|
he election of a Republican president opposed to the
expansion of slavery into the western territories led
seven states in the lower South to secede from the Union
beginning in December 1860 and to establish the Confederate
States of America the following February. After Lincoln
notified South Carolina's governor that he intended
to resupply Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, the Confederacy
fired on the installation. This led Lincoln to declare
that an insurrection existed in the South. Within weeks,
Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas joined
the Confederacy.
2.1 million men served in the Union army and 900,000
Confederates in the Confederate. The Civil War was the
first war to involve trench warfare; observation balloons;
iron-clad ships; and the use of repeating and breech-loading
rifles, mines, and hand grenades.
Early in the war, the Union succeeded in blockading
Confederate harbors, and by mid-July 1862 it had divided
the Confederacy in two by wresting control of Kentucky,
Missouri, and much of Tennessee, as well as Mississippi
River.
In the Eastern Theater in 1861 and 1862, the Confederacy
stopped Union attempts to capture its capital in Richmond,
Virginia. In September 1862 (at Antietam in Maryland)
and July 1863 (at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania), Lee tried
and failed to provoke European powers intervention in
the war by winning a victory on Northern soil.
After futile pleas to the border states to free slaves
voluntarily, Lincoln in the summer of 1862 decided that
emancipation was a military and political necessity.
The Emancipation Proclamation transformed the war from
a conflict to save the Union to a war to abolish slavery.
It authorized the enlistment of African Americans; 220,000
served during the war, helping to ensure the destruction
of slavery.
Consequences
1. During the war Congress adopted policies that altered
American society. The Homestead Act offered free public
land to western settlers. Huge land grants supported
construction of a transcontinental railroad. The government
raised the tariff, imposed new taxes, enacted the first
income tax, and established a system of federally-chartered
banks.
2. The Union lost about 360,000 troops during the Civil
War and the Confederacy about 260,000. This is almost
as many soldiers as have died in all other American
wars combined.
3. The 13th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, ended
slavery in the United States.
Background
Between the Napoleonic Wars of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries and World War I, the American
Civil War was the greatest military conflict in the
western world. It cost 600,000 American lives, more
than in World War I and World War II combined. Its social
consequences were especially far-reaching. The war resulted
in the emancipation of four million enslaved African
Americans. It also brought vast changes to the nation's
financial system, fundamentally altered the relationship
between the states and the federal government, and became
modern history's first total war. It is truly the central
event in American history.
|
 |
