The Civil War

Most of America’s wars have been waged against other sovereign nations, but wars often erupt within a single country. These are called “civil wars,” “rebellions,” “revolutions,” or “wars of independence”—depending in part on who wins. The Civil War would very likely have a different name if the South had won. To them it wasn’t a civil war but a war of secession. At the time they called it “The War of Northern Aggression,” but had they won it might be known today as “The Second War of Independence.”

United States?

The United States were never truly united before the Civil War.

Our first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, brought together 13 colonies as a loose confederation of states, each with its own “sovereignty, freedom, and independence.” Our second constitution—the one we still have—was an attempt to wrangle them into a single cohesive nation. It didn’t totally work, not without a war to enforce it.

Two Paths Diverged

It was a nearly classic case of a single state—the United States—that encompassed two nations at odds with one another—the North and the South.

The unusual thing about it was how quickly a fairly homogenous group of people of European ancestry developed nationalistic identities that bound them to their own kind and excluded the other. Behind it was an ideological divide that grew out of an economic system, slavery. The divide ran deep, leaving traces that linger to this day.

Sins of Our Fathers

The seeds of the Civil War go back to America’s Founding Fathers, who were in a position to abolish slavery but did not.

Slavery was already a divisive issue at the country’s founding and even became a bargaining point in writing and ratifying the Constitution. Many of the Founding Fathers were slaveholders, though some had become critical of slavery. George Washington stipulated that his slaves be freed after he died, but he did nothing to end slavery as President. He feared that any attempt to declare emancipation would destroy the nascent Union, and hoped that slavery would fade away on its own. His hopes weren’t irrational—several northern states had already signed abolition laws.

The Infernal Machine

Can the invention of a machine lead to war? If it could it might be the 1793 invention of the cotton gin.

Eli Whitney’s cotton gin cleaned cotton so efficiently that the only remaining barrier to production was how much you could plant and pick—and it revitalized slavery in the South. Entrepreneurs created expansive forced labor camps, competing to produce more and more cotton. In 1805 planters figured that a single slave could tend 5 acres of cotton. By 1855, a single slave, using the same two hands, was expected to maintain 10 acres. It was a brutally efficient system, and planters refused to give it up.

Southern Nationalists

Many Southerners came to believe that Southern culture was no longer compatible with that of the North. What’s more, the South was blameless.

It was the South that had preserved the socially aristocratic, agrarian society of the Founding Fathers, while the North abandoned it. Southerners saw themselves as peaceful, pastoral, and God-fearing. Yes, and slave-owning, like the Founders. The North had forsaken all of that to become urban, industrial, and democratic—in other words, clawing and corrupt. If that was the United States, Southern nationalists wanted no part of it.  

Look West

Cotton, which dominated the South, devoured land. Artificial fertilizers had not been developed, so every few years you had to rotate to a different crop or risk destroying the soil.

The solution was to continually incorporate new lands to keep the cotton growing. Southern entrepreneurs claimed the right to set up forced-labor cotton plantations in new territories and states. Abolitionists followed them into the territories of Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas, sparking violent struggles over who would write the new states’ constitutions.

Dred Scott v. Sanford

Dred Scott was an ordinary man thrust onto the national stage. He was a slave, as many ordinary men were at the time, and he wanted his freedom.

Dred Scott’s owner had taken him north, and when the man died Scott sued to obtain his freedom on the grounds that his residence in a free state made him free. The case went back and forth on appeal and in 1857 ended up in the Supreme Court. The Southern-dominated court ruled not only that Scott, being black, could not be a citizen and that he was in fact “property,” but that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery. Southerners hoped the decision would end the slavery question and crush the antislavery Republican party, but it did the opposite, leading to the election of Abraham Lincoln.

A Holy War

One of those who participated in the Kansas bloodshed was John Brown, an abolitionist with a religious bent for meting out Biblical punishments.

After proslavery vigilantes killed abolitionists in Lawrence, Kansas, John Brown and his followers chose 5 random proslavery settlers and hacked them to death with broadswords. He fled the territory and in 1859 orchestrated a slave uprising in Appalachia, which was to begin with a raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. He was captured immediately, tried, and hanged. The raid had seemed slightly insane, but Brown’s stirring courtroom eloquence made him a hero in the North—and on both sides a symbol of the looming conflict.

The Divisive President

Southern states did everything they could to defeat Abraham Lincoln in the election of 1860. When they failed they began seceding from the United States.

Fear of the antislavery Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was so strong that 10 Southern states refused to put him on the ballot. In a normal year that would have sunk Lincoln, but by 1860 slavery had so fractured the country that there were 4 major candidates for president, each with a different stand on the issue. Lincoln, the most anti of the antislavery candidates, took the Northern vote and won. South Carolina seceded almost immediately, and 6 other Southern states followed before Lincoln even took the oath of office. Without intending it, Lincoln had started a revolution.

Standoff Over an Unused Fort

When Lincoln took office on March 5, 1861, he found on his desk a request to resupply soldiers occupying an unfinished fort in Charleston Harbor. It would be the first of many difficult tests.

President Lincoln was content to give the seceding states time to reconsider their actions, but the issue of Fort Sumter forced his hand. The fort was federal property, but now South Carolina claimed it. To give in would be to recognize the new Confederacy, which Lincoln would not do. He didn’t want to use force and start a war over the issue; he preferred to let South Carolina do that. So he dispatched ships to resupply the soldiers stranded in the fort. With news of coming resupply ships, South Carolina attacked the fort, starting the Civil War.

Images:

Battle of Chickamauga. Found at http://www.history.com/news/8-things-you-should-know-about-the-battle-of-chickamauga

US Constitution. Found at http://gawker.com/the-constitution-old-bullshit-1723875534

Map, Confederate States of America. Found at http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/civil-war/war/maps/#/detail/the-confederate-states-of-america

George Washington and family, by Edward Savage, winter of 1789–1790. Found at National Gallery of Art, https://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/art-object-page.561.html

Mural celebrating cotton gin, by Hugo Ohlms at Augusta Lewis Troup School, New Haven, CT. Found at Mural Locator, http://murallocator.org/2011/05/history-of-new-haven-whitney-invents-cotton-gin/

Cotton plantation on the Mississippi, Currier & Ives print, 1884. Found at Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/91722891/

Slave coffel in Kentucky 1857. Artist unknown, from The Suppressed Book About Slavery, 1864. Found at https://bjws.blogspot.com/2015/11/

Portrait of Dred Scott, by Louis Schultze, 1882. The image was painted after the only known photograph of Scott. Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis. Found at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h1532.html

Mural at Kansas State Capitol depicting John Brown, by John Steuart Curry, 1940. Found at https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/kansas-state-capitol-curry-murals/16864

Abraham Lincoln, 16th President, by Alexander Gardner, November 8, 1863. Found at https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/presidents/abrahamlincoln

Bombardment of Fort Sumter. Engraving, artist unknown. National Park Service. Found at http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-civilwar/4637