American Civil War

The American Civil War was a war fought inside one country, the United States, between 1861 and 1865. On one side was the federal government, usually called the Union or simply “the North”. On the other side was the Confederate States of America, a new government formed by eleven Southern states that had declared themselves independent. Most people called the Confederacy “the South”.

The war had many names. In the North it was often called the War of the Rebellion, and the official army records published after the war used that title. Many white Southerners later preferred “the War Between the States”, a phrase that suggested two equal countries rather than a rebellion. In Korean it is called 남북 전쟁, “the war between the South and the North”.

It was a very big war. Around two million men served in the Union forces and perhaps 750,000 to a million in the Confederate forces; historians disagree about the exact Confederate figures because many records were lost. Battles spread across a huge area, from Pennsylvania in the north to Texas and Florida in the south, and from the Atlantic coast to New Mexico.

In 1860 about four million people, nearly one in three people living in the Southern states, were enslaved. Slavery was the base of the Southern economy: enslaved people grew cotton, tobacco, sugar and rice, and cotton was the largest American export. The value of enslaved people as “property” was enormous, larger than the value of all the country’s railroads and factories combined, according to common historical estimates. Enslaved people resisted in many ways, from working slowly to running away, but the law gave them no protection.

For decades Americans fought politically over whether slavery should be allowed in new western territories. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850 tried to settle the question, but the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 forced Northerners to help return people who escaped slavery, which angered many. In 1854 the Kansas–Nebraska Act reopened the question, and violence broke out in Kansas. In 1857 the Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott decision, said that Black Americans could not be citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories. In 1859 the abolitionist John Brown attacked the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, hoping to start a slave uprising.

Abraham Lincoln and his new Republican Party did not propose to abolish slavery in the states where it already existed, but they were determined to stop it from spreading. When Lincoln won the presidential election in November 1860 without carrying a single Deep South state, South Carolina declared on 20 December 1860 that it had left the Union. Six more states followed before Lincoln took office. Their own official declarations said plainly that they were leaving to protect slavery. In March 1861 the Confederate vice-president, Alexander Stephens, said in his “Cornerstone Speech” that the new government rested on the idea that Black people were not equal to white people and that slavery was their natural condition.

Later, some people claimed the war was really about “states’ rights” or tariffs. Historians today overwhelmingly agree that slavery was the central cause. Arguments about states’ rights were real, but they were mostly arguments about the right to keep and extend slavery; indeed, Southern leaders had strongly supported federal power when it came to catching people who escaped slavery.

The Union included the free states of the North and West and four slaveholding “border states”: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri. West Virginia split away from Virginia and joined the Union as a new state in 1863. The Union had more than twice the population of the Confederacy, most of the factories, most of the railroads and a navy.

The Confederacy was made up of South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas, which left the Union before the war, and Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina, which left after the fighting started at Fort Sumter. Its president was Jefferson Davis, and its capital moved from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia. The Confederacy hoped that it could hold out long enough for the North to give up, and that Britain and France, which needed Southern cotton, would recognise it.

Neither side was completely united. Many people in the mountains of the South, such as eastern Tennessee, supported the Union. In the North, some Democrats, nicknamed “Copperheads”, wanted peace with the South. Native American nations in Indian Territory (today Oklahoma) were divided, and some fought on each side. Most importantly, four million enslaved people had their own goal: freedom.

Both sides expected a short war. At the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, near Washington, the Confederates won, and it became clear the war would be long. The Union adopted a strategy of blockading Southern ports and taking control of the Mississippi River to split the Confederacy, sometimes called the “Anaconda Plan”. In the West, Ulysses S. Grant captured Forts Henry and Donelson in early 1862 and survived the bloody Battle of Shiloh in April. Union ships captured New Orleans that same month.

In the East, Robert E. Lee took command of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in 1862 and won a series of victories. His invasion of Maryland ended at the Battle of Antietam on 17 September 1862, the bloodiest single day in American history. Lincoln used this partial success to announce the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Lee won again at Fredericksburg in December 1862 and Chancellorsville in May 1863, and then invaded Pennsylvania.

July 1863 was a turning point. At Gettysburg (1–3 July) Lee’s army was defeated and retreated. On 4 July Vicksburg, the Confederate fortress on the Mississippi, surrendered to Grant after a long siege, giving the Union control of the river. In November Lincoln gave his short Gettysburg Address, describing the war as a test of whether a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” could survive.

In 1864 Grant, now in overall command, pressed Lee in Virginia in a series of costly battles, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor, and then besieged Petersburg. William T. Sherman captured Atlanta in September 1864, which helped Lincoln win re-election in November, and then marched through Georgia to the sea, destroying railroads, crops and property to break the South’s ability and will to fight. In April 1865 Lee abandoned Richmond and surrendered at Appomattox Court House on 9 April. Five days later Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth and died the next morning. The remaining Confederate armies surrendered over the following weeks.

At first Lincoln said his goal was to save the Union, not to end slavery, partly to keep the border states loyal. But enslaved people forced the issue. From the first months of the war they escaped to Union lines. In May 1861 the Union general Benjamin Butler at Fort Monroe, Virginia, refused to return three escaped men, calling them “contraband of war”. Congress then passed Confiscation Acts, and soon thousands of people were freeing themselves by reaching Union armies.

Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863, using his power as commander-in-chief. It declared free the enslaved people in areas still in rebellion, which covered most of the roughly four million enslaved people in the country. It did not apply to the loyal border states or to some Union-held areas, and it could only be enforced where Union armies went. Yet it changed the meaning of the war: every Union advance now became an advance of freedom, and it made it much harder for Britain or France to side with the Confederacy.

The Proclamation also authorised the enlistment of Black soldiers. About 180,000 Black men served in the Union army, in regiments of the United States Colored Troops, and about 19,000 more in the navy; most were formerly enslaved. They were paid less than white soldiers until 1864, and those captured faced massacre or enslavement, as at Fort Pillow in 1864. Their service, argued Frederick Douglass and others, gave Black Americans a strong claim to citizenship.

Because the Proclamation was a war measure, abolitionists wanted a permanent constitutional change. Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment in January 1865, and it was ratified in December 1865, ending slavery throughout the United States except as punishment for a crime, an exception that would later be used to force Black prisoners into labour. On 19 June 1865 Union troops announced emancipation in Galveston, Texas; the day is remembered as Juneteenth, which became a federal holiday in 2021.

For more than a century the usual figure for soldiers’ deaths was about 620,000, based on counts made in the late nineteenth century. In 2011 the historical demographer J. David Hacker used census data to estimate that about 750,000 soldiers died, with a plausible range of roughly 650,000 to 850,000. Many historians now cite his higher figure, but all numbers remain estimates, especially for the Confederacy, whose records are incomplete.

About two out of every three soldiers who died were killed by disease, such as dysentery, typhoid, pneumonia and measles, rather than by bullets. Prisoner-of-war camps were deadly: at Andersonville in Georgia, about 13,000 Union prisoners died. Many more soldiers returned home with amputated limbs or lasting psychological wounds.

Civilian deaths were never counted. Guerrilla warfare in Missouri and Kansas, the destruction of farms, hunger in the Confederacy, and disease in crowded camps all took lives. Formerly enslaved people who fled to Union lines often lived in crowded “contraband camps” where sickness spread; some historians, such as Jim Downs, have argued that these deaths were large and long ignored, although exact numbers cannot be known. The war also left hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans, and the South’s economy was ruined.

After the war the country had to decide how the Southern states would return and what rights freed people would have. President Andrew Johnson, who took over after Lincoln’s death, allowed Southern states to rejoin quickly under white leadership. Those states passed “Black Codes” that tried to force freed people back into labour under harsh conditions. In response, Congress took control of Reconstruction in 1867 and required new state constitutions with Black male voting.

Two more amendments transformed the Constitution: the Fourteenth (1868) made everyone born in the United States a citizen and promised “equal protection of the laws”, and the Fifteenth (1870) forbade denying the vote on account of race. The Freedmen’s Bureau, created in 1865, helped formerly enslaved people with food, schools and labour contracts. Freed people built churches and schools, reunited families separated by sale, and about 2,000 Black men held public office, including Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce in the U.S. Senate.

White Southern resistance was violent. The Ku Klux Klan and other groups murdered Black leaders and voters. Northern support for intervention faded, and after the disputed election of 1876, the “Compromise of 1877” ended the use of federal troops to protect Reconstruction governments. Over the next decades Southern states imposed racial segregation (“Jim Crow” laws) and took the vote from most Black citizens. Historian Eric Foner called Reconstruction “America’s unfinished revolution”: its promises of equality were only taken up again by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The war mattered far beyond the United States. Britain and France never recognised the Confederacy, but the question was debated, and British-built commerce raiders such as the CSS Alabama damaged Union shipping. After the war an international tribunal in Geneva (1872) ordered Britain to pay compensation for these “Alabama claims”, an early example of settling disputes by arbitration. The blockade caused a “cotton famine” in the textile districts of Lancashire, England; how far British workers supported the Union despite their hardship is still discussed by historians.

Many people abroad saw the war as a struggle about free labour and democracy. The International Workingmen’s Association, in an address drafted by Karl Marx, congratulated Lincoln on his re-election in 1864. The Union victory and the end of American slavery increased pressure on the remaining slave societies of the Americas, Brazil and Cuba, where slavery was abolished in 1888 and 1886. Some defeated Confederates emigrated to Brazil, where their descendants are still called “Confederados”.

