Gregory Bodenhamer Fortune 500 Manager Mechanicsburg Pa The war in Mexico. Polk had achieved his most important expansionist goals by the summer of 1846, but righting with Mexico continued for another two years. Taylor won important battles at Palo Alto and Monterrey in northern Mexico, making him a national hero. President Polk agreed to let Santa Anna, then in exile in Cuba, back into Mexico only if he promised to help negotiate a settlement. Santa Anna instead took command of the government and pledged continued resistance against the American invasion. Severely outnumbered, Santa Anna's forces were defeated by Taylor's troops at the Battle of Buena Vista (February 1847). The main theater of the war then shifted to the heart of Mexico. General Winfield Scott landed near Veracruz on March 29 and spent the spring and summer pressing the campaign toward Mexico City. The fall of the Mexican capital in September ended the war.

The war in Mexico. Polk had achieved his most important expansionist goals by the summer of 1846, but righting with Mexico continued for another two years. Taylor won important battles at Palo Alto and Monterrey in northern Mexico, making him a national hero. President Polk agreed to let Santa Anna, then in exile in Cuba, back into Mexico only if he promised to help negotiate a settlement. Santa Anna instead took command of the government and pledged continued resistance against the American invasion. Severely outnumbered, Santa Anna's forces were defeated by Taylor's troops at the Battle of Buena Vista (February 1847). The main theater of the war then shifted to the heart of Mexico. General Winfield Scott landed near Veracruz on March 29 and spent the spring and summer pressing the campaign toward Mexico City. The fall of the Mexican capital in September ended the war.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Nicholas Trist, an official in the State Department, opened negotiations with Mexico in January 1848. The resulting Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was ratified by Mexico in February and by the Senate in March. Under its terms, Mexico relinquished all claims to Texas north of the Rio Grande and ceded New Mexico and California to the United States. The lands of the Mexican Cession also encompassed Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. The United States agreed to pay $ 15 million for the new territory and an additional $3 million to assume the debt owed by Mexico to American citizens for past claims.

Slavery in the New Lands

With the Mexican War, the extension of slavery into the territories became a national issue, and several solutions to the problem were suggested. Shortly after the fighting began, Democrat David Wilmot of Pennsylvania introduced an amendment to an appropriation bill in the House of Representatives calling for the prohibition of slavery in any territory to be acquired from Mexico. Although the Wilmot Proviso never became law, John C. Calhoun responded to it with a series of resolutions, maintaining that any attempt to ban slavery was unconstitutional: slaves were property, and if a person wanted to take his property to another part of the country, no law could prevent him from doing so. Furthermore, the Fifth Amendment prevented Congress from depriving anyone of their property without due process. On middle ground between these two extreme positions was a proposal for “ squatter sovereignty” (later known as “ popular sovereignty”), championed by Lewis Cass of Michigan. Popular sovereignty, if accepted, would let the settlers themselves decide whether slavery would be allowed in their territory.

The election of 1848. With his foreign policy objectives achieved, Polk decided not to run for a second term. Zachary Taylor was the nominee of the Whigs. Although himself a slaveowner, he had not taken a public stand on slavery or any other major issue of the day and, in fact, had never voted in a national election. The Whigs had no party platform and ran the campaign solely on Taylor's war record. The Democrats chose Lewis Cass, but their platform called on Congress not to interfere with slavery and did not mention popular sovereignty. The wild card in the election was the Free-Soil party, a coalition of three groups: dissident Democrats who supported the Wilmot Proviso, members of the abolitionist Liberty party, and anti-slavery Whigs from New England.

The major parties ran a distinctly sectional campaign. In the North, the Whigs claimed that Taylor would back the Wilmot Proviso if Congress approved it, while they reminded southern voters that their candidate was a son of the South. The Democrats assured both parts of the country that the territories would decide the slavery question on their own without Congress, leaving northerners to believe that the West would be free and southerners confident that slaves would be allowed. The results of the election showed the effects of the campaign. Taylor won the presidency with 163 electoral votes (eight slave and seven free states) to Cass's 127 (seven slave and eight free states); the Free-Soil party did not win any states but did split the vote in New York to Taylor's favor and the Ohio vote in Cass's.

The California gold rush. In January 1848, gold was discovered in California. The news spread around the world and was confirmed by President Polk in his annual message to Congress in December. Tens of thousands of people, mostly white Americans, flooded into California, looking to make their fortune in the gold fields; a polyglot mix of free African Americans, Mexicans, Pacific Islanders, and Europeans rushed in as well. With the influx of the forty-niners, who were chiefly young men without families, the population of California reached one hundred thousand by the end of 1849 and continued to grow. Easy-to-locate gold deposits were soon played out, and by 1852, many miners found themselves wage earners for highly mechanized and well-financed mining operations. Others gave up prospecting soon after they arrived in California, realizing that more money could be made in providing food, lodging, and other services to the new arrivals.

