slaves currently held in Confederate territory; the war was no longer solely for the Union as it was. The Maryland adventure, in any case, was only one wing of a Confederate counter-offensive. Bragg, the Confederate commander in Tennessee, moved into Kentucky, but on 8 October Don Carlos Buell caught up with him at Perryville, and repulsed his attacks; only one-third of the Union army was engaged but Bragg escaped through the Cumberland Gap. A fleeting opportunity to gain foreign intervention was allowed to slip through Confederate fingers.

The civil war now entered a period of stalemate, and increasingly the Union resorted to an attritional strategy to bring the Confederacy down. McClellan, the chief spokesman for limited war, was removed on 8 November. But Lincoln's chief problem was in finding a general who could match Lee's operational skills and put into practice a grim strategy that would wear away the Confederacy's lighter, more mobile armies which excelled at manoeuvre. Union defeats at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville almost brought Lincoln's administration to its knees. A defensive success at Murfreesboro (Stone's River, 31 December 1862-2 January 1863) in central Tennessee seemed a greater triumph than it actually was. It was also becoming clear that battles could no longer be won in a single day and demanded nerve and stamina not only from the fighting troops but from the commanders as well.

The spring of 1863 placed the Confederacy uncomfortably on the horns of a strategic dilemma. Grant was inching closer to the crucial Mississippi communications centre at Vicksburg. Yet the brilliant victory at Chancellorsville offered an opportunity to renew the campaign north of the Potomac. Davis had already sent a recuperated Johnston to take charge of the west, but he was cautious and acted without confidence. Lee's view prevailed and he invaded Pennsylvania. Lacking cavalry while Stuart indulged in a cavalry raid that skirted Washington, Lee allowed himself to be drawn into the battle of Gettysburg (1-3 July 1863), where he was defeated. As for operations in the west, Grant slipped south of Vicksburg and crossed to the east bank of the Mississippi river. In an object lesson in calculated audacity, he advanced towards Jackson, Mississippi, and then turned west, defeating the Confederates at Champion's Hill before investing Vicksburg on 19 May. The city surrendered on 4 July 1863 thus cutting off the Confederate Trans-Mississippi from Richmond and permitting untrammelled Union passage of the Mississippi river. A third success for Union arms was recorded when William S. Rosecrans occupied most of east Tennessee in August 1863 in a series of sweeping turning movements that drove Bragg back into Georgia with his army intact.

The Union needed to deliver a knockout blow. Despite its successes, Confederate armies still remained in the field, Richmond was inviolate, and the secessionist heartland in the Deep South remained untouched. The capacity of the Confederacy to strike back was revealed in the autumn of 1863 when Bragg defeated Rosecrans's Army of the Cumberland at Chickamauga (19-20 September) and moved to besiege Chattanooga. His opportunity was thrown away by what amounted to a virtual mutiny of the general officers of the Confederate Army of Tennessee, most of whom called for Bragg to be dismissed. This unseemly fracas required the presence of Jefferson Davis to sort out. In the meantime, Grant was given command at Chattanooga, and first concentrated overwhelming Union forces before defeating the Confederates who occupied the high ground south and east of the town. This success led to his promotion (as lieutenant general) to general-in-chief of the Union armies, and he moved to Washington to take command in March 1864.

Although it had been tried before, Grant was determined to unleash a simultaneous concentric advance on all fronts that would prevent a Confederate concentration at key points. However, he would be frustrated because the terrain favoured the tactical defence in the two major theatres, Virginia and Georgia, and the war had demonstrated that the defensive was growing in potency. The civil war was an infantryman's war. Soldiers were equipped with rifled muskets which fired the Minié bullet to a range of about 1, 000 yards (914 metres) ; this was a significant improvement on the Napoleonic musket. Consequently, soldiers of both sides increasingly resorted to entrenchments by 1863; but as the rifle-musket still had to be fired standing up in volleys, these consisted of shallow rifle pits, perhaps 3-4 feet (0.9-1.2 metres) deep with a breastwork several feet high placed on top of this. The role of cavalry was reduced to that of intelligence gathering and screening, and as a result, often fought its own separate, mounted engagements away from the main battlefield. Artillery was experiencing a transitional period; it still had to be ‘pointed’ by direct fire at the enemy. Although devastating against attacking infantry, it as yet lacked explosive power to destroy even shallow entrenchments. In short, Grant's dynamic strategy faced severe tactical obstacles, but he was remorseless in pursuit of his objective.

The 1864 campaign consisted of two attritional thrusts on geographical objectives, Atlanta and Richmond. The two overall Union commanders, Grant and Sherman, sought to destroy the two Confederate armies in front of them before either could fall back into Richmond or Atlanta's defences. The main difference between them was that Lee fought Grant for the initiative whereas Joseph E. Johnston did not contest this with Sherman. The result in Virginia, where two well-matched adversaries were determined to fight it out, was a ferocious series of great attritional battles, Wilderness (4-6 May), Spotsylvania (8-21 May), followed by the shattering Union repulse at Cold Harbor on 3 June. The Confederates inflicted casualties equal to their own strength, but Grant recovered from this setback to cross the James river and on 15 June advance on Petersburg, Richmond's communications centre on the Appomattox river. Lee arrived in the nick of time but only ensured that the siege that he had always feared was the result of his tenacious defence. Sherman, who now commanded the Military Division of the West, was determined to apply pressure on Johnston so that he could not send reinforcements to aid Lee. The strategic co-ordination of Union armies over such great distances was facilitated by the use of the telegraph. Outflanking his opponent's position on the Rocky Face Ridge, Sherman almost cut the Army of Tennessee off from its communications. Johnston considered launching a counter-attack at Cassville but refrained, and withdrew back through the Allatoona Pass behind the Etowah river. Sherman moved into the woods around his left, and was blocked at New Hope Church. Sherman tried to force the Confederate lines at Kennesaw Mountain but was repulsed on 27 June with 3, 000 casualties. Yet Sherman inched towards Atlanta and by 9 July was only 4 miles (6.4 km) from its centre. Johnston was replaced by the impulsive Hood. He launched a series of disastrous counter-attacks, which failed to prevent Sherman from extending his tentacles south of Atlanta, and the city was finally evacuated on 1 September 1864. This tremendous success guaranteed Lincoln's re-election in the presidential contest in November, and offered Sherman the chance to cut the Confederacy in two by marching towards the Atlantic coast.