The war also affected neighbours. While the United States was divided, France installed Maximilian of Habsburg as emperor of Mexico. After 1865 the United States pressed France to leave, and the French withdrew in 1866–67. Large amounts of surplus weapons from the war were sold abroad, including to Japan during the upheavals of the 1860s.

In the North, the war was remembered as a victory that saved the Union, and for many as a crusade that ended slavery. Union veterans formed the Grand Army of the Republic, and the custom of decorating soldiers’ graves grew into Memorial Day. For African Americans, the war was above all the story of emancipation: they celebrated Emancipation Day and Juneteenth, and writers such as Frederick Douglass warned against forgetting why the war had been fought.

In the white South, a powerful story called the “Lost Cause” developed. The term came from the title of an 1866 book by the Richmond journalist Edward A. Pollard. The Lost Cause claimed that the South had fought honourably for states’ rights, not slavery; that slavery had been kind and enslaved people loyal; that Confederate generals like Lee were noble heroes; and that the South lost only because the North had more men and factories. Organisations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy built hundreds of monuments, many of them during the Jim Crow era and again during the civil rights era, and worked to shape school textbooks.

By the early twentieth century, many white Americans in North and South embraced a “reconciliation” story focused on the bravery of soldiers on both sides, which left out slavery and Black Americans. The film The Birth of a Nation (1915) glorified the Ku Klux Klan, and Gone with the Wind (1939) romanticised the plantation South. In recent decades, especially after the racist murders at a Charleston church in 2015 and the violence in Charlottesville in 2017, many Confederate monuments and flags have been removed from public places, and debates about them remain part of American politics.

Outside the United States, the war is usually taught through the figure of Lincoln and the abolition of slavery. In Korea, for example, it is known mainly as the war that ended American slavery, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is widely quoted as a statement of democracy.

The war is one of the best-documented conflicts of the nineteenth century. The U.S. government published The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (1880–1901), a massive series of reports, orders and letters from both sides. Because Confederate records were partly lost in the burning of Richmond and elsewhere, the collection is fuller for the Union, and many reports were written by officers eager to justify themselves.

Political documents are central for the question of causes: the secession ordinances and “declarations of causes” of states such as South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia and Texas; Stephens’s Cornerstone Speech; Lincoln’s speeches and letters; and the debates of Congress. Ordinary people’s voices survive in millions of soldiers’ letters and diaries, women’s diaries such as that of Mary Chesnut in South Carolina, and newspapers from both sides. The war was also one of the first to be widely photographed; Alexander Gardner’s images of the dead at Antietam, displayed in Mathew Brady’s New York gallery in 1862, shocked the public.

The voices of enslaved and freed people require special attention. Sources include the writings of Frederick Douglass and other Black abolitionists, letters of Black soldiers, and records of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Freedmen and Southern Society Project, based at the University of Maryland, has published many of these documents. The interviews with formerly enslaved elders collected by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s are valuable but must be read carefully, because the interviewees were very old and were often questioned by white interviewers in the segregated South.

Early histories were written by participants defending their side. Jefferson Davis’s The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881) and the writings of Jubal Early and the Southern Historical Society helped make the Lost Cause a coherent narrative. In the early twentieth century, the “Dunning School”, historians trained by William A. Dunning at Columbia University, portrayed Reconstruction as a corrupt tragedy imposed on the white South; this view influenced textbooks and films for decades. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America (1935) challenged it, stressing the role of Black workers and voters, but was largely ignored by white academics at first.

In the 1920s Charles and Mary Beard interpreted the war as a clash between industrial capitalism and agrarian society. In the 1930s and 1940s so-called “revisionists”, such as James G. Randall and Avery Craven, argued that the war was avoidable, the product of extremists and a “blundering generation”. After the Second World War and during the civil rights movement, historians returned to slavery as the core issue. Eric Foner’s work on free-labour ideology, James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), and many studies of the secession crisis made the centrality of slavery the scholarly consensus.

Since the 1980s, historians have asked who freed the slaves. Scholars connected with the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, notably Ira Berlin, emphasised “self-emancipation” by enslaved people who fled and forced the issue; others, including McPherson, stressed that Lincoln’s decisions and Union military victory were indispensable. Most now see these as complementary. Eric Foner’s Reconstruction (1988) overturned the Dunning view, and David W. Blight’s Race and Reunion (2001) showed how white reconciliation was achieved by marginalising emancipation in public memory.

Current research explores the war’s environmental and medical history, the experiences of women, Native Americans and immigrants, guerrilla violence, the international context, and the demographic question of how many died, as in Hacker’s census-based estimate. Debates over monuments show that historiography is not only an academic matter: how the war is explained continues to shape American politics.