The economic and social impact of the gold rush was less important at the time than California's political future. A state constitution that prohibited slavery was adopted in the fall of 1849, and in December, President Taylor recommended that California be admitted into the Union. Admission was a volatile issue because the numbers of slave and free states were balanced at fifteen each. Oregon had been organized as a free territory in 1848 on the basis of its provisional constitution and the fact that it lay north of the line established by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Extending that line—36°30′ north latitude—to the Pacific would have cut California in two. It fell to Congress, which had scrupulously tried to avoid the slavery question for almost three decades, to decide slavery's fate in California and the rest of the Mexican Cession.

Compromise of 1850

The decade preceding the Civil War began positively with a compromise that seemed to settle the several outstanding issues of the Mexican Cession. Despite lawmakers' efforts, however, slavery remained a burning national question; new political alignments were formed that reflected the division of the country between North and South, and the creation of new territories raised anew the problem of the extension of slavery. Court decisions and popular literature hardened the feelings of both proslavery and antislavery individuals. In the end, the nation could not overcome the fundamental divisions over slavery and states' rights, and the Union was dissolved.

With California ready for statehood in 1850, a solution to the problem of the extension of slavery raised by the Mexican Cession could no longer be delayed. Although President Taylor was the titular head of the Whigs, he had little political clout. The Whigs turned to Henry Clay, who was responsible for the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the settlement of the nullification controversy in the 1830s, to devise yet another compromise that would satisfy all factions.

Clay's omnibus bill. Clay knew that the issues dividing the country went beyond the lands acquired from the war with Mexico. Many northerners were concerned about slaves still being bought and sold in the nation's capital, while southerners wanted a more effective means than the 1793 fugitive slave law for recapturing their runaway slaves. In January 1850, Clay presented a series of resolutions known as the omnibus bill, which addressed all the outstanding questions. According to the bill, California would be admitted to the Union as a free state; New Mexico and Utah would be organized as territories with the status of slavery to be decided by popular sovereignty; the slave trade, but not slavery itself, would be terminated in the District of Columbia; the fugitive slave law would be strengthened; Congress would declare that it had no right to interfere in the interstate slave trade; the disputed boundary between Texas and New Mexico would be adjusted; and the United States would assume the pre-annexation debt of Texas.

The politics of compromise. The debate in the Senate on the omnibus bill stretched out for six months amid talk of the southern states' seceding from the Union. Clay made an eloquent defense of his proposed settlement on the Senate floor, strongly emphasizing that secession would lead only to war. Calhoun, too ill to deliver his response to Clay's speech, listened as a colleague read it for him. He called for equal rights for the South in the territories, an end to attacks against slavery, and a constitutional amendment that would, in some vaguely described manner, restore power to the southern states. Daniel Webster spoke in support of the compromise and criticized extremists on both sides of the issues—abolitionists as well as the vocal defenders of slavery. He argued that the climate and soil of the territories precluded the extension of slavery there. Senator William H. Seward of New York condemned Clay's resolutions on the grounds that any compromise with slavery was wrong.

The omnibus bill failed because all of the measures had to be voted on as a package. Senator Stephen Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois, rescued the compromise by pushing through five separate bills, each of which independently drew enough support to pass. In addition to admitting California as a free state, the Compromise of 1850 included the following four pieces of legislation: the Texas and New Mexico Act, under which New Mexico became a territory without restrictions on slavery (that is, the matter was to be settled by popular sovereignty) and the boundary between Texas and New Mexico was settled, with the United States paying Texas $10 million to relinquish all its territorial claims; the Utah Act, which established Utah as a territory under the same terms as New Mexico regarding slavery; an amendment to the Fugitive Slave Act, which put all cases involving runaway slaves under federal jurisdiction in a manner that clearly favored slaveowners; and the Act Abolishing the Slave Trade in the District of Columbia, which did exactly what its title indicates—it abolished commerce in slaves in the capital city, effective January 1, 1851, with the further provision that the District of Columbia could not be used as a shipping point for the purpose of sale.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Although the running away of slaves was never a serious problem, the new fugitive slave law was the one major victory the South won from the Compromise of 1850; it was also the most controversial. Special commissioners were appointed to hear cases regarding fugitives and could issue warrants for the arrest of runaway slaves; the commissioners received ten dollars for every alleged runaway returned to his or her owner but only five dollars if it was determined that the slave should not be returned. Slaves who claimed to be free were not permitted to testify in their own defense and did not have recourse to a jury trial. Anyone who interfered with the capture of fugitive slaves faced heavy fines, and obstructing the return of a slave was punishable by fines, imprisonment, and civil liabilities. Despite the law's enforcement provisions, several northern states enacted personal liberty laws, which prohibited officials from aiding in the recovery of fugitive slaves. Occasionally, violence broke out when a crowd of abolitionists tried to “rescue” slaves who were about to be brought before commissioners. The refusal of many northerners to cooperate with agents exercising their rights under the law made the Fugitive Slave Act a dead letter as soon as it was enacted.

The impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Northern views of slavery hardened after the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's sentimental novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, in which she wrote about the injustice of the institution in reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The daughter of the noted preacher Lyman Beecher and sister of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, Stowe first serialized Uncle Tom's Cabin in an abolitionist magazine in 1851. The story appeared as a book the following year. The novel dramatically portrays the terror of the slave Eliza as she runs across ice floes on the Ohio River, clutching her tiny baby, and the nobility of Uncle Tom as he is whipped to death by Simon Legree. The book makes it clear that the concept of slavery is inherently evil; although Tom had been owned by a “kindly master” before he was sold to Legree, it was the institution itself that led to families being torn apart.

Stowe's novel was an immediate success, selling two million copies by the end of 1852 and waking a mass audience to the harshness of slavery. The impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin is difficult to overestimate. According to Stowe's son, when President Lincoln met Mrs. Stowe at a White House affair, he is alleged to have remarked, “So this is the little lady who started the Civil War.” The story is probably apocryphal, but it makes the point that northern views on slavery indeed changed after the publication of her novel.

Political Realignment in the 1850s

The presidential election of 1852 marked the beginning of the end of the Whig party. With its northern and southern wings divided over the Fugitive Slave Law, the best the party could do was nominate another hero of the Mexican War, General Winfield Scott. The Democrats turned away from Millard Fillmore, Taylor's vice president, who had succeeded to the presidency upon Taylor's death in 1850, and chose Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire as their candidate. Although both parties supported the Compromise of 1850, the Democrats were able to better overcome their internal differences, and Pierce won a landslide victory in the Electoral College, 254 to 42. The Whigs never recovered from the defeat.

The election of 1852 was an important watershed. As the Whig party fell apart, Americans formed new political alignments. Southern Whigs moved into the Democratic party, while northern Whigs joined the new Republican party, formed in 1855. In addition, another party—the American party (also known as the Know-Nothings)—attracted anti-immigration nativists, opponents of the extension of slavery, and voters disillusioned with the performance of both the Whigs and Democrats. The year 1852 also marked the last election for eighty years in which candidates from both parties collected popular and electoral votes from throughout the country; party affiliation and voter support remained largely sectional until the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Compromise of 1850 did not address the issue of slavery in the large unorganized territory in the Great Plains, but with California clamoring for the construction of a transcontinental railroad link to the East, the issue had to be addressed. Senator Douglas, who favored a northern rail route to California that would benefit Chicago, was the author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It created two territories—Kansas and Nebraska—and declared the Missouri Compromise null and void; the matter of slavery in the new territories would be decided by popular sovereignty. Personally, Douglas assumed that Nebraska would become a free state and that Kansas would allow slavery.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act created far more problems than it purported to solve. Antislavery northerners, who held the Missouri Compromise sacrosanct, thought the legislation sold Kansas into slavery, and they condemned Douglas for being a dupe of southern interests. Their suspicions gained credibility with the ratification of the Gadsden Purchase at the end of 1853. President Pierce had sent James Gadsden, a railroad expert who happened to be a southerner, to Mexico to negotiate the purchase of the Mesilla Valley, the area south of the Gila River in present-day Arizona. An army survey had indicated this region to be a feasible route for a southerly transcontinental railroad, which had considerable support in the South. The treaty originally included Baja California, but opposition from free-soilers limited the purchase to the land that makes up the southern borders of Arizona and New Mexico today. The purchase completed the continental expansion of the United States.

“ Bleeding Kansas.” Senator Douglas did not anticipate the violence that would accompany the creation of the Kansas Territory, as both proslavery and antislavery settlers rushed in to gain control of the government. Competing territorial legislatures were established in 1855, and the free-state force drafted a constitution prohibiting not only slavery but also the settling of free blacks in Kansas. On May 21, 1856, a proslavery mob attacked the free-state stronghold at Lawrence, burning buildings and destroying property. John Brown, a militant abolitionist, and a small band of supporters retaliated by killing five men at Pottawatomie Creek a few days later. Violence erupted in the U.S. Senate over Kansas as well. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts condemned southerners for their actions in Kansas in extremely strong language. Preston Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina, decided to punish Sumner for his insults and beat him with his cane in a confrontation in the Senate chamber. Onlookers from the South did nothing to help Sumner.

