Civil War

Civil War, American, a military conflict between the United States of America (the Union) and the Confederate States of America (the Confederacy) from 1861 to 1865.The American Civil War is sometimes called the War Between the States, the War of Rebellion, or the War for Southern Independence. It began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, and lasted until May 26, 1865, when the last Confederate army surrendered. The war took more than 600,000 lives, destroyed property valued at $5 billion, brought freedom to 4 million black slaves, and opened wounds that have not yet completely healed more than 125 years later.

Causes of the Civil War

The chief and immediate cause of the war was slavery. Southern states, including the 11 states that formed the Confederacy, depended on slavery to support their economy. Southerners used slave labor to produce crops, especially cotton. Although slavery was illegal in the Northern states, only a small proportion of Northerners actively opposed it. The main debate between the North and the South on the eve of the war was whether slavery should be permitted in the Western territories recently acquired during the Mexican War (1846-1848), including New Mexico, part of California, and Utah. Opponents of slavery were concerned about its expansion, in part because they did not want to compete against slave labor.

Economic and Social Factors

By 1860, the North and the South had developed into two very different regions. Divergent social, economic, and political points of view, dating from colonial times, gradually drove the two sections farther and farther apart. Each tried to impose its point of view on the country as a whole. Although compromises had kept the Union together for many years, in 1860 the situation was explosive. The election of Abraham Lincoln as president was viewed by the South as a threat to slavery and ignited the war.

During the first half of the 19th century, economic differences between the regions also increased. By 1860 cotton was the chief crop of the South, and it represented 57 percent of all U.S. exports. The profitability of cotton, known as King Cotton, completed the South’s dependence on the plantation system and its essential component, slavery.

The North was by then firmly established as an industrial society. Labor was needed, but not slave labor. Immigration was encouraged. Immigrants from Europe worked in factories, built the railroads of the North, and settled the West. Very few settled in the South.

The South, resisting industrialization, manufactured little. Almost all manufactured goods had to be imported. Southerners therefore opposed high tariffs, or taxes that were placed on imported goods and increased the price of manufactured articles. The manufacturing economy of the North, on the other hand, demanded high tariffs to protect its own products from cheap foreign competition.

Before the Civil War, the federal government’s chief source of revenue was the tariff. There were few other sources of revenue, for example, neither personal nor corporate income taxes existed. The tariff paid for most improvements made by the federal government, such as roads, turnpikes, and canals. To keep tariffs low, the South preferred to do without these improvements.

The expanding Northwest Territory, which was made up of the present-day states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota, was far from the markets for its grain and cattle. It needed such internal improvements for survival, and so supported the Northeast’s demands for high tariffs. In return, the Northeast supported most federally financed improvements in the Northwest Territory.

As a result, although both the South and the West were agricultural, the West allied itself with the Northern, rather than the Southern, point of view. Economic needs sharpened sectional differences, adding to the interregional hostility.

Political Factors

In the early days of the United States, loyalty to one’s state often took precedence over loyalty to one’s country. A New Yorker or a Virginian would refer to his state as "my country." The Union was considered a "voluntary compact" entered into by independent, sovereign states for as long as it served their purpose to be so joined. In the nation’s early years, neither North nor South had any strong sense of the permanence of the Union.New England, for example, once thought of seceding, or leaving the Union, because the War of 1812 cut off trade with England.

As Northern and Southern patterns of living diverged, their political ideas also developed marked differences. The North needed a central government to build an infrastructure of roads and railways, protect its complex trading and financial interests, and control the national currency. The South depended much less on the federal government than did other regions, and Southerners therefore felt no need to strengthen it. In addition, Southern patriots feared that a strong central government might interfere with slavery.

The Fight Over Slavery

Up to 1860 only a few extremists in the South, called fire-eaters, wanted to apply the doctrine of secession to create a separate Southern country. Moderates of both North and South kept hoping to compromise their differences over slavery, tariffs, and the territories in the forum of the Congress of the United States. Compromise was possible as long as neither side controlled the Senate.

With the admission of Alabama in 1819, the Senate became perfectly balanced. However, vast territories in the West and Southwest, acquired through the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican War, would soon be petitioning for statehood. North and South began a long and bitter struggle over whether the territories would enter the Union as free or slave states.

Missouri Compromise

Under the Constitution of the United States, the federal government had no authority to interfere with slavery within the states. Northern opponents of slavery could hope only to prevent it from spreading. They tried to do this in 1818, when Missouri sought admission to the Union with a constitution permitting slavery. After two years of bitter controversy a solution was found in the Missouri Compromise. This compromise admitted Missouri to the Union as a slave state and admitted Maine as a free state to keep the balance in the Senate. It also provided that slavery would be excluded from the still unorganized part of the Louisiana Territory. A line was drawn from Missouri’s southern boundary, at the latitude of 36°30’, and slavery would not be allowed in the territory north of that line,with the exception of Missouri.

Compromise of 1850

Agitation against slavery continued in the North. The South reacted by defending it ever more strongly. The Mexican War, by which the United States made good its annexation of Texas and acquired New Mexico, Arizona, California, and several of the present Rocky Mountain states, led to a new crisis. Antislavery forces demanded that slavery be excluded from any lands ceded by Mexico. Slaveholders pressed for their share of the new territories and for other safeguards to protect slavery. For a time the country seemed to be headed for civil war. Again a solution was found in compromise.The settlement was the Compromise Measures of 1850. Among other things, this compromise admitted California as a free state and set up territorial governments in the remainder of the Mexican cession with authority to decide for themselves whether to permit slavery or not. Moderates in both North and South hoped that the slavery question was settled, at least for a while.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The year after the compromise a literary event shook the country. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote an antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that was published serially in a newspaper in 1851 and in book form the year after. It was widely read in the United States and abroad and moved many to join the cause of abolition. The South indignantly denied this indictment of slavery. Stowe’s book increased partisan feeling over slavery and intensified sectional differences.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1854, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois introduced a bill to organize the territories of Kansas and Nebraska into states. As finally passed, the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise and provided that settlers in the territories should decide "all questions pertaining to slavery." This doctrine was known as popular sovereignty. Since Kansas and Nebraska were north of the line established in the Missouri Compromise, the act made possible the extension of the slave system into territory previously considered free soil. Soon, settlers in Kansas were engaged in a bloody battle to decide the slavery issue (see Border War).

The passage of the act caused a political explosion in the North. Abraham Lincoln, a longtime member of the Whig Party, represented the view of many thousands when he wrote, in the third person, that "the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused him as he had never been before." Antislavery groups met to form a new party, which they named the Republican Party. By 1856 the party was broad enough and strong enough to put a national ticket, headed by John C. Frémont, into the presidential election. The Republicans lost by a relatively narrow margin.

Dred Scott Case

In 1857 the Supreme Court of the United States added to the mounting tension by its decision in the Dred Scott Case. In that case, Dred Scott, a slave, sued for his freedom on the grounds that when his master had taken him to free territories, Scott was no longer a slave. In separate opinions a majority of the justices held that Scott did not have the right to file suit in state or federal courts because he was not a citizen of the United States. As a slave, he was considered property. The justices continued to write that Congress had no power to exclude slavery from the territories. Therefore, the Missouri Compromise and other legislation limiting slavery were unconstitutional.

Lincoln-Douglas Debates

In 1858 Douglas was running for reelection to the Senate. His opponent was Abraham Lincoln, then the leader of the Republican Party in Illinois. In a series of seven debates, Lincoln and Douglas argued, among other things, the question of the extension of slavery. Douglas stood on his doctrine of popular sovereignty, holding that the people of the territories could elect to have slavery. They could also elect not to have it. Lincoln, on the other hand, argued that slavery was "a moral, a social, and a political wrong" and that it was the duty of the federal government to prohibit its extension into the territories.

Although the Republicans carried the state ticket and outvoted the Democrats, the Illinois legislature reelected Douglas to the Senate. The campaign, widely reported in the newspapers, had an importance far beyond the fate of the two candidates. It demonstrated to the South that the Republican Party was steadily growing in strength and that it would oppose the extension of slavery by every possible means. The campaign also showed Douglas to be an unreliable ally of the South. He had said repeatedly in the debates that he did not care whether slavery was voted up or down. In addition, Lincoln, hitherto known only locally, gained a national reputation even in defeat.

John Brown’s Raid

As soon as the 1858 elections were over, political maneuvering began over the 1860 presidential election. Many states were in the process of choosing delegates to the national conventions when news of a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), swept the nation. On October 16, 1859, the raiders had seized the federal armory and arsenal there. They surrendered two days later. Authorities found that the raid had been led by John Brown, whose raids and murders in Kansas and Missouri had already made him an outlaw. Brown and his followers had planned to march their army into the South to forcibly free slaves. Brown was arrested, tried, and convicted. When he was executed for his crime, thousands of Northerners hailed him as a martyr, while Southerners became increasingly fearful of armed intervention in their states by Northern abolitionists.

Election of 1860

The slavery question overshadowed all others in the presidential election year of 1860. At the Democratic National Convention, held in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 23, the delegates from the South refused to support Douglas, the leading contender, because of his position on slavery, and they prevented the naming of a candidate. The convention adjourned to meet on June 18 in Baltimore, Maryland. On May 16 the Republican National Convention met in Chicago, Illinois, and passed over the two most popular aspirants, William H. Seward and Salmon P. Chase. Instead they nominated the lesser known Abraham Lincoln. In Baltimore, at the reconvened Democratic convention after several days of wrangling, the Southern delegates walked out of the convention. Those who remained nominated Douglas. On June 28 the Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. The Democratic Party, long a unifying force in the nation, was thus split over sectional differences into two bitterly opposed factions. The Constitutional Union Party, a group of conservatives who condemned sectional parties, placed a fourth ticket, headed by John Bell of Tennessee, in the field.

Because of this division, Lincoln won easily, although he did not receive a majority of the popular vote. The popular vote was: Lincoln, 1,866,452; Douglas, 1,376,957; Breckinridge, 849,781; Bell, 588,879. Lincoln won in the electoral college, where he received 180 votes against 72 for Breckinridge, 39 for Bell, and 12 for Douglas.

The South Secedes "se·cede (s¹-s¶d") v. se·ced·ed se·ced·ing 1. To withdraw formally from membership in an organization, association, or alliance. [Latin s¶c¶dere, withdraw.]

During the campaign many Southerners had threatened that their states would secede from the Union if Lincoln was elected because they feared that a Lincoln administration would threaten slavery. Few people in the North believed them. A month before the election, however, Governor William Henry Gist of South Carolina wrote the governors of all the Cotton States except Texas that South Carolina would secede in the event of Lincoln’s election and asked what course the other states would follow.

As soon as it was certain that Lincoln had won, the South Carolina legislature summoned a special convention. It met on December 17, 1860, in Charleston. Three days later the convention unanimously passed an ordinance dissolving "the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States." Similar conventions were held by other Southern states, and similar ordinances were adopted, although not by unanimous votes. The first states to follow South Carolina’s course in 1861 were: Mississippi, January 9; Florida, January 10; Alabama, January 11; Georgia, January 19; Louisiana, January 26; and Texas, February 1. In April, Lincoln called for states to send militias for national service to suppress the rebellion. The upper South refused to send their militias to coerce the seceded states. Instead they joined the lower South in secession beginning with Virginia on April 17th; Arkansas, May 6; North Carolina, May 20; and Tennessee, June 8.

The Confederacy

On February 4, delegates from the first six states to secede met in Montgomery, Alabama, to set up a provisional government for the Confederate States of America. Four days later they adopted a constitution modeled to a large extent on the Constitution of the United States. On February 9 the provisional Confederate Congress elected Jefferson Davis of Mississippi provisional president and Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia provisional vice president. Both men were to hold office until February 22, 1862. On that date, after an uncontested election in November 1861, Davis and Stephens were given permanent status.

Lincoln’s Inauguration

When Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861, seven states had seceded and organized a working government. Southern leaders believed that their action was lawful, but Lincoln and a majority of Northerners refused to accept the right of Southern states to secede.

The new president announced in his inaugural address that he would "hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government." He promised that the government would not "assail" the states of the South, and he pleaded with the Southern people not to act hastily but to give the new administration a chance to prove that it was not hostile. Lincoln seems to have believed that with time, and without an act of provocation, the states in secession might return to the Union, but time ran out.

Civil War Begins

As the Southern states seceded, they seized and occupied most of the federal forts within their borders or off their shores. Only four remained in the hands of the Union. Fort Sumter stood guard in the mouth of the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. The other three forts were in Florida: Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, Fort Pickens in Pensacola Bay, and Fort Taylor at Key West. Of the four, Sumter was the most important.

Fort Sumter

In January 1861 President James Buchanan tried to send troops and supplies to Major Robert Anderson, commander of the garrison at Fort Sumter. Star of the West, the ship Buchanan sent, was an unarmed merchant vessel. When the shore batteries at Charleston Harbor fired on the ship, it sailed away. Lincoln, during his first full day in office, learned that Anderson had only enough provisions for a month and could obtain no supplies from the mainland. Sumter had become a symbol of the Union. To give it up, Lincoln felt, was to violate his sworn oath to protect the properties of the United States. On the other hand, there was grave doubt that a relief expedition could succeed in supplying the fort. If it failed, it might touch off war.

Early in April, President Lincoln came to a decision. He would send a relief expedition to Sumter, but the ships would land provisions only if they were not attacked. On April 6, he notified the governor of South Carolina of the action he was taking. Three days later the relief ships sailed from New York City.

Surrender of Fort Sumter

On April 11, 1861, General P. G. T. Beauregard, commanding the Confederate troops in Charleston, served Anderson with a demand that he surrender the fort. Anderson refused, but he stated that lack of supplies would compel him to give up the fort by April 15. His reply was so hedged with qualifications that Beauregard considered it unsatisfactory, and, at 4:30 AM on April 12, he ordered his batteries to open fire on the fort.

For a day and a half, Anderson returned the fire. The relief expedition, weakened by storms and without the tugs it needed, appeared at the bar of the harbor but made no effort to land men. On the second day, with Sumter badly damaged by fire, Anderson surrendered the fort.

North and South Mobilize

The North responded to the attack on Fort Sumter with shock and anger. Everywhere people were determined to support the government in whatever measures it might take. On April 15, Lincoln issued a proclamation that called up a total of 75,000 militia from the states. At the same time, calls for troops were sent to the governors of all states that had remained in the Union. On April 19 a second proclamation announced that Southern ports would be blockaded. A third proclamation, dated May 3, called for 42,000 three-year volunteers for the regular army and for 18,000 volunteers to serve one to three years in the navy.

The South responded with equal determination. Virginia and the rest of the upper South seceded. The Congress of the Confederacy authorized President Davis to wage the war now beginning. The border slave states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware never seceded. However, many thousands of men in Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland volunteered for service in the Confederate armies.

Both the North and South raised troops as quickly as possible and struggled with the problem of equipping and training them. The states recruited volunteers and organized them into regiments. Officers were elected by the men and commissioned by the governors. In the beginning the length of service was usually short, but as soon as it became clear that the war would not end with one decisive battle, three-year-enlistments became the rule, although there were many exceptions.

In the North the first troops ready for service were sent to Washington, D.C., and to points along the Ohio River. Confederate troops were concentrated in Tennessee and in northern Virginia, where they could threaten the federal capital.

Civil War, 1861

Both sides prepared for what would become a much longer war than either at first imagined. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers poured into the armies, and the respective economies tried to adjust to meet the demands of supplying huge military forces. On the battlefield, the Confederates won victories in Virginia at the First Battle of Bull Run in mid-July, and in Missouri at Wilson’s Creek in August. Despite these setbacks, the Union army and navy took steps to begin operations along the upper Mississippi River and along the southern Atlantic coast. The goal was to implement Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan to seize control of the Mississippi River and institute a naval blockade of the Confederacy. Away from the military sphere, the Trent Affair presented the Lincoln administration with a major diplomatic crisis that threatened to involve Great Britain in the American war.

First Battle of Bull Run

On July 16, 1861, a Union army, led by General Irvin McDowell, began to move toward Confederate troops under General Beauregard that were grouped about Manassas Junction, 40 km (25 mi) southwest of Washington, D.C. The two armies did not meet until July 21. The battle, known as First Bull Run or First Manassas, started well for the North. However, with the arrival of Confederate reinforcements and the heroic stand of General Thomas J. Jackson, who earned the nickname "Stonewall," the battle ended in an overwhelming victory for the South. Most of the Union troops straggled back to Washington in near panic.

The defeat shocked the North. The people suddenly realized that the war could be a grim struggle that might last for years. Governors offered more troops and hurried forward regiments with full ranks. The Union War Department pushed the organization of long-term volunteers. General George B. McClellan was ordered to Washington from western Virginia, where he had made a name for himself in a series of small battles. McClellan took charge of the troops in and around the capital, enforcing discipline and instituting intensive training. By the end of October he had a well-equipped, well-trained army that was known as the Army of the Potomac. In November he replaced the aged general Winfield Scott as general-in-chief.

Grant’s Campaign in the West

On the western front, Grant waited for permission from his superior, Henry W. Halleck, to strike at the Confederates in Tennessee. Grant had picked his targets: Fort Henry on the Tennessee River; then Fort Donelson a few miles to the east on the Cumberland River. In January 1862 Halleck ordered the advance. It was to be a joint campaign with naval forces under the command of Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote. Foote’s gunboats attacked Fort Henry on February 6. The fort surrendered before Grant’s troops could be engaged. Fort Donelson proved to be a different story. Fighting began on February 12, but Fort Donelson held out until February 16. The two victories lifted spirits in the North, and Grant’s demand for "unconditional and immediate surrender" in response to the Confederate commander’s request for terms made the Union general famous.

The North, its elation heightened by a decisive Union victory in the Battle of Pea Ridge, also known as the Battle of Elkhorn Tavern, in Arkansas, on March 7 and 8, soon received more good news with a victory at Shiloh.

Second Battle of Bull Run

After the failure of the Peninsular campaign, Lincoln named Henry W. Halleck general-in-chief of the Union armies. The Army of Virginia was organized in June 1862. General John Pope, a former subordinate of Halleck’s, was put in command of the new army. Halleck ordered McClellan to bring his men back to Washington, where he was to join with the forces under Pope.

Lee concentrated on preventing this junction of Union armies. On August 9, 1862, Jackson attacked Pope’s advance units at Cedar Mountain, near Culpeper, Virginia, and defeated them. Pope withdrew to the north side of the Rappahannock River and waited for McClellan. Jackson, with 23,000 men, swung in a wide circle around Pope’s army. On August 26 he swooped down on the federal base at Manassas Junction, captured or destroyed supplies, and then made a stand at Manassas, the site of the First Battle of Bull Run.

On August 29, Pope with 62,000 men attacked Jackson. Jackson withstood the offensive, which was not well coordinated. Nevertheless, