Secession
After the war against Mexico ended, the U.S. divided along sectional lines. For years, industrialization in the northern states sustained a manufacturing sector and free labor. At the same time, southern states largely depended upon plantation agriculture and slave labor for growth. The rapid expansion of the nation intensified the fearsome competition between the North and the South.
As the population in the western territories began to surge, the question for the nation was: Would new states enter the Union “free” or “slave”? The Compromise of 1850 permitted California to enter as a free state while making several concessions to southern congressmen in respect to other contentious issues. For example, the Fugitive Slave Act made the federal government responsible for apprehending runaway slaves. Rather than easing the sectional tensions caused by black chattel slavery, the politics of compromise infuriated northern abolitionists.
With American corporations developing a transcontinental railroad, the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 led to another dispute between the sections. According to the law's concept of popular sovereignty, the settlers of each territory would decide for themselves whether or not to permit slaveholding. Antislavery members of Congress denounced it as an effort to turn the Trans-Mississippi West into “a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.” Groups of “free soilers” set out to save Kansas from a “slave power conspiracy.” In the town of Lawrence, they clashed with “border ruffians” from neighboring Missouri. An abolitionist named John Brown attacked opponents at Pottawatomie Creek, where his party dragged five men from their houses, split open their skulls, cut off their hands, and laid out their entrails. Two separate governments organized in Lecompton and in Topeka, each vying for federal recognition. Army regulars attempted to restore order among the partisan bands without success. For years, fighting between proslavery and antislavery forces raged in “bleeding Kansas.”
Democrat James Buchanan became president in 1857 but failed to stop the forces of disunion. The Republican Party, which northerners organized to promote the “free soil” doctrine, opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories. Amid the rancor, the Supreme Court opined that Congress lacked the authority to restrict the property rights of slaveholders. A financial panic upset southern “fire-eaters,” who blamed the economic downturn on “Yankee” businesses and high tariffs. Abraham Lincoln, a Republican candidate for the Senate the next year, intoned: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
The partisanship of the Republicans and the Democrats exacerbated the quarrels between the North and the South, which made the ideological disagreements almost impossible to resolve. Heading east from Kansas, the fanatical Brown attempted to foment a slave insurrection inside Virginia. On October 16, 1859, he seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in a forlorn effort to distribute arms to slaves. Along with 20 accomplices, he anticipated waging a “holy war” in the mountains. After taking hostages, they hid in a fire-engine house adjacent to the armory. Militiamen surrounded them, as Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee arrived on the scene with a detachment of marines. Brown was captured, tried, and hanged for treason. Consequently, abolitionists referred to him as a martyr.
In the wake of the raid, Lincoln narrowly won the presidential election on November 6, 1860. Assuming that the president-elect threatened slavery, South Carolina quickly passed an ordinance declaring that the Union “is hereby dissolved.” Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas soon joined the secessionist movement. On February 7, 1861, the seceding states established a provisional framework for the Confederate States of America. The Confederates seized arsenals, forts, mints, and other property of the federal government within their borders – save Fort Pickens outside Pensacola and Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. While a “lame duck” in office, Buchanan did almost nothing to stop the rebellion.
As Buchanan dithered in the White House, the leaders of the rebellion elected Jefferson Davis as the first and only President of the Confederate States of America. He remained devoted to states' rights in addition to “King Cotton.” His administration abided by a new Constitution, which made slaveholding a cornerstone of civil society. Noted for his considerable knowledge of military affairs, he gambled that European recognition of the Confederacy was inevitable.
Winfield Scott, the general-in-chief of the Army, worried that the “rashness” of the Confederacy threatened the safety of the 68 soldiers garrisoned at Fort Sumter. He ordered an attempt to resupply Major Robert Anderson, the commander of the garrison. However, Confederate batteries fired a salvo upon an unarmed steamer, Star of the West. Though an act of war, it merely drove the supply ship away from Charleston. After taking office on March 4, 1861, Lincoln learned that Fort Sumter would not hold out much longer without provisions.
During his inauguration, the president addressed the impending crisis. Though pledging not to interfere with slavery where it already existed, he refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Confederacy. In other words, the ordinances for secession were illegal. Furthermore, he placed the onus for the “momentous issue of civil war” upon the South. While promising to preserve, protect, and defend the American republic, his words denied any intention of belligerence. Instead, he concluded with a plea to “the better angels of our nature.”
After taking command of Confederate outfits in Charleston, General Pierre G. T. Beauregard delivered an ultimatum to Anderson, his erstwhile instructor at West Point. Anderson remained steadfast and rejected his former student's demand to surrender. With time running out, Lincoln sent a fleet of ships to resupply the garrison. At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, Confederate batteries began a 34-hour bombardment of Fort Sumter. The federal cannons answered in kind, but they were no match for the “ring of fire” from Beauregard's artillery. The ships of the relief expedition arrived at the harbor mouth yet dared not proceed. Although no soldiers inside Fort Sumter died from the attack, Anderson capitulated two days later.