The election of 1856. The new Republican party chose Californian John C. Fremont, explorer and military leader, as its presidential candidate in 1856. The party's platform, which condemned the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and called for free soil, was more important than the nominee; the Republicans were the first major political party to fake a position on slavery. James Buchanan, an experienced politician and diplomat who had served in both the House and Senate and had been secretary of state in the Polk administration, was the Democratic candidate. He ran on a platform that endorsed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and congressional noninterference in slavery. The American party turned to former president Millard Fillmore.

The Republicans recognized that they had no chance of winning in the slave states, so there were in effect two sectional campaigns: Frémont against Buchanan in the North and Buchanan against Fillmore in the South. The American party's anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant stand cost it dearly. The Democrats swept the South with the exception of the border states of Maryland and Delaware and also showed strength in key northern states, where their attacks against nativism and calls for religious freedom gained the party support from ethnic voters. Fremont won eleven of the sixteen free states and came close to winning the election without any backing at all in the South, which was significant because it showed that a party with an antislavery platform and an exclusively northern base could win the presidency.

Union in Crisis

Buchanan won, but his term in office began inauspiciously. Two days after his inauguration, the Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford, a key case that addressed the status of African Americans in American society. The ruling of Chief Justice Roger Taney was hailed in the South but blasted by infuriated antislavery forces in the North. The decision further heightened the sectional tensions in the country.

The Dred Scott decision. As a slave, Dred Scott had been taken by his master from the slave state of Missouri to the free state of Illinois and then to the free territory of Wisconsin, where they lived during the 1830s. After his master died, Scott tried to buy his freedom; when that failed, he sought relief in the courts. He claimed that although he had been brought back to Missouri, his past residence in a free state and territory had made him a free person.

Taney's decision effectively rejected Scott's claim from the outset. He stated that Scott was a slave, not a citizen of either the United States or Missouri, and therefore had no right to bring suit in the federal courts. Taney put forward a racial justification for denying blacks, free or slave, the rights of citizenship. From the time the Constitution was ratified, African Americans were “regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations.” Further, Taney declared that the Missouri Compromise, which had created the concept of free and slave states based on geography, had been unconstitutional from its inception because it violated the Fifth Amendment's protection of property. In his view, slaves were nothing more than property, as southerners had always asserted they were.

The Dred Scott decision astonished antislavery northerners, who took their wrath out on Buchanan. Even though the president had not appointed the Taney Court and had no influence on its decision, he was seen as another puppet of the slaveowners. The fact that Buchanan was one of the signatories of the Ostend Manifesto (1854), which threatened an American takeover of Cuba after Spain had spurned an offer from the United States to buy the colony, seemed to give additional credence to this view. It was widely believed that the South was interested in acquiring Cuba to make it a slave state.

More trouble in Kansas. Despite his political troubles, Buchanan hoped to bring about a solution to the tensions in Kansas between the rival territorial governments. He suggested that an elected territorial convention create a constitution either permitting or prohibiting slavery and that Congress, after reviewing the document, vote on admitting Kansas as a state. The president failed to take into account the numerous instances of voting fraud in the territory's brief history. Although in the majority, free-staters boycotted the election for the convention, and the proslavery delegates left in control drafted a constitution that permitted slavery. Through a territorial referendum limited to just the constitution's slavery provisions, also boycotted by the antislavery forces, the Lecompton Constitution was approved. The free-state legislature called for another vote on the constitution, and the result was overwhelmingly negative. Although a proponent of popular sovereignty, Buchanan endorsed the Lecompton Constitution anyway as a way of paying back his southern supporters and tried to get Kansas admitted to the Union as a slave state. Congress, however, ordered yet another closely supervised election, and the voters rejected the Lecompton Constitution for a second time. With that vote, Kansas was no longer a burning issue in national politics. Buchanan's inept handling of the Kansas constitution succeeded only in alienating northern Democrats.

The Panic of 1857. An economic downturn in late 1857 hurt business conditions. California gold had inflated the nation's currency, and speculators had overly promoted railroads and real estate. Unemployment rose, and grain prices fell because of oversupply, but cotton prices dipped and then quickly recovered. The fact that the South weathered the depression much better than the North was taken by southerners as an important sign of the strength of the southern economy. The more radical individuals in the region, who were seriously considering secession, believed that the South could function independently of the North on cotton exports alone. Northern business interests blamed their problems squarely on Democratic policies, particularly the Tariff of 1857, which had lowered rates significantly. The panic gave the Republicans powerful ammunition for the upcoming presidential election: protective tariffs for business and liberal land laws for encouraging the creation of family farms.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates. Senator Douglas had broken with Buchanan over the Lecompton Constitution and was a likely challenge to him for the Democratic nomination in 1860. In Douglas's crucial 1858 Senate reelection campaign, his Republican opponent was Abraham Lincoln, who had been long involved in first Whig and men Republican party politics but had little personal national experience. The debates between the two candidates revolved around their position on slavery. Although Lincoln favored limiting slavery to the states where it already existed and accepted that race made social and political equality for blacks impossible, Douglas was able to portray him as an abolitionist for all intents and purposes. When Douglas was asked how he could reconcile popular sovereignty with the Dred Scott decision, the best he could come up with was a weak argument that voters in a territory could reject laws that protected slaves as property. This concept became known as the Freeport Doctrine, after the town where the particular debate took place. Although Lincoln lost the election, he did become a national figure, popular in the North but hated in the South.