The event which made this possible was the rash decision by Hood to attack towards Chattanooga, thus evacuating the critical theatre of operations. Sherman was eventually able to advance towards Savannah with impunity. Neither Grant nor Lincoln was keen on this alternative, but Sherman reassured them by sending George H. Thomas and the Army of the Cumberland to Nashville to defend his rear. There on 15-16 December 1864 Thomas crushed Hood's army. Sherman's prime targets in his famous marches were Confederate war-making resources and morale. Property rather than the people themselves were the victims of his depredations but his attacks were aimed just as much at the civil will as the morale of Confederate soldiers. He set about demonstrating that the Confederacy was an ‘empty shell’. In January 1865 he moved through South Carolina and thence into North Carolina, determined to link up with Grant.

The final Confederate collapse was precipitate. A much enfeebled Army of Northern Virginia was besieged in Richmond. Lee's efforts the previous summer to distract attention by sending a small force under Jubal A. Early up the Shenandoah valley towards Washington brought an awful retribution on this beautiful rural area. Confederate troops were driven back and the new Union commander Sheridan, was ordered by Grant to destroy all provisions and crops, a duty which he executed with great zeal. Denied the foodstuffs of the Shenandoah, the fall of Richmond was just a matter of time. Sheridan rejoined Grant and shattered Lee's right flank at Five Forks (31 March 1865), causing the evacuation of Richmond on 1-2 April. Grant pursued the remnants of the Confederate army and forced their capitulation at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865. Remaining Confederate troops in North Carolina surrendered to Sherman at Durham Station on 26 April, although small detachments in the Trans-Mississippi did not surrender until May.

The civil war had cost 620, 000 American soldiers' lives (360, 000 Union and 260, 000 Confederate), although two-thirds of these were victims of disease not bullets. The economic damage inflicted on the South was enormous. Total southern capital, heavily invested in now-demonetized slaves, shrank by 46 per cent, whereas northern capital grew by 50 per cent. In 1860 the slave states contained 30 per cent of the total wealth of the USA, by 1870 this figure had slumped to 12 per cent. The war's political significance was enormous: the issue of secession was dealt with once and for all; slavery was abolished; and the power of the federal government was greatly increased. Its military significance was no less momentous. The civil war pointed to the great importance in modern war of organization, especially in the related spheres of logistics, communications, and transportation. Further, as the North was dragged into an attritional conflict due to early disappointments, so the deployment of numbers and quantities of equipment became more important than operational skill. Consequently, victory in the civil war (as in the two world wars of the twentieth century) went to the side with the largest population, the most durable financial system, and the greatest industrial capacity. But if Lincoln had been less able to unite the North, and Davis more successful in rallying the South, it could have been otherwise.

Bibliography

• Grant, Susan-Mary, and Reid, Brian Holden (eds.), The American Civil War (London, 2000).
• Hattaway, Herman, and Jones, Archer, How the North Won (Urbana, Ill., 1983).
• McPherson, James M., The Battle Cry of Freedom (New York, 1998).
• Parish, Peter J., The American Civil War (London, 1975).
• Reid, Brian Holden, The Origins of the American Civil War (London, 1996)

— Brian Holden Reid

(1861 – 65)

Causes
Military and Diplomatic Course
Domestic Course
Postwar Impact
Changing Interpretations

Constitutional history of the Civil War period underscores the principal characteristics of the Supreme Court as a coordinate branch of government in the context of nineteenth‐century political culture. As the war signaled the end of three decades of Democratic rule and the start of a long period of Republican dominance, so it marked the transition from the state sovereignty doctrines of the Taney Court to the constitutional nationalism of the Chase Court. The process of change that accelerated these political and jurisprudential trends was dramatically illustrated in the withdrawal from the federal government of southern members of Congress and the resignation from the Supreme Court of Justice John A. Campbell of Alabama.

Changes in the membership of the Supreme Court at the start of the Civil War permitted the effects of the political realignment that put Abraham Lincoln in the White House to be registered in constitutional law more rapidly than is usually the case following critical elections in American political history. Problems arising from the war encouraged the Court to refrain from judicial activist policy making at the expense of the political branches. Military exigencies caused most of the major constitutional questions that arose to be resolved by the executive and Congress and induced in the justices a more deferential attitude toward political officers than might otherwise have prevailed (see War).

Three vacancies existed on the Supreme Court at the start of President Abraham Lincoln's administration. Justice Peter V. Daniel died in 1860 and President James Buchanan's nomination of a Democratic successor was blocked by Republicans in the Senate in February 1861. Justice John McLean died on 4 April 1861, and on 25 April Justice Campbell resigned. Lincoln appointed Noah H. Swayne, an Ohio Republican, in January 1862, Republican Samuel F. Miller of Iowa in July, and Illinois Republican David Davis, a state judge, in October. When Congress created a tenth judicial circuit (thereby increasing the size of the Court to ten justices) in 1863, Lincoln named Stephen J. Field of California, a Democrat and ardent Unionist, to the high bench. These appointments produced a more politically balanced Court, consisting of six antebellum Democrats (Samuel Nelson, Nathan Clifford, James M. Wayne, Robert C. Grier, John Catron, and Roger B. Taney), and four wartime appointees sympathetic to the Republican administration. The composition of the Court remained stable until Chief Justice Taney died in October 1864 and was replaced by Salmon P. Chase, secretary of the treasury under Lincoln.

The war raised constitutional questions that were inappropriate for judicial resolution because of their military and political nature. Confiscation, emancipation, taxation and fiscal policy, conscription, and treason were among these issues. Yet the judiciary's traditional concern for individual liberty and property rights provided the basis for limited Supreme Court involvement in matters relating to internal security policy and to the politically sensitive question of the legal nature of the war.