For the Lincoln administration, the surrender of Fort Sumter signaled the beginning of the Civil War. On April 15, the commander-in-chief called upon the states to immediately mobilize 75,000 militiamen for 90 days of federal service. While upholding the rule of law, he intended to suppress an insurrection with force. Four days later, he issued another proclamation, which ordered a naval blockade of southern ports. Henceforth, any vessel operating for the Confederacy faced capture by the Navy. With northern solidarity growing, the public rallied in support of military action to preserve the Union.
Southern defiance of the Union spread quickly. All of the slaveholding states except Maryland and Delaware rejected the federal request for troops. Thereafter, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas seceded and increased the size of the Confederacy to 11 states. They moved the capital from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia, which was located no more than 100 miles south of Washington D.C. After less than a century of existence, the U.S. came apart in 1861.
Battle Cries
Young men of the North and the South answered the call of their states. “Billy Yanks” vowed to prevent national disunion, whereas “Johnny Rebs” denounced tyrannical government. Fields, workshops, and factories emptied, as the armed forces swelled with volunteers. Full of bravado, few wanted to miss out on a romantic duel for honor. Both sides expected a short war to settle their differences.
Whether recruiting for the Union or the Confederacy, civilian authorities organized their armies in a similar fashion. Local officials often launched recruiting rallies or opened recruiting offices. A hundred or so citizens usually formed a company. Sometimes hailing from the same communities, 10 companies made a regiment. More often than not, they elected officers based upon their preeminence or affiliations. The motley array of uniforms, weaponry, and equipment indicated that the raw recruits amounted to nothing if not armed mobs.
Within months, the Union and Confederate armies began to achieve a wartime footing. While the former r
aised twice as many regiments as the latter, the infantry comprised the bulk of the combat units. The federal government supplied the cavalry and artillery with horses, but rebel leaders expected regimental officers to provide their own mounts. Upon reaching full strength, three or four regiments amounted to a brigade. A few brigades grouped together to form a division, which commanders combined as required to make an army. Later, both sides organized two or more divisions into a corps to further enlarge the armies. In the first year alone, more than a million men marched in formations for the North and the South.
With few exceptions, the South initially commissioned a higher caliber of officer than the North. An officer of distinction and a native of Virginia, Lee received an offer to command federal troops massing in Washington D.C. After meeting with Scott and Lincoln, however, he responded that he was not able to “raise my hand against my birthplace.” He resigned his commission in the Army and assumed command of Virginia's defenses.
The aging Scott, also a Virginian, regretted the loss of Lee, whom he called “the very best soldier I ever saw in the field.” Acknowledging the defense posture of the Confederates, the general-in-chief devised war plans to “envelop the insurgent states” with a quarantine of Atlantic and Gulf ports while launching an invasion down the Mississippi River. He hoped to avoid excessive bloodshed with a deliberate stranglehold. Because the joint operation would move slowly to quell the rebellion, newspapers derisively called it the “Anaconda Plan.”
Lincoln clamored for swift action, because several “border states” between the North and the South contemplated secession as well. He directed subordinates to prevent the secession of Maryland, where federal troops suppressed riots and arrested rebels. After suspending the writ of habeas corpus, he permitted the detainment of Confederate sympathizers at Fort McHenry. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in ex parte Merryman issued a ruling against the commander-in-chief, but Lincoln disregarded it.
Lincoln urged General George B. McClellan of Ohio to move rapidly across the border into Virginia. The western portion of the state included the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which McClellan, who commanded 20,000 volunteers, secured in the summer of 1861. After a series of battles, the defeated Confederates fled eastward and left most of Virginia west of the Alleghenies under federal control. Hailed as a “Young Napoleon,” McClellan's success led to the creation of West Virginia as a separate state in the Union.
Lincoln wanted the military to occupy northern Virginia, where 20,000 Confederates under Beauregard defended the railroad center of Manassas Junction. Moving in haste before their enlistments expired, General Irvin McDowell marched 37,000 federals toward a meandering creek called Bull Run. Southerners tended to identify battles with nearby towns, whereas northerners preferred to name them with natural features such as mountains or waterways.
On July 21, 1861, the blue-clad regiments travelled on the Warrenton turnpike across Bull Run, where they met the men in gray. After confusion and delay, the first federal thrust struck 11 Confederate companies and two guns that morning. The field artillery blasted the opposing lines with canister and shell. Waves of Union infantry pressed against Beauregard's left flank. As the troops scrambled forward, the Battle of Bull Run began.
Under the direction of General Joseph E. Johnston, thousands of Confederate reinforcements poured into the battlefield from the Manassas Gap Railroad. Nevertheless, their dispositions appeared to give way that afternoon. General Barnard E. Bee of South Carolina rallied his troops on a flat-crested hill behind a house, where General Thomas J. Jackson's newly arrived brigade of Virginians formed a line. As his flanks wavered, Bee shouted: “Look, there is Jackson with his Virginians, standing like a stone wall!” Though Bee himself was killed, his memorable words endured as Jackson's nickname.