The Harpers Ferry incident. As the decade drew to a close, the North and South grew increasingly polarized. It became difficult to distinguish among those who wanted to abolish slavery immediately, those who simply opposed slavery, and those who were just against the extension of slavery. To southerners, particularly the more radical, anything less than unconditional acceptance of slavery was intolerable. The time for reasoned debate was quickly passing, and critical events escalated the tension.

In October 1859, the fiery John Brown, who had already gained national notoriety for his actions in Kansas, raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with the apparent objective of fomenting a slave revolt. Federal troops captured Brown and his small band; tried for and convicted of treason, he was hanged on December 2. Southerners soon learned that Brown had connections with prominent abolitionists. While many northerners hailed him as a martyr to the cause of freedom, southerners concluded that the raid on Harpers Ferry was not an isolated incident but part of a conspiracy to mobilize slaves in a mass insurrection. Feeling that their entire way of life was under imminent attack, some southerners looked to secession—leaving the Union—as the only solution. The outcome of the upcoming presidential election would be crucial.

The election of 1860. To counteract the image of the Republican party as the party of the abolitionists, the Republicans broadened their program to include a protective tariff, free 160-acre homesteads from the public domain, and a more moderate stand on slavery. New York's William Seward, long known for his abolitionist views, was too radical a candidate; therefore, the Republicans nominated Lincoln.

The Democratic party, faced with the challenge of choosing someone who could appeal to all their factions, split in two. The Democrats' convention was in Charleston, South Carolina, the home of the late Calhoun and a hot bed of radical southern sentiment since the 1820s. A platform plank endorsing popular sovereignty was adopted, which prompted the delegates from the Deep South to bolt the convention; the remaining delegates could not agree on a nominee. The Democrats then moved to Baltimore and eventually selected Stephen Douglas for their candidate—the decision that split the party. Southern Democrats, who wanted federal protection of slavery in the territories, opted to run their own candidate, Buchanan's vice president, John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. Meanwhile, a group of southern moderates joined with former northern Whigs to form the Constitutional Union party, and they chose John Bell, a Tennessee slaveowner who had opposed the Lecompton Constitution, for their candidate.

With the Democratic party divided, Lincoln's election was effectively guaranteed. Although Douglas did relatively well in the popular vote, Lincoln won every state north of the Mason-Dixon Line, along with California and Oregon. The Deep South, from North Carolina to Texas, went to Breckinridge, while Bell took Virginia, Kentucky, and his home state of Tennessee.

From secession to Fort Sumter. Lincoln's election was the signal for secession. Not surprising, South Carolina left first (December 20, 1860), followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Representatives of the seven states met in Montgomery, Alabama, in February 1861 to form the Confederate States of America, draft a new constitution, and elect Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as their first president. Last-minute efforts to compromise failed. Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky tried to work out an arrangement whereby owners of runaway slaves would be compensated for their loss and to amend the Constitution to bar the federal government from interfering with slavery in the South, but events had moved beyond compromise, and the Republicans rejected Crittenden's proposals in any event.

The crucial issue was no longer slavery but whether the southern states would be allowed to secede. By the time Lincoln took office in March, the Confederacy had already commandeered federal arsenals, post offices, government buildings and offices, and most military installations within its territory. Fort Sumter, located on an island in Charleston Harbor, was still in the hands of the United States. Buchanan had tried to send reinforcements and supplies to the fort but backed off when the relief ship was fired upon from the mainland shore. Lincoln tried another approach, announcing that he was sending in just food and medical supplies, not additional troops or ammunition. The South could not abide a continued Union presence in Charleston, and early on April 12, 1861, Confederate artillery opened fire on Fort Sumter. The U.S. forces surrendered the next day. The South had fired the first shot, and Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand volunteers to suppress the insurrection. Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee joined the Confederacy during the next month. The Civil War had begun.