President Lincoln's suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus in April 1861 presented an issue of government infringement of civil liberties that could reasonably be brought before the judiciary. The executive and Congress provided for the nation's internal security without benefit of any Supreme Court opinion on the constitutionality of the measures adopted. Before the government's policy was put in place, however, Chief Justice Taney attempted to control the actions of the executive branch by invalidating Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Taney questioned the president's action in Ex parte Merryman in May 1861.

John Merryman was a pro‐Confederate Maryland political leader who was arrested under authority of Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus in May 1861 for participating in the destruction of railroad bridges. He petitioned Chief Justice Taney, presiding judge of the circuit court at Baltimore, for a writ of habeas corpus. Taney issued the writ, but the military commander to whom it was addressed refused to produce Merryman. The chief justice then issued a writ of attachment ordering the military commander to be apprehended. He was again rebuffed. Holding a session at chambers as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (rather than presiding over a session of the circuit court), Taney on 28 May 1861 declared Merryman entitled to his freedom. In an unusual move, he filed an opinion condemning Merryman's arrest as an arbitrary and illegal denial of civil liberty (see Military Trials and Martial Law).

Taney stated that military detention of civilians like Merryman was unconstitutional because only Congress had authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. He based this conclusion on the fact that the provision authorizing suspension of the writ appears in Article I of the Constitution, dealing with the powers of the legislative branch. In a broader constitutional analysis, Taney described the president as a mere administrative officer charged with faithful enforcement of the laws. According to the chief justice, this amounted to a constitutional duty not to execute the laws on the president's own authority or initiative, but rather to act in support of the judicial authority by executing the laws “as they are expounded and adjudged by the co‐ordinate branch of the government, to which that duty is assigned by the Constitution.” Taney sent a copy of his opinion to Lincoln, who in his 4 July 1861 message to Congress justified his action suspending the writ of habeas corpus on the basis of his constitutional oath to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. The president reasoned further that the Constitution did not expressly state who can order suspension of the writ and that the framers did not intend that in an emergency no action should be taken to protect the public safety by suspending habeas corpus until Congress could be assembled. Lincoln prevailed in the contest with Taney.

The Supreme Court at other times deferred to the government's internal security policy, even when executive action exceeded habeas corpus suspension, as in Ex parte Vallandigham in 1864. In April 1863, General Ambrose Burnside issued an order prohibiting in the area of his command any declarations of sympathy for the enemy. He also declared that persons who helped the enemy would be tried under military authority. Former Democratic representative Clement L. Vallandigham condemned the order and urged resistance to it. He was arrested, tried, and convicted by a military commission. Burnside imposed a prison sentence, which President Lincoln commuted into banishment beyond Confederate lines. Removing to Canada, Vallandigham petitioned a federal circuit court in Ohio for a writ of habeas corpus, but since he was no longer in custody, no basis existed for Supreme Court review of the lower court's denial of the petition. Vallandigham then applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari to review directly the decision of the military commission.

With Chief Justice Taney not participating in the case, the Court denied the petition for certiorari. Justice Wayne's opinion for a unanimous Court asserted that the Court lacked jurisdiction under the Judiciary Act of 1789 because a military commission was not a court whose decisions could be reviewed by the Supreme Court. He noted that the Constitution defined the original jurisdiction of the Court in a way that precluded review of the case. Although the disposition of the case was favorable to the government, the Court did not reach the issue of the constitutionality of military trial of civilians in circumstances like those surrounding the arrest of Vallandigham.

While generally refraining from decisions having an impact on military or war‐related policies, the Supreme Court handed down a major decision determining the legal nature of the conflict. This question was presented in the Prize Cases (1863), where the issue was the legality of the navy's capture of ships bound for Confederate ports under the blockade ordered by President Lincoln in April 1861. If a state of war recognized by international law existed, the blockade was legal and the captures legitimate. If a war did not exist when the executive imposed the blockade, the captures were illegal. In March 1863, the Supreme Court decided 5 to 4 that the blockade was legal. According to Justice Grier's majority opinion, a state of war existed in April 1861 that justified resort to a blockade. Grier wrote that although the conflict began as an insurrection against the federal government and without a formal declaration, it was nonetheless a war—a civil war. He observed that the Civil War was a fact of which the Supreme Court was bound to take notice. Turning to the Constitution, he pointed out that although neither Congress nor the executive could declare war on a state, the president was authorized by statutes of 1795 and 1807 to call out the militia and use military force to suppress insurrection against the United States. Grier stated that it was for the president as commander in chief to decide whether in suppressing an insurrection it was justifiable to treat the opponents as belligerents (see Presidential Emergency Powers). He furthermore contended that the Supreme Court must be governed by the president's decision. Grier concluded that the proclamation of the blockade was evidence that a state of war existed.

The Prize Cases recognized broad executive power to respond to military attack on the United States. Of more immediate practical import was the Court's holding that persons in the seceded states could be treated both as rebels and enemies, or as a belligerent party. The Court did not, however, acknowledge or confer executive authority unilaterally to declare and carry on a war indefinitely without legislative approval.

Justice Nelson wrote a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Clifford, Catron, and Taney. Nelson argued that war did not exist when Lincoln ordered the blockade because Congress had not exercised its exclusive power to declare war. He said that whether war existed was a legal question unaffected by material facts and realities. When Congress on 13 July 1861 authorized the executive to declare the existence of a state of insurrection, war began and the blockade was legal. Before that date the conduct of hostilities by the United States was a “personal war” of President Lincoln.

During the Civil War the Supreme Court decided many nonmilitary questions. California land disputes arising out of Mexican rule were prominent on its docket, as were cases dealing with contracts, partnership, bankruptcy, usury, patent rights, and other commercial matters. A few cases illustrated continuity with earlier trends in constitutional law despite changes in the Court's membership.

