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Having been elected President of the Confederacy, in his inaugural speech of 1861, Jefferson Davis proclaimed it was “the American idea that governments rest upon the consent of the governed”, and added that it was “the right of the people to alter or abolish governments whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they were established”. Although secession of Southern states from the Union did not necessarily have to lead to armed conflict,President Abraham Lincoln, and the majority of Northerners, felt so strongly that the precedent of states leaving the Union might lead to its ultimate disintegration, they were prepared to fight a war which left well over half a million dead—as many as were lost in all other wars the U.S. has fought added together. By the time the war was over, the fight to preserve the Union had taken on a higher goal, and the victory of the North in 1865 ensured that nearly four million black slaves would be freed.

The Problems of Territorial Expansion and Attempts at Compromise

Territorial expansion westwards lay at the root of the United States’ problems leading up to the Civil War. As more land was acquired by the nation, and pioneers, potential settlers, prospectors, and those hoping to practise their religion free from persecution, continued to travel west, so more territories would apply to become new states in the Union. This in turn would raise the issue of whether these new states would be pro-slavery or free. Missouri was the first territory from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 to apply for statehood, and the associated Missouri Compromise of 1820 highlights perfectly the dilemma expansion brought with it. At the time the slave states and free states were equally balanced in the Senate. If Missouri joined as a slave state it would tip the balance in favour of the South. Henry Clay’s solution was to create a new free state called Maine out of part of Massachusetts, and to ban slavery in the Louisiana Purchase above a line of latitude 36° 30′.

Economic Differences and the Moral Implications of Slavery

There were certainly differences between North and South economically, and it could be argued that slavery was at the root of those differences. There has been a tendency to assume that the South was economically backward compared to the North. Although this should not be exaggerated, it does seem that despite growth in the Southern economy, it did not really develop, and the region remained more reluctant than the North to embrace new technology. It is true that the North had greater diversity than the South, and between 1800 and 1860 the proportion of the Northern labour force engaged in agriculture fell from 70 per cent to 40 per cent, while the Southern proportion remained constant at approximately 80 per cent; also only approximately 10 per cent of Southerners lived in urban areas compared with 25 per cent of Northerners.

States’ Rights and Nationalism

Jefferson Davis claimed that the South had fought for states’ rights rather than to save slavery, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the state right of paramount importance to the South was the right to own slaves. Hugh Brogan⁵notes that the states’ rights doctrinehad evolved out of the necessity to protect slavery, but in 1832 South Carolina had threatened secession over the tariff, and as early as 1799 Thomas Jefferson had championed states’ rights in the face of the draconian Alien and Sedition Acts. When the Supreme Court made its infamous decision regarding the status of black slave Dred Scott in 1857 it ruled that no slave could become free by virtue of simply living in a free territory. The implications of Dred Scott were that neither Congress nor an individual state could legally bar slavery from any land. This represented a major blow to the right of states to determine whether slavery should exist or not within its borders, but this defeat for states’ rights was lost amid the rejoicing south of the Potomac.

The secession of seven states from the Lower South over the winter of 1860/1 was met with inactivity by “lame duck” President Buchanan as he saw out his term of office. By the time Lincoln took over in March, the “rebel states” had sworn in Jefferson Davis as a provisional President. Southerners had already taken control of 11 forts and military installations in the Confederacy, when the news came through that Lincoln intended to send supplies to the U.S. garrison in Fort Sumter, Charleston Harbor. On 12 April 1861 Confederate forces opened fire on the fort, claiming that, as South Carolina no longer belonged to the Union, U.S. soldiers had no right to occupy the fort. Lincoln’s determination to preserve the Union meant that he had little option other than to order a blockade of the Confederate coastline and the raising of an army of 75 000 men. His action provoked the secession in May of four more Southern states, including Virginia, a state which would prove vital to the South’s war effort, and the consequent loss of Robert E. Lee, a man to whom Lincoln had offered high command in the Union army.

It was absolutely vital for Lincoln that no more of the slaveholding states seceded and it was with this in mind that Lincoln remarked: “I hope to have God on my side but I must have Kentucky.” The position of Maryland was also crucial, for had it seceded Washington, D.C. itself would have been left in “enemy territory”, so Lincoln acted quickly to ensure that secessionists there were suppressed. Fortunately for him the border slave states decided not to leave the Union, but it had been a close run thing, and ultimately perhaps affected the outcome of the war. Had the slave states of Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware and Missouri joined the Confederacy, its white population would have increased by 45 per cent and its manufacturing capacity by 80 per cent. Lincoln’s decision not to make the war an anti-slavery war initiallyhad paid off. In addition the Confederacy also contained areas of discontent, usually the more mountainous regions away from the plantations. The western uplands of Virginia actually seceded from the Confederacy to join the Union in June 1861 and form the state of West Virginia in 1863, and in fact Union regiments were raised from every Southern state except one.

Emancipation, Gettysburg and Vicksburg

Emancipation was a calculated risk for Lincoln, and it was one which paid off. As well as giving the war a new and more noble cause, it opened up another source of recruitment and by the end of the war over 200 000 black troops had served in the Union armies. In the mid-terms of 1862, the Democrats nearly won control of the House of Representatives, but support for Lincoln returned in 1863. According to Philip Jenkins, “1863 proved to be the pivotal year of the war in which the South lost the strategic initiative”. Lincoln had made Joseph Hooker his new army commander but he was defeated at Chancellorsville in May 1863 by Lee. It may have been the Virginian’s greatest victory but he did not destroy the Union army and he crucially lost “Stonewall” Jackson, who died from wounds inflicted by his own troops when they failed to recognise him returning to the lines. Lee followed up Chancellorsville by invading the North, with his initial target being the rail junction at Harrisburg, which would allow him to cut Union supply lines from east to west, and might well contribute to greater war weariness in the North.

When Hooker was refused his requested further reinforcements, he resigned, being replaced by George Meade. Meade fought Lee’s army at Gettysburg in July 1863, where he held a defensive position and succeeded in fighting off Lee’s attacks, although he did not follow Lee’s retreating army. Nevertheless Gettysburg marked the last time that Confederate forces were able to threaten Northern territory seriously. On 4 July, the same day that Lee withdrew from Gettysburg, Union forces under Grant captured Vicksburg, the major Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi, which divided the eastern Confederate states from Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. There followed a Union defeat for Rosecrans by Bragg at Chickamauga in September 1863 and he retreated to Chattanooga, to be replaced by George Thomas. Grant, Hooker and William Sherman at the Battle of Chattanooga in November, routed the forces of Bragg, who was duly replaced by Joseph E. Johnston. Northern troops had driven Confederates back into Georgia and taken control of most of eastern Tennessee as well as the Tennessee River. A fourth Confederate state was thereby cut off from the remaining seven.

In March 1864, Grant took over from Henry Halleck as commander of all Union armies. His strategy was for Sherman’s army of the west, in Georgia, to destroy the remains of Johnston’s Confederate army, and their supplies, while he moved with George Meade’s army of the Potomac against Richmond. On his way to Richmond, Grant fought the costly and indecisive Battle of the Wilderness （May 1864） and was then defeated by Lee at Spotsylvania Court House （also May 1864）. Further losses were sustained at Cold Harbor in June where there were 6 000 Union casualties in a single hour. On 3 June, one young Union soldier, in his last diary entry, wrote simply: “I was killed.” Grant failed to take the vital rail centre of Petersburg from Beauregard in the same month. During the Wilderness campaign, in the space of a month Grant lost 55 000 men —killed, wounded or captured—against Lee’s 31 000. Shortly afterwards, by way of distraction, Jubal Early attacked the outskirts of Washington, D.C. itself, but was turned round at the Battle of Fort Stevens on 12 July. In the meantime, Grant had changed his strategy and he besieged the vital railhead of Petersburg for nine months, eventually cutting off Richmond from the rest of the Confederacy. In the west, Sherman had advanced towards Atlanta but was defeated heavily by Johnston at Kennesaw Mountain in June 1864. Jefferson Davis rewarded Johnston’s campaign, to the astonishment of his men, by replacing him as head of Confederate forces in the west by John Bell Hood, who eventually abandoned Atlanta, one of the key transportation centres of the Confederacy in September, boosting Lincoln’s chances of re-election considerably.

Lincoln was re-elected in November 1864 as the candidate of the so-called Union Party, a loose alliance of Republicans and “War Democrats”. George Thomas finished off Hood at Nashville in December while Sherman began a 300 mile march of destruction through Georgia. Having reached Savannah in December, he turned North wreaking further destruction through the Carolinas. By 1865 Union forces numbered perhaps one million while Confederate troops in the field totalled 200 000. Lee, having been made general-in-chief, had reinstated Johnston who took the realistic option by surrendering to Sherman in North Carolina in April 1865. In the east, Confederate forces evacuated Richmond and Petersburg in April 1865 and, having been prevented from meeting up with Johnston’s men, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on 9 April. On 14 April Lincoln was assassinated.

Lincoln’s main aim under what has become known as “Reconstruction” was to readmit the Confederate states to the Union as quickly as possible. As early as 1863 he issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, which proposed to grant readmission to the states and amnesty to all Southerners except high civil and military leaders as long as 10 per cent of each state’s voters swore an oath of allegiance to the U.S. and recognised the ending of slavery. Lincoln also insisted that any legal confiscation of property in the South would be limited to the lifetimes of its owners and would not apply to their heirs. Many former slaveholders simply took the oath of allegiance and continued to own their land. In 1864 Louisiana drew up a new constitution prohibiting slavery, but did not grant blacks, who made up nearly half the population, the vote. When over 10 per cent of voters （based on number of votes cast in 1860） in Louisiana supported the new Constitution, Lincoln was happy to see it return the Union. Republican Radicals, however, who viewed Reconstruction as a Congressional function, persuaded Congress to reject Louisiana’s readmission and refuse to admit its senators, seeking to delay Reconstruction until after the war when the President would be in a weaker position. Two of the Radicals, Benjamin Wade and Henry Davis, were behind the Wade-Davis Bill, which proposed to exclude anyone who had taken up arms or held high office for the Confederacy from either voting or standing for political office, and also required that 50 per cent of a state’s voters take an “Ironclad Oath”, swearing that they had never supported secession voluntarily, before readmission. Lincoln vetoed the Bill in August 1864, but the stage was set for future conflict.

There was, therefore, a range of aims for Congressional Reconstruction which included:

● the readmission of the Southern states;

● the improvement of black rights （which some hoped would prevent an exodus of freed slaves to the North where they would come into direct competition with poor white workers）;

● the maintenance of the Northern/Republican dominance of government;

● the economic rehabilitation of the South;

● and possibly an element of vindictiveness following the South’s apparent reluctance to accept the verdict of war and the terms of their defeat. （Northerners never did “hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree” as the words to the song “John Brown’s Body” promised, although he was imprisoned for two years. In fact only one man was executed for his rolein the war, Henry Wirz, who had been in charge of the notorious Andersonville prison camp.）

The term “key turning point” suggests the U.S. took a significantly different path from the one it would have taken had the war not taken place. This contention is clearly open to debate, and it must be examined from economic and social as well as political perspectives. The abolition of slavery is perhaps the key to answering the question, in that had war not happened the prospects of gaining a two-thirds vote in Congress plus the support of three-quarters of the states were remote. Lincoln had expanded the powers of the Presidency during the war, but Johnson’s impeachment and Grant’s tainted terms in office saw a return to a less dominant Presidency. Lincoln talked of “fundamental and astounding changes” resulting from the war, but he had little chance to speak with any real perspective and neither did those who spoke in revolutionary terms before the 1860s were over, although their initial reactions to the effects of the war should not be discounted.

Clearly the main results of the war were the triumph of the Union and the emancipation of black slaves. The Union existed before the war and so it could be argued that the war was fought to prevent change rather than to hasten it, but the war had determined what the nature of that Union would be in the long term, and certainly where states’ rights would stand in relation to federal power, although for most people after the war it was still state governments which continued to play a greater part in their lives than Washington, despite greater taxation and involvement from the centre. The abolition of slavery was clearly a fundamental change in U.S. society although it could be argued that blacks remained very much second-class citizens for decades after the war. Neither was the abolition of slavery simply a case of freeing four million black people—it had huge economic, social and political implications, particularly in the South which was hugely affected by the war. The war had devastated large areas of the region as well as fundamentally changing its social and economic systems. Southern incomes continued to fall after the war and agricultural production dropped significantly. The war confirmed the dominance of the Republican Party and by implication the North. After the war, a hundred years would pass before a Southerner became President again. And this pattern was repeated in other areas of national government, such as the Supreme Court where only five of the next 26 appointees would come from the South.