Balance of Forces

At the beginning of the Civil War, the goal of the North was simply to restore the Union. In his first inaugural address (March 4, 1861), President Abraham Lincoln made it very clear that he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it already existed. This point was reiterated in resolutions adopted by Congress in July that stated the war was not waged against “the established institutions” of the southern states. As the conflict dragged on, however, the president realized that the slavery issue could not be avoided—for political, military, and moral reasons. By 1863, the purpose of the war had broadened into a crusade against slavery. Southern leaders fought the war under the dual banners of states' rights and preserving their way of life. Although the overwhelming majority of southerners did not own slaves, support for slavery was widespread, and southerners were deeply concerned about what would happen if it was abolished. The fact that almost all the fighting took place in the South meant that southerners defended their homes against an invading army throughout the Civil War.

The North had clear advantages over the South at the start of the war. While the South's population was just nine million (more than three million of which were slaves), more than twenty-two million people lived in the northern and border states. The North had the resources and manpower to equip and put many more men in the field than the South and was comparatively an industrial powerhouse, far outstripping the Confederacy in available raw materials, factory production, and railroads. Despite these strengths, the North did face problems, and the South was not as weak as it initially appeared.

The problems of the North. That Lincoln won the presidency in 1860 with only forty percent of the popular vote indicated that he did not start his term with an overwhelming political mandate. His own party was divided into Moderates and Radicals; the latter favored immediate emancipation and tried to interfere with his method of conducting the war. The Democratic party in the North, while generally supportive of the administration, contained a peace faction known as the Copperheads their loyalty to the Union was doubted. Militarily, the North faced the difficult challenges of invading a large territory, maintaining long supply lines, and dealing with hostile southern civilians, all of which made its numerical superiority less effective. Northern generals proved less daring and innovative than their southern counterparts, particularly during the early stages of the war.

Advantages and expectations in the South. The South intended to fight a mainly defensive war, which meant it needed fewer troops than the invading army. With slaves working either on the farms or in Confederate labor battalions, more white soldiers were available for combat duty than would have been without slavery. Southern strategy, formed from an assumption that support for the war in the North was weak, was to wear down the Union forces until Lincoln was ready to accept the independence of the Confederacy. The South also had a greater number of experienced military commanders than the North; many U.S. army officers, including veterans of the Mexican War, resigned their commissions to fight on the Confederate side when the hostilities broke out. Southerners knew that their economy was not self-sufficient, particularly in wartime, but they anticipated outside help. They fully expected the dependence of Great Britain and France on cotton imports to lead to diplomatic recognition and direct material aid.

Fighting the War

Everyone expected a short war. Indeed, Lincoln's first call for volunteers required just a ninety-day enlistment. After the First Battle of Bull Run (July 1861), the hope for a quick victory faded, and the Union implemented the Anaconda Plan. Named for the South American constrictor, it was intended to slowly crush the South with a naval blockade of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and an invasion along the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Mississippi rivers to slice the Confederacy in half. The defense of Washington, D.C., and pressure on the Confederate capital at Richmond were also part of the northern strategy. Jefferson Davis's defensive strategy took advantage of fighting on familiar territory and keeping his army close to the bases of supply. The South was prepared to go on the offensive and move into the North through Maryland and Pennsylvania, however, if opportunities presented themselves.

The war in the East. The first major engagement of the war was a disaster for the North. At the First Battle of Bull Run in Virginia, thirty thousand Union troops were routed by a smaller Confederate force as politicians and their families from Washington picnicked on the hills above the battlefield. The defeat prompted Lincoln to put General George McClellan in command of the Army of the Potomac. McClellan spent the next nine months transforming his men into welltrained and disciplined soldiers but then seemed reluctant to let them fight. The army suffered another defeat when it finally did go into the field during the Peninsula Campaign (March–July 1862), an attempt to take Richmond by sea. In September, the South went on the offensive. The Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee moved into Maryland and met the Union troops at the Battle of Antietam. The bloodiest confrontation of the war ended inconclusively but for the fact that Lee's retreat allowed McClellan to claim victory. Antietam was significant because the outcome finally gave Lincoln the opportunity to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which probably ended any chance the South had of getting Great Britain and France to intervene. Also significant was Lincoln's dismissal of McClellan following his failure to pursue Lee's retreating army; the commander in chief and the general became bitter political rivals.

Lincoln first replaced McClellan with General Ambrose Burnside. Burnside's doubts about his own ability to lead a large army proved correct, and he lost a major battle against Lee and Lieutenant General “Stonewall” Jackson at Fredericksburg in December 1862. The president then turned to General “Fighting Joe” Hooker. Despite Hooker's overwhelming numerical superiority on the battlefield—about one hundred thirty thousand Union troops against sixty thousand southern troops under Lee and Jackson—he was unable to prevent a major Confederate victory at Chancellorsville (May 1863).

The war in the West. The Union army had greater success in the West. After driving Confederate forces out of Kentucky, Ulysses S. Grant moved into Tennessee, where he narrowly averted defeat at Shiloh (April 1862), and then proceeded to the Mississippi River, where he captured Memphis (June 1862). Grant's troops moved downriver to lay siege to the important river town of Vicksburg, which held out until July 1863. The navy, under Admiral David Farragut, played an important role in the western campaign, taking New Orleans and then Baton Rouge in May 1862. During the siege of Vicksburg, however, fighting in the West became a stalemate.

Farragut's successes on the Mississippi River were not the only significant naval engagements of the war. The Confederates salvaged the Merrimack, a scuttled Union warship in the Norfolk navy yard, reinforced it with iron sheathing, and renamed it the Virginia. The ironclad Virginia sailed the short distance to Hampton Roads, where it sank several wooden-sided Union ships on blockade duty. The North hastily built its own ironclad, the Monitor, an odd vessel that one observer said resembled a “cheese box on a raft.” The Monitor and the Virginia clashed on March 9, 1862. Cannon balls bounced off their iron sides, and neither ship could sink the other. The lesson was clear: future navies would turn to steam-powered, ironclad battleships.

The war and diplomacy. The South recognized early that support from other countries could well be decisive in determining the outcome of the war. In Great Britain, public opinion was divided. Merchants and mill owners backed the Confederacy because it was the major supplier of cotton for British textiles mills, but there was also widespread opposition to slavery and the slave trade. Early in the war, relations between the United States and Great Britain soured over the Trent Affair. The British steamer Trent was stopped by the U.S. navy, and two Confederate diplomats en route to England to seek recognition for the South were taken off. When the British demanded their release on grounds of diplomatic immunity, Lincoln ordered them set free. The British as well as the French built ships for the South, the most notoriously destructive of which was the English-built Alabama, but U.S. threats of war forced both countries to back off. Although the foreign-built ships were helpful to the Confederacy, they did not alter the outcome of the war.

France took advantage of the Civil War to pursue its own agenda in the Western Hemisphere. Using alleged unpaid debts as a pretext for intervention, French troops invaded Mexico in 1863 and installed Maximilian of Austria as the “Emperor of Mexico.” The United States could do nothing about this blatant violation of the Monroe Doctrine during the war, but it came to the aid of Mexico's legitimate president, Benito Juárez, by moving fifty thousand troops to the border in 1866. France withdrew its forces, and Maximilian ended up in front of a Mexican firing squad.

The war and manpower. Although the majority of soldiers on both sides during the Civil War were volunteers, the Confederacy and Union did resort to the draft as the fighting expanded. Conscription of men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five (the range was later extended to include men aged seventeen to fifty) for a three-year period became law in the South in April 1862. Planters with twenty or more slaves and men employed in what were considered to be essential civilian jobs were exempt. Military service could also be avoided by finding a substitute or simply paying five hundred dollars to the government. The draft in the North was instituted about a year later (March 1863) for men between the ages of twenty and forty-five, and it too included provisions for substitution and payment (three hundred dollars). In July 1863 in New York City, mobs made up largely of Irish immigrants rioted against the Union conscription law and took out their anger on African Americans, whom they blamed for the war. The exemptions and the ability of the wealthy to buy their way out of service caused dissension as troops began to see the conflict as “a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.” The percentage of draftees in the Confederate troops was considerably higher than the percentage in the Union army.

Emancipation

Early in the war, to keep the border states in the Union, Lincoln resisted the demands of the Radical Republicans to free the slaves. Military commanders, though, sometimes took action counter to Lincoln's policy during actual fighting. For example, faced with slaves who had run away to Union lines, General B. F. Butler treated them as contraband and did not return them to their owners (May 1861). General John C. Frémont, in charge of the Department of the West, which included Missouri and Kansas, confiscated the property of rebels and declared their slaves emancipated (August 1861). Lincoln effectively countermanded Frémont's order. Congress, meanwhile, enacted measures that whittled away at slavery. The Confiscation Act of 1861 allowed captured or runaway slaves who had been in use by the Confederacy to support the Union effort instead. Slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia with compensation in April 1862 and in the territories in June 1862. The Second Confiscation Act (July 1862) gave real freedom to slaves belonging to anyone actively participating in the war against the Union.

Lincoln and gradual emancipation. Lincoln proposed a plan for gradual emancipation that was by definition a long-term solution to the slavery problem. The plan was aimed at pacifying the slave states that remained in the Union. Lincoln outlined his ideas on several occasions between 1861 and 1862, the fullest statement coming in his Second Message to Congress in December 1862. He urged the House and Senate to adopt a constitutional amendment under which states that abolished slavery by 1900 would be compensated by the federal government. Runaway-slave owners who remained loyal to the United States would also be compensated for their losses. The amendment authorized Congress to appropriate funds to resettle free blacks, if they consented, outside of the country. Although Lincoln himself did not think resettlement was necessary, the idea addressed the deep racial prejudice existing in the country as a whole and particularly white fears about competing for jobs with millions of former slaves.

The Emancipation Proclamation. Despite his support for gradual emancipation, Lincoln soon realized that immediate action was necessary, both on military and moral grounds. Slaves were an asset to the Confederate war effort, and public opinion in the North was shifting in favor of emancipation. Following the Union “victory” at Antietam, the president issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (September 22, 1862), which granted freedom to all slaves in the Confederate states and in other areas of active rebellion as of January 1, 1863. The proclamation did not apply to the slaveholding border states, nor would it apply to any Confederate states that rejoined the Union before the deadline. The formal Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, specifically delineated the Confederate territory where slaves were freed, urged the slaves not to resort to violence except in self-defense, and confirmed that African Americans could serve in the Union army and navy.

Despite its limited scope, the Emancipation Proclamation redefined the purpose of the war. Southerners as well as northern Copperheads recognized this fact, and they condemned Lincoln's actions as tantamount to promoting a slave insurrection throughout the Confederacy. The slaves themselves responded with jubilation, not rebellion, and those who could fled to the Union lines, where their symbolic freedom could become a reality.

Blacks in the Civil War. Almost two hundred thousand African Americans fought in the Civil War, the majority of them former slaves. Organized into segregated units under white officers, they received less pay than white soldiers until Congress remedied the inequity in June 1864. At first, black troops were used only for menial jobs behind the lines. When finally allowed into combat, they distinguished themselves and earned grudging respect for their courage under fire. Black soldiers knew quite well that they faced summary execution or reenslavement if captured. Around thirty-seven thousand were killed during the war, a number that represents a significantly higher casualty rate than that of white soldiers.

The Confederacy used slaves as laborers to construct trenches and earthworks and as cooks and teamsters in military camps. With the South's manpower reserves dwindling in late 1864, Jefferson Davis proposed putting slaves into the army. The idea of slaves defending a government committed to the preservation of slavery while the opposing side was pledged to end it was one of the great ironies of the war. The Confederate Congress in fact passed legislation in March 1865 for the call-up of three hundred thousand slaves for the army, but the fighting stopped before the law went into effect.

Politics and Economics of the War

In the North, the Republican-controlled Congress implemented the party's domestic program. The Pacific Railroad Act (1862) authorized the construction of the first transcontinental line from both Omaha, Nebraska, and Sacramento, California. The Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroad companies received more than sixty million acres of land at no cost and $20 million in very generous loans from the federal government, and together they completed the line in 1869. Republicans had always favored a liberal land policy, and the Homestead Act (1862) granted 160 acres free of charge (except for a small registration fee) to any farmer who worked the land for five years. The Morrill Land Grant Act (1862) was a boost to higher education in the country. States were given public lands for the purpose of establishing colleges for “agriculture and the mechanical arts.” Today's state university systems are based on these “land grant” colleges.

Financing the war. The war was expensive for both sides. The Union raised money through higher tariffs, an excise tax that raised prices on most goods and services, and the imposition of the first federal income tax. The Bureau of Internal Revenue was established to collect taxes. Congress ordered paper money, known as greenbacks, to be printed as legal tender that could be used to pay debts but could not be redeemed for hard currency. Greenbacks and bonds issued by the federal government provided the main sources of revenue for the war effort. Bonds were sold through a network of agents and increased the national debt to almost $3 billion by 1865.

War created the opportunity for profiteering. The Union awarded millions of dollars in contracts to businesses for firearms, uniforms, and a broad range of military equipment and supplies. The contractors often took advantage of the federal government's largesse. One of the most notorious examples was manufacturers' use of shoddy, a cheap cloth made from compressed rag fiber, for making uniforms, which quickly fell apart. The word “shoddy” entered the English language as an adjective for anything of very poor quality.

The Confederacy, which was unable to secure the loans it expected from overseas, faced far worse financial problems than the Union. While taxes were raised in the same manner as in the North, they were difficult to collect and provided less than five percent of the South's wartime revenue. Confederate paper money was not declared legal tender, so there was little to no public confidence in it. Inflation became a major problem as more and more paper money was put into circulation; the value of a Confederate dollar dropped to just over one and a half cents in gold by the end of the war. Prices in the South rose by more than nine thousand percent between 1861 and 1865.

Civil liberties and the war. Some basic civil liberties were also casualties of the war. Lincoln, with the ultimate approval of Congress, suspended the writ of habeas corpus early in the conflict, and individuals suspected of disloyalty or active work against the Union were arrested without formal charges. While most of the nearly fourteen thousand who were detained were never brought to trial, those who were tried came under the jurisdiction of military courts. The reliance on military courts for trying civilians was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Ex parte Milligan in 1866.