In Gelpcke v. Dubuque (1864), the Court overruled an Iowa supreme court decision holding that a city's nonpayment of municipal bonds, issued for a railroad that was never built, was constitutional under the state constitution. Although not expressly stated, the effective basis of the Court's decision seemed to be the Contract Clause of the Constitution. The case also may have illustrated the Court's belief that it could shape a federal common law of commerce, as in Swift v. Tyson (1842).

The Supreme Court also ruled against state power in People ex rel. Bank of Commerce v. Commissioner of Taxes (1863). In this case the Court considered a New York tax on bank stock, including federal government securities that were otherwise exempt from state taxation. Although Congress in 1862 passed an act declaring stocks, bonds, and other U.S. securities exempt from state taxes, the Court struck down the state tax on constitutional grounds. Yet the Court declined to decide the constitutionality of the Legal Tender Act of 1862. In Roosevelt v. Meyer (1863), it inexplicably held that it lacked jurisdiction to review a New York state court ruling favorable to the Legal Tender Act. It is not clear whether this decision, which was overruled in 1872, reflected unwillingness to tackle the controversial issue of national currency policy or was instead a flawed legal analysis of the Judiciary Act of 1780. (See Legal Tender Cases.)

The December 1864 term of the Supreme Court marked the end of the Taney era. While Congress debated and rejected a proposal to place a marble bust of the late Chief Justice Taney in the Supreme Court room in the Capitol, the Court under Chief Justice Chase disposed of a series of cases involving the illegal slave trade. In February 1865, John S. Rock was sworn in as the first African‐American attorney to be admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court. This event signified the emergence of racial equality as a major constitutional issue in the judicial history of the Reconstruction period that would soon engage the Court's attention.

See also History of the Court: Establishment of the Union.

Bibliography

• David P. Currie, The Constitution in the Supreme Court: The First Hundred Years 1789–1888 (1985).
• David M. Silver, Lincoln's Supreme Court (1956).
• Carl B. Swisher, History of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 5, The Taney Period 1836–64 (1974).
• Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United States History, 2 vols (1926)

— Herman Belz

(April 1861- April 1865) costing more than 600, 000 American lives, the Civil War consolidated the Revolutionary War of 1776 by ensuring that the United States would remain a single republic rather than a collection of potentially independent states. The Civil War brought enormous changes to the United States, most notably in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, which abolished slavery and gave citizenship to African Americans. The war also made use of several military innovations. Longer-range and more destructive ammunition, primarily the minié rifle bullet, made casualty rates much higher than in previous wars. The Civil War also was the first to make use of the draft and ironclad warships, and extensive use of rail transport and military telegraph lines, and it was first to be widely documented by photographers. Prompted by sectional disputes between slaveholding southern states and northern states, the Civil War began following the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, whose party was committed to free labor ideology. Rather than accepting Lincoln's leadership, seven southern states, led by South Carolina and comprising Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas elected to secede from the Union and form the Confederate States of America (CSA) in February 1861. The Confederacy elected Mexican War (1846-48) hero and former Secretary of War Jefferson Davis as their president, and began organizing an independent government modeled on the U.S. Constitution, with caveats guaranteeing slavery. On April 12, the Confederacy began fighting to assert its independence when Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina harbor. Soon after, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia joined the Confederacy.

Union commander Gen. Winfield Scott's strategic response was to blockade and encircle the Confederacy in a strategy dubbed the Anaconda Plan. Nevertheless, the first two years of fighting favored Confederate armies. Despite the superiority in men and supplies held by the Union's Army of the Potomac, the Army of Northern Virginia led by Robert E. Lee won or dramatically stopped U.S. armies in a series of battles fought in northern Virginia and Maryland. Notable among these were the 1861 First Battle of Bull Run, in which southern armies won the war's first major contest; a series of dramatic raids conducted in the Shenandoah Valley by troops under Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson; the Seven Days' Battle (1862), in which Lee, at high cost, drove Union general George B. McClellan back from the Confederate capital at Richmond; the 1862 Second Battle of Bull Run, in which Lee virtually crushed Union armies fighting under John Pope; Antietam, that same year, where McClellan failed to capitalize on a costly victory that stopped Lee's advance into the heart of Maryland; and Fredericksburg (also 1862), which witnessed well-defended Confederates cutting down 13, 000 Union troops with only 5, 000 losses of their own.

While Lee stymied Union armies in the East, federal forces under Ulysses S. Grant chipped away at the South's western defenses. In February 1862 Grant launched joint army-navy attacks that took Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in Kentucky and Tennessee, piercing the center of the Confederacy's western defenses. As Union armies began moving into the Confederacy from the West, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston counterattacked near Shiloh (1862) on the Tennessee River. Grant's unprepared troops suffered heavy casualties, but managed to repel the attack. The Union then began a long push into the South. The year 1863 proved crucial in many ways. After Antietam, Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation stating that the federal government considered all slaves still in Confederate territory to be free, which went into effect on January 1, 1863. The proclamation had two important consequences. For many in the North it transformed the war into a crusade against slavery. It also dissuaded Britain from officially recognizing and aiding the Confederacy. That year, the United States accepted African American enlistments to the army for the first time since 1820. By war's end, over 179, 000 African-American men served in the U.S. armed forces. the year 1863 also witnessed two of the most crucial Confederate military defeats. Lee attempted to bring the Union to negotiate a peace by making an offensive strike. Federal armies under Gen. George G. Meade stopped that advance in the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in July—the war's largest and most consequential battle. In the west, on July 4, Grant took the city of Vicksburg, the Confederacy's last major stronghold on the Mississippi. In 1864, Lincoln promoted Grant to general-in-chief. As Grant pushed against Lee's armies toward the Confederate capital at Richmond, Gen. William T. Sherman assailed Atlanta and then conducted his infamous March to the Sea (1864-65). Aiming to undercut the Confederacy's ability to sustain warfare in terms of both material and morale, Sherman's forces cut a sixty-mile wide trail through Georgia from Atlanta to the Atlantic, earning him the longstanding enmity of many southerners, despite his own personal regard for the region and its people. These two offensives combined with a concerted Union press to shatter the Confederacy. The war effectively ended on April 9, 1865, when Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox, Virginia. In something of an anticlimax, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston handed over the last Confederate army to Sherman near Durham, North Carolina, on April 26. The Reconstruction that followed in its wake was fraught, a situation only made worse by Abraham Lincoln's death on April 15, 1865.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