The Confederate interior lines held, while the Union advance started to falter. Launching a counterattack with incredible ferocity, Jackson urged his men to “yell like furies.” Their frightening “rebel yell” combined the sounds of a wailing scream with a foxhunt yip. When McDowell sounded the retreat before nightfall, the federals fled across the creek in panic. Soldiers overran civilians, who watched the battle unwind from nearby. They streamed back to Washington D.C. in a chaotic dash called the “Great Skedaddle.” The rebels also became disorganized and abandoned the chase that evening. Only 18,000 personnel on each side actually engaged in combat. The Union lost 625 killed along with 950 wounded, whereas the Confederates counted 400 fatalities and close to 1,600 wounded.
After the Battle of Bull Run, a gravedigger found an unsent letter upon a corpse. It belonged to a member of the 2nd Rhode Island Volunteers, Major Sullivan Ballou. Written to his wife while awaiting action, several passages described his yearning to return home unharmed. “If I do not, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you,” he penned before dying, “and when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name.”
In spite of the sobering defeat, the Lincoln administration redoubled the war effort. The next day, the president signed a bill calling for a 100,000-man force composed of three-year volunteers to replace the “three-month men.” Following Scott's advice, he summoned McClellan to Washington D.C. and assigned him command of the demoralized troops encamped near the capital. On August 21, McClellan named them the Army of the Potomac and commenced rebuilding the regiments.
While the regiments drilled, few sounds expressed the pride of the North more eloquently than “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” That fall, Julia Ward Howe of Boston heard Massachusetts soldiers singing the refrain at a camp in northern Virginia. Afterward, she composed her own version of the martial song with transcendent words that foretold of Armageddon. “He hath loosed the fateful lightning,” she wrote as a battle cry, “of His terrible swift sword.” In contrast to the high-pitched squall of the “rebel yell,” the Union anthem resonated with the deeper-toned shouts of “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!”
Union Strategy
During the first year of fighting, military campaigns from Missouri to Virginia produced no decisive victories for either side. Scott retired from the Army on November 1, 1861, permitting McClellan to succeed him as the general-in-chief. Prone to exaggeration, the latter declared: “I can do it all!” Though an able administrator, he was enigmatic, stubborn, inflexible, strong-willed, and self-righteous. For all his faults, he became the Union's first strategist.
Like his predecessor, McClellan recognized that the Union held the upper hand against the Confederacy. With a four-to-one advantage in human resources, the northern states possessed a large pool of able-bodied men for military service. Northern foundries produced almost all of the nation's firearms. In addition to equipment, wagons, and ships, the majority of the nation's railroads crisscrossed the North. Along with industry and factories, the North contained two-thirds of the nation's farm acreage.
On the other hand, the South enjoyed a few advantages. The southern economy produced the nation's leading export – cotton. With slaves forced to continue laboring behind the lines, almost 80 percent of the white male population mobilized for military service. Despite deficits in aggregate numbers, the Confederate army benefited from veterans in command at the outset. Though beset with internal conflicts, the rebel states needed only to defend 750,000 square miles of territory – not to seize it.
To mount multipronged offensive operations, McClellan unified the command system of the federal forces. Requesting the mobilization of even more men, he envisaged the formation of massive armies benefiting from extraordinarily complex logistics. He weighed with caution various thrusts aimed at defined objectives, which revealed the operational imperatives of a grand strategic plan. With the Army of the Potomac concentrating on Virginia, other Union columns would advance simultaneously into Kentucky and Tennessee. McClellan intended to stretch the Confederate military along a broad front while conducting campaigns in the field to break their lines. Though advocating the use of “overwhelming physical force,” he wanted
no actions against “private property or unarmed persons.” After dissipating the strengths of his opponent's interior lines, he wanted to “crush” their defenses and to occupy their land. Unfortunately, his personality and politics undermined the implementation of the strategy.
By the end of 1861, the House and Senate established the Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War. Dominated by Republicans, members investigated command decisions, medical services, and wartime procurement. Allegedly, “shoddy” millionaires supplied the Union soldiers with defective uniforms made from reprocessed wool rather than virgin wool. Congressional leaders teamed with Edwin M. Stanton, who became the Secretary of War the next year, to refine the federal contract system with corporations manufacturing military goods. Whatever the benefits of civilian oversight, the meddling of officials in Washington D.C. inhibited the effective coordination of military campaigns in the field.
As federal forces readied for campaigning, the War Department massed not only men but also firepower. Captain Thomas J. Rodman developed a whole family of Columbiad-type smoothbore artillery for coastal defense. Made of cast iron, the Rodman guns utilized powder grains that increased muzzle velocities with lower maximum pressures compared to conventional ball powder. For field artillery batteries, smoothbores remained easier to operate than breechloaders but lacked the accuracy of rifled pieces. During 1861, the foundry at West Point produced a cast iron rifled muzzleloader with a wrought iron band around the breach for additional strength. Its 3-inch bore threw a 10-pound shell 3,200 yards at an elevation of 5 degrees. However, gun crews seldom utilized the greater ranges in wooded, broken terrain. Artillery officers preferred older 12-pound Napoleons, which raked enemy lines with shell, shot, and canister in close fighting. Despite the technological innovations, the mixture of weaponry and the increases in costs threatened to create serious supply problems for Union armies.
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