The Probert Encyclopaedia of Warfare

AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

The American Civil War was a conflict between northern and southern states of the Union which lasted from about 1861 until the southern states surrendered in 1865.

Sectional differences had prevailed in the USA from the beginning of the existence of the Union. After the time of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, their main basis was the economic and social divergence between North and South caused by the existence of slavery. This caused frequent tendencies to disruption, which increased after 1850. Disunion sentiment was brought to a head by the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Secessions of the Southern States immediately followed. In February, 1861, the seceding States, in provisional Congress at Montgomery, formed the Confederate States of America. Most persons, North and South, at first expected peaceable separation. Buchanan temporised. Abraham Lincoln could not be clear of his course at first. But the firing on Fort Sumter precipitated conflict. President Abraham Lincoln called for troops to enforce the authority of the Union, and the border States seceded.

The eleven seceding States had a population of 9,000,000, of whom 3,500,000 were slaves; the remaining States had a population of 22,000,000. The North was rich and of varied industrial life, the South poor and almost entirely agricultural. The North was less united than the South, and of a less military spirit. Unscientific as was the financial management on both sides, that of the National Government was, from the nature of the case, more successful. Extraordinary taxes were levied and enormous loans raised. Supplies of men were obtained for both armies by conscription. Toward the close of the war the North had a million men in her military and naval service, the South 450,000. Though Confederate cruisers did great damage to American commerce, the naval operations of the war were mostly not oceanic, but confined to the assistance of land forces by expeditions on the Atlantic coast, in the Gulf and on the rivers, and to the maintenance of the blockade of Southern ports.

In the first year of the war the leading land operations of the war were those in attack and defence of Washington, the chief battle being the Battle of Bull Run. In 1862, in the West, Buell, Pope and Ulysses Simpson Grant cleared the upper Mississippi, the lower Cumberland and Tennessee, with the Shiloh Landing and Battle of Corinth, while Farragut took New Orleans. In the East, Robert E Lee defeated George B. McClellan in the Peninsular campaign, and Pope and George B. McClellan at Manassas, fought George B. McClellan at Antietam, and defeated Burnside at Fredericksburg.

In 1863 Robert E Lee, having defeated Joseph Hooker at Chancellorsville, invaded Pennsylvania, where he was defeated at Gettysburg, the most important decisive battle of the war. Meantime Ulysses Simpson Grant had taken Vicksburg and opened the Mississippi, and the western armies were concentrated upon the struggle for the possession of the central highlands which commanded the heart of the Confederate territory. Here Rosecrans had defeated Bragg at Murfreesboro' but had been defeated at Chickamauga. Ulysses Simpson Grant took his place. Ulysses Simpson Grant and Sherman were henceforth the leading figures of the war, on the Federal side.

In 1864 Ulysses Simpson Grant, in a series of severe battles, forced Robert E Lee back upon Richmond and began the siege of Petersburg, while Sherman, starting from the central highlands, forced back Edward Johnston and Hood and effected his famous and destructive 'march to the sea' through Georgia. Sherman then marched northward toward Ulysses Simpson Grant, who had finally succeeded in reducing Robert E Lee to extremities. April 9,1865, Robert E Lee surrendered to Ulysses Simpson Grant at Appomattox. Edward Johnston surrendered, and the war ended, having cost the nation the lives of probably 300,000 men, and money losses of perhaps $8,000,000,000. The great results, which justified all these efforts, were the destruction of slavery and of that extreme States-rights view of the Constitution which permitted secession. In many respects the most gigantic conflict of modern times, the war had ended in the triumph of the national idea and the consolidation of the Union. That the great armies returned to civil life so quietly and with so little difficulty was not the least of its marvels.
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