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Civil wars, 1642-51. In 1629 Charles I dismissed Parliament, resolving never to call another. He might have succeeded but for the problem of the multiple kingdoms. During the 1630s he decided to bring Scottish religious practice into conformity with English by abolishing presbyterian worship and substituting an Anglican service. The Scots revolted, and Charles's two attempts to subdue them—the Bishops' wars of 1639 and 1640—were abject failures. At the insistence of the nobility he summoned Parliament. Once convened, the Commons refused him the taxes he needed, and set about dismantling the apparatus of prerogative government, abolishing ship money, the courts of Star Chamber, High Commission, Wards, and others; passing a Triennial Act, depriving church courts of their punitive powers, and attainting Charles's chief minister Strafford. Charles ratified these changes, but with such ill grace that many doubted whether he would keep his word. Trust became a critical issue upon the outbreak of rebellion in Ireland in the autumn of 1641. Exaggerated reports of atrocities perpetrated against the protestant settlers in Ireland inflamed English opinion. It was accepted that an army should crush the rebellion, but there was no agreement about entrusting the king with command. Charles's attempt to arrest five of the parliamentary ringleaders contributed to the deepening distrust of him. Mistrust was compounded by fear that the king could not be counted on to defend England against the threat of international catholicism. Thus legal and constitutional arguments about taxation, the rights of Parliament, and the extent of royal power were inflamed by religious panic.

Despite its control of the midlands, the east, and the south-east including London, there was nothing inevitable about Parliament's victory. Charles almost overthrew his foes at Edgehill October 1642), while in 1643 there were a number of royalist victories. For all the efforts of John Pym to hold together the parliamentary coalition, parliamentary fortunes reached their nadir in that year.

What turned the tide against Charles I was again the reality of multiple kingdoms. In return for a promise to uphold presbyterian church government and impose it in England, the Scots came to Parliament's aid with an army of 20, 000. This bargain was sealed in the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, and the Scots army entered England early in 1644. The joint armies dealt a crushing blow to the king's forces at Marston Moor, near York July 1644). However, this victory was almost frittered away by Essex when he allowed his army to become trapped by Charles at Lostwithiel in Cornwall September 1644). Completely disenchanted with the aristocratic leadership of Parliament's armies, the win-the-war faction under Sir Henry Vane and Oliver Cromwell purged the armies of their noble and parliamentary leadership, creating the New Model Army. Led by Sir Thomas Fairfax, and knit together by constant pay and religious indoctrination, this army quickly put the royalist forces to flight at Naseby June 1645), Langport July 1645), and Bristol September 1645). By May 1646 Charles had handed himself over to the Scots.

Refusing to accept the verdict of the battlefield, Charles dragged out peace negotiations with Parliament, attempting to exploit the rift between army and Parliament and redoubling his efforts to persuade the Scots to assist him. Early in 1648 royalist risings erupted in Kent, Essex, Wales, and the navy in anticipation of a Scottish intervention on behalf of the king. But the Scots were late, and the New Model Army had no difficulty crushing the revolts. When the duke of Hamilton crossed the border in July, he attracted little support, and Cromwell destroyed his forces between Preston and Uttoxeter August 1648). Everywhere triumphant in battle, the army found that Parliament was still intent on negotiating with the king. To prevent such an outcome it occupied London, purged the House of Commons of those who favoured negotiation, and engineered the trial and execution of the king. Once the Rump Parliament had abolished monarchy and the House of Lords, it launched invasions of Ireland (1649) and Scotland (1650). In spite of Cromwellian ruthlessness at Drogheda and Wexford, Ireland took three years to subjugate. The Scots were devastated at Dunbar September 1650), but continued to resist, to the point of invading England a year later under Charles II. His forces scattered at Worcester September 1651), the hapless king fled to the continent. Although the king, lords, and Church of England were brought back in 1660, prerogative government was not. The constitutional changes of 1641 were preserved, while the legacy of the civil wars in radical thought, religious liberty, and parliamentary domination of the state re-emerged in the ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688-9.

Historians have long debated the causes of the Civil War. They have argued that a split developed between the industrialized North and the agricultural South as both sections vied for control of the nation. Closely related is the belief that the two sections fought over the tariff, which, some have stated, protected Northern manufactures. Others have contended that the war erupted over states' rights. Northerners advocated a more expanded federal government than did Southerners, who held fast to a federal system in which the preponderant power lay with the states. Some have also suggested that politicians in the 1850s failed by their own in competency to broker a compromise to the sectional controversy during the secession crisis, so that the nation blundered into civil strife.

Each of these explanations has serious shortcomings. The Northern states accounted for two of every three farms in the United States, and Southern staple crop production, especially cotton, provided raw material for many Northern factories. The tariff was not a powerful political issue in the critical decade leading up to the war. Nor did Southerners complain about the import duty when it protected regional interests, such as those of sugar growers. Like their Southern countrymen, many Northerners—perhaps even a majority—believed instates' rights, and on the surface, the differences of opinion were not sufficient to warrant separation or war. The blundering generation argument assumes that politicians in Washington were unusually incompetent in the 1850s or that there was room to compromise on the vital moral issue of the day: slavery. There is little evidence to substantiate charges of massive political incompetence and the argument plays down the buildup of mistrust that controversies and compromises had generated since the Missouri Crisis four decades earlier. The willingness of so many millions of people to march off to war or endure hardships for their section proves just how deeply people in the North and South felt about the great issues of their day.

Slavery, Secession, and the War's Onset

Slavery lay at the root of the Civil War. The Republican Party dedicated itself to blocking the expansion of the "peculiar institution," and many of its leaders had publicly avowed their desire to see slavery abolished. Southern states had maintained that if a member of the Republican Party were elected president, they would secede. When the voters chose the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln in 1860, seven slave states voted to leave the union and began to form a Southern confederacy. In their ordinances of secession or justifications, they stated clearly that they dissolved their connection to the United States to protect slavery. As the state of Mississippi argued, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery." Slavery had divided families, religions, institutions, political parties, and finally, the nation itself.

