The Civil War
On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office as President of the United States. He appealed to the southern states to stay in the Union and promised that he would not interfere with slavery in any of them. But he warned that he would not allow them to break up the United States by seceding.
The southern states took no notice of Lincoln's appeal. On April 1? Confederate guns opened fire on Fort Sumter, a fortress in South Carolina, that was occupied by United states troops. The American Civil War began.
Lincoln called for 75,000 men to fight to save the Union. President of the Confederate States - Jefferson Davis, made a similar appeal for the men to fight for the Confederacy. Some people found it difficult to decide which side to support, but volunteers rushed forward in thousands on both sides.
In both men and material resources the North was much stronger than the South. It had a population of twenty-two million people. The South had only nine million and 3.5 million were slaves. The north grew more food crops than the South. It also had more than five times the manufacturing capacity, including weapon factories. However, the North faced one great difficulty. The only way it could win the war was to invade the South and occupy its land. The South had no such problem. It did not need to conquer the North to win independence. All it had to do was to hold out until the people of the North grew tired of fighting. Most southerners believed that the Confederacy could do this. The fact that almost all the war's fighting took place in the South meant that Confederate soldiers were defending their own homes and this made them fight with more spirit than the Union soldiers.
Southerners denied that they were fighting to preserve slavery. Most were poor families who owned no slaves anyway. The South was fighting for its independence from the North.
The war was fought in two main areas - in Virginia and in the Mississippi valley. In Virginia the Union armies suffered one defeat after another. The Confederate forces in Virginia had two great advantages. The first was that many rivers cut across the roads leading south, so this made the land easier to defend. The second was their leaders. Two Confederate generals in particular, Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. ('Stonewall') Jackson, showed much more skill than the generals leading the Union army at this time. The North's early defeats in Virginia discouraged its supporters. The flood of volunteers for the army began to dry up.
Fortunately for the North, Union forces in the Mississippi valley had more success. In April 1862 they captured New Orleans, the largest city in the Confederacy. In July 1866 an important Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi called Vicksburg surrendered to a Union army led by General Ulysses S. Grant. Union forces now controlled the whole length of Mississippi.
But many northerners were tired of war. General Lee, the Confederate commander, believed that if his army could win on northern soil, this might force the Union government to make peace.
In the last week of June 1863, Lee marched his army north into Pennsylvania. At a small town named Gettysburg a Union army blocked his way. The battle which followed was the biggest that has ever been fought in the United States. In three days more than 50,000 men were killed or wounded. On the fourth day Lee broke off the battle and led his men back into the South. Confederate army had suffered a defeat from which it would never recover.
In November 1864, a Union army led by General William T. Sherman began to march through the Confederate state of Georgia. Its solders destroyed everything on their path. The Confederate capital was already in danger from another Union army led by General Grant. By March 1865, Grant had almost encircled the city and Lee was forced to abandon it to save his army from being trapped. But on April 9, 1865, he met Grant in a house in a village called Appo attox and surrender his army. The war was over. The Civil War put an nd to slavery (in 1865 this was abolished everywhere in the United States by the 13a' Amendment to the Constitution) and it decided that the United States was one nation, whose parts could not be separated.
The Civil War caused terrible destruction at home. More Americans died in this war than in any other, before or since. The dead on both sides totaled 635.000