Although the U.S. Constitution did not specifically forbid secession, Lincoln and most Northerners believed that the concept would undercut the linchpin of any democratic republic, respect for the outcome of fair elections. By allowing secession, a group could nullify the expressed wishes of the people acting under constitutional law.

Northerners viewed the union and the Constitution as sacrosanct. It was the basis for the world's great experiment, a democratic republic, a kind of beacon of light for people everywhere. All freedoms derived from the Constitution and the union. For those who had gone before them and for future generations, they had an obligation to preserve that system.

Representatives from the seceding states met during the months of February and March in Montgomery, Alabama, to form a new government, the Confederate States of America. The convention chose Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as provisional president and Alexander Stephens of Georgia as provisional vice president. The constitution itself greatly resembled that of the United States. Major distinctions included a single, six-year term as president, a line-item veto for the president, and a provision stipulating that states could not secede from the country. The most fundamental difference, according to Stephens, rested with the underlying premise: the United States acknowledged the notion that all men were created equal, whereas the Confederate States of America insisted that "the negro is not the equal of the white man" and that "slavery …is his natural and normal condition."

The fighting began when the Lincoln administration determined to preserve the union and to protect federal property. Lincoln attempted to maintain Union control of several forts on Confederate soil, including Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. As food supplies for the garrison began to run low, the president let it be known that he would send a resupply ship that would carry no munitions of war. The plan forced the Rebels' hand. If the Confederacy allowed the ship to deposit supplies safely, it would be tolerating the existence of a United States fort not just on Confederate soil, but in the birthplace of secession. Such a presence was a slap at the viability of the new nation. The other alternative would be for the new Confederate government to employ force to prevent the re-supply, and thus commit the first act of violence. Rather than endure the insult of a Union post on secessionist soil, the Confederates began shelling Fort Sumter on 12 April. After a thirty-four-hour bombardment, the garrison surrendered. In response to the attack, Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand militiamen to suppress the insurrection. The war was on.

Rather than fight their fellow slave states, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas seceded and joined the Confederate States of America. The Confederacy then shifted its seat of government from Montgomery to Richmond, Virginia. While the new Confederate capital would be only 110 miles from Washington, D.C., and in a more exposed area than Montgomery, the choice of Richmond made good sense. Richmond was a larger city and could better accommodate the new government. It was the seat of vital manufacturing operations that would be essential to preserve during the war and it served as a key railroad nexus in a powerful agricultural state. Moving the capital to Richmond had the effect of bonding Virginia more strongly to the Confederacy. The site also reminded everyone of the legacy to the American Revolution and the work of the founding fathers. Secessionists insisted that they were the true inheritors of the Constitution, one that forged compromises to permit slave ownership. Like their forefathers, they would fight a war for independence to protect their rights.

Comparative Advantages

The Union possessed the preponderance of resources. It had a population of twenty-two million, well educated and with a sound work ethic. Ninety percent of U.S. manufacturing was produced in the loyal states and virtually all arms manufacturing took place there. One half of its adult males listed farming as their occupation, and the region's output of food crops was staggering. Almost three times as many draft animals, an extremely valuable wartime asset, were in Northern hands. The Union had a vast financial network, with four of every five bank accounts, huge gold reserves, and ready access to commercial credit, all of which were essential to finance a massive war. It had a sophisticated and modern railroad network, with two and one-half times as many miles as the South, and a large commercial fleet to carry trade and, in wartime, to haul supplies. Finally, the Union inherited a small U.S. Army, numbering around sixteen thousand, with experienced officers, and a U.S. Navy with only twenty-three active ships, but an industrial base that could transform it into the largest and probably the best in the world.

As history has demonstrated time after time, however, overwhelming resources do not guarantee victory. Furthermore, the Confederacy had some advantages of its own. It had a population of 9 million, 5.5 million of whom were white, scattered over an area of almost 750,000 square miles. Its white citizenry, on the whole, was educated and motivated to support the cause. The seceding states produced some superb military leaders, many from the regular army. One in eight regular army officers resigned their commissions to join the Confederacy. A number of them were among the most respected, including Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, and Joseph E. Johnston, to name a few. To join those, the South had hundreds of graduates from military schools such as the Virginia Military Institute and The Citadel, who could teach recruits the basics in drill, tactics, and soldierly comportment. Even more so than their revolutionary ancestors, they had a wealth of experienced politicians on the state, local, and national levels. And perhaps most importantly, the Confederacy had to be conquered to lose. A stalemate was tantamount to Rebel victory.

Over the course of the war, the Confederacy steadily lost a resource on which it had depended heavily: its slave population. Confederates expected their 3.5 million slaves would help produce foodstuffs, manufacture materials for the army and their people, and serve the Rebel cause in sundry other ways. Instead, hundreds of thousands of slaves ultimately escaped to Union lines, many of them taking up arms against their old masters. Other slaves disrupted life on the home front, generated fears of servile insurrections while most of the young adult white males were away in the service, slowed production of essential wartime commodities, or aided the Union armies in many different ways.

From a legal standpoint, the war began when Lincoln called out the militiamen and ordered the Union navy to blockade Confederate ports. Internationally, the Confederacy achieved recognition as a belligerent, but never received recognition as an independent state by any foreign power. No nation attempted to intervene, although the British government considered it and the French government offered to mediate, an overture the United States rebuffed.

Before Lincoln's first Congress met in July 1861, the president adopted measures that gave the Union war policy its controlling character. Besides proclaiming an insurrection, calling out militia, and blockading Rebel ports, he suspended the habeas corpus privilege, expanded the regular army, directed emergency expenditures, and in general assumed executive functions beyond existing law. That summer, Congress ratified his actions and in 1863, by a five to four vote, the U.S. Supreme Court sustained the constitutionality of his executive decisions in the Prize Cases. In general, Lincoln's method of meeting the emergency and suppressing disloyal tendencies was to employ arbitrary executive power, such as his extensive program of arbitrary arrests, wherein thousands of citizens were thrust into prison on suspicion of disloyal or dangerous activity. These prisoners were held without trial, deprived of their usual civil rights, and subjected to no accusations under the law. Such policies, which Lincoln justified as necessary for the survival of the union, led to severe and widespread criticism of the Lincoln administration. Yet it cannot be said that Lincoln became a dictator. He allowed freedom of speech and of the press, contrary examples being exceptional, not typical. He tolerated newspaper criticism of himself and of the government, interposed no party uniformity, permitted free assembly, avoided partisan violence, recognized opponents in making appointments, and above all submitted his party and himself, even during war, to the test of popular election.

Confederate president Jefferson Davis also faced dissent, but Davis suffered from the additional burden of attempting to build a government and a nation during wartime. Many Confederates opposed the kind of concentration of power under the central government that was necessary to prosecute the war. With only one political party, vicious factions emerged, heaping sharp criticism on the overworked Davis and many of his appointees.

Enlistment and Conscription

Neither side was prepared for war, yet both sides rallied around their flag and cause. That regular army of only sixteen thousand men was transformed into two massive national armies. Before the war was over, the Union would maintain more than one million men in uniform at one time; the Confederacy's peak estimate was about one half that number. In order to draw people into military service, both sides relied primarily on volunteers. Locals organized companies, batteries, or regiments and offered them to the governor, who then tried to convince the secretary of war to accept them. Those early waves of recruits left home with a hero's good-bye. Over time, the celebrations ceased as more and more men failed to return home.

Early in the war, both sides had more volunteers than they could arm and clothe, and many frustrated volunteers were not accepted. By 1862, however, matters began to change. Most of the Confederates who enlisted in 1861 did so for a one-year term. As both sides geared up for spring offensives, the Davis administration and his generals feared their armies would dissolve. In April 1862, the Confederate Congress passed laws that established all white males between ages eighteen and thirty-five as eligible for military service. Everyone called into service would be subject to a three-year term, unless the war ended sooner, and those people already in service who were of draft age had their terms of service extended to three years. This was the first conscription act in American history. Draftees had the opportunity to hire substitutes, and in October 1862 the act was amended so that individuals who owned more than twenty slaves could acquire an exemption for an adult white male. Throughout the remainder of the war, the Confederacy continued to draft, expanding the age limits on both ends, and to recruit to fill its ranks. The Confederacy eventually forbade substitutes as well.

The Lincoln administration suffered similar problems. In The summer of 1862, dismal Union progress in the East convinced most people that the war would extend on for years. As enlistment slowed to a trickle, the Northern government also resorted to conscription through the Militia Act of 17 July 1862, which could keep individuals in uniform for only nine months. This proved so unsatisfactory that Congress replaced it with a stronger law in March 1863, establishing state quotas for three-year terms of service. Local communities raised bounty money to lure individuals to enlist, there by reducing or filling their draft quotas. For those slots that volunteers did not fill, locals would have to draft. Inmost cases, results were achieved by the threat of being drafted and the amount of money available as bounty for recruits.

Recruitment policies in the North and the South generated complaints against both governments, including charges that it was a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, and even sparked draft riots. In The end, though, comparatively few soldiers were drafted. Conscription acted as a stick to encourage enlistments, while bounties and avoiding the shame of being drafted were the carrots.

Virtually all of those who entered the two armies did so with naive notions of military service, duty, and combat. Disease took greater tolls on their ranks than did enemy shot and shell. Perceptions of glory faded as hard-ships mounted. Approximately one in eight, unwilling to endure the sacrifices and suffering any longer, deserted. Yet for the bulk of those who donned the blue and the gray, their commitment to cause and comrades sustained them through the most trying moments. Over time, they learned to be skilled soldiers, men who knew how to execute on the battlefield and care for themselves in camp. They took pride in themselves, their units, and their service and vowed to stay the course until they achieved victory or all hope was lost.

The Early War

The first major engagement of the war took place in July 1861, near Manassas Junction, Virginia. Confederates under Major General P. G. T. Beauregard had assembled in northern Virginia to defend the area and guard the connection of the Manassas Gap Railroad from the Shenandoah Valley, running east-west, and the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, which sliced from southwest Virginia toward Washington, D.C. A Union army of a little more than thirty thousand men, the largest ever assembled for battle in American history, under Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, pushed southwest from Washington. After marching all night, McDowell's columns engaged the Confederates around a creek called Bull Run. McDowell feigned an attack on the Rebel right and swung wide on the opposite side, crossing Bull Run and rolling up on Beauregard's left. Just as it appeared that the Union would win the day, two events occurred. Soldiers under Brigadier General Thomas J. Jackson held firm, like a "stone wall," and critical reinforcements from the Shenandoah

Valley under Major General Joseph E. Johnston arrived by rail to bolster the defenders. As the Union attackers grew exhausted, the Confederates launched a counterattack that swept the battlefield. President Davis, who arrived that afternoon, joined his generals in trying to mount a pursuit, but Confederate confusion in victory was almost as bad as Union panic in defeat. The Federals fled back to Washington, having endured a staggering three thousand casualties; in triumph, the Confederates suffered almost two thousand losses.

Lincoln promptly replaced McDowell with Major General George B. McClellan, a highly touted engineer who oversaw a minor Union victory in western Virginia. McClellan accumulated and trained a massive army, but tarried so long that winter fell before he moved out. Meanwhile, McClellan politicked to remove the aged commanding general of all Union armies, Winfield Scott, and got himself installed. "I can do it all," a cocky McClellan boasted.

The following spring, after much prodding from Lincoln, the Union army shifted its base by water to the Virginia coast east of Richmond and began an arduous advance up the peninsula between the York and James Rivers. As the Union forces neared Richmond, Confederates under Joseph E. Johnston attacked; Johnston was badly wounded, and the Federals held.

To replace Johnston, Davis chose his military adviser, General Robert E. Lee, a highly regarded West Point graduate who had not achieved much success theretofore. With his back up against Richmond, Lee drew Stonewall Jackson's men in from the Shenandoah Valley, where they had conducted a spectacular campaign against superior Union numbers, and launched a massive surprise attack on McClellan's right flank. In the Seven Days' Battles in June and July 1862, Lee's army failed to crush McClellan, but it drove the Federals back twenty miles to the protection of the Union navy. With the fight whipped out of McClellan, Lee began moving northward in August. At the Battle of Second Manassas, Lee crushed a Union army under Major General John Pope, and then turned on the Union garrison at Harpers Ferry and crossed over into Maryland in September. A lost copy of the Confederate invasion plan, which a Union soldier had discovered and passed on to headquarters, emboldened McClellan, who had replaced Pope. He fought Lee to a draw at Antietam in the single bloodiest day of fighting in the war, with combined casualties of nearly twenty-three thousand. After the fight, Lee fell back to Virginia while McClellan dawdled until an exasperated Lincoln replaced him with Major General Ambrose P. Burnside. In just three months, though, Lee had completely reversed Rebel fortunes in the East and had established himself as the great Confederate general.

Emancipation and Black Enlistment

Strangely enough, despite Lee's overall achievements, the Union repulse of Lee's raid offered Lincoln an opportunity to transform the war. With the failure of McClellan's Richmond campaign, Lincoln had decided on emancipation and black enlistment. The war was all about slavery, Lincoln had concluded, and if the nation reunited, the United States would have to settle the slavery issue and move beyond it. Federal recruitment, moreover, had slowed to a trickle. The largest untapped resource available was African Americans. They produced for the Confederacy; they could contribute in and out of uniform to the Union.

Despite the hopes of Lincoln and other politicians to keep blacks out of the war, they had forced their way to the heart of it from the beginning. In April 1861, several slaves who were being used for Confederate military construction projects fled to Union lines. The Union general, Benjamin Butler, declared them contraband of war and subject to confiscation, in accordance with international law, and then hired them to work for the Union army. Congress established Butler's ruling as the law of the land in the First Confiscation Act in August 1861. But soon, slaves who worked for the Rebel army began arriving with family members who had not labored on Rebel military projects and the original law broke down as many Union officers were loath to return anyone to slavery. In July 1862 Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act, which allowed the president to authorize the seizure of any Rebel property, including slaves. It also passed legislation that enabled Lincoln to use blacks for any military duties he found them competent to perform.

Lincoln issued his most important executive pronouncement, the Emancipation Proclamation, in September 1862, just after the Battle of Antietam. In it, Lincoln announced that slaves in all areas beyond control of Union armies on 1 January 1863, would become free. Based on his powers as commander in chief, Lincoln rightly believed that slavery aided the Confederacy and that its destruction would strengthen the Union effort. Yet the program also fulfilled one of Lincoln's dreams: the destruction of an immoral institution. By eradicating it, Lincoln altered the Union goal from a war to restore the Union to one that would destroy slavery as well. The decision generated some opposition, but in the end, those who were principally responsible for enforcing the proclamation, the Union soldiery, embraced it as a vital step in winning the war.

Although Lincoln waited to issue his emancipation decree until the Union won its next victory—almost three months later—he had begun bringing blacks into Union uniform in the summer of 1862. He tried to control the experiment carefully, but after black troops fought heroically at the Battles of Port Hudson, Milliken's Bend, and Fort Wagner in 1863, he authorized a dramatic expansion of black enlistment. Blacks served in segregated units, largely under white officers, and in time they proved to be an invaluable force in the Union war effort.

Union Progress in the Western Theater

While the Yankees struggled to achieve positive results in the eastern theater, out west their armies made great progress. Ulysses S. Grant, a West Point graduate who resigned under a cloud in 1854, emerged as an unlikely hero. In February 1862, he launched an outstandingly effective campaign against Confederate forces at Forts Henry and Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, respectively. In conjunction with the Union gun-boat fleet, he secured Fort Henry and then besieged the prize, Fort Donelson and its garrison of nearly twenty thousand men. Although some Confederates escaped, its fall resulted in the first great Union victory of the war and shattered the cordon of Rebel defenses in the Kentucky-Tennessee region. Several weeks later, Union troops occupied Nashville, the capital of Tennessee, and by the end of March, Grant's reinforced command had occupied a position around Shiloh Church near the Mississippi border.

Then, early on 6 April, Confederates under General Albert Sidney Johnston launched a vicious attack. Grant, caught unprepared, saw his men driven back. Valiant fighting and some timely reinforcements saved the day, however, and the following afternoon, Union troops swept the field. Johnston was wounded and bled to death on the first day of fighting. At Shiloh, Grant's army suffered thirteen thousand casualties, horrifying politicians and civilians alike, and he soon found his reputation damaged and his command responsibilities curtailed.

When his superior, Major General Henry W. Halleck, returned East to become the new general in chief that summer, however, Grant was given a second chance. On 1 May 1862, Union forces began entering New Orleans; opening the entire length of the Mississippi River became a high priority. Grant began the difficult task of securing Vicksburg, Mississippi, a Confederate bastion located high on bluffs that dominated the Mississippi River. After months of toil and failure, including a repulsed assault on the bluffs, Grant finally conceived a way to defeat the Rebels. With Navy help, he shifted his army below the city in April 1863 by marching men along the opposite bank and shuttling them across the river. He then pushed inland toward Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, and turned on Vicksburg. Over the course of several weeks, in perhaps the most brilliant campaign of the war, Grant's forces defeated two Confederate armies in five separate battles and then laid siege to the city. On 4 July 1863, the Vicksburg garrison of nearly thirty thousand men surrendered. Grant had captured his second army, and with news of the fall of Vicksburg, the Confederates at Port Hudson, Louisiana, surrendered, giving the Union control of the Mississippi River and isolating a large portion of the Confederacy.

After a Union disaster at Chickamauga, Georgia, in September, Grant was brought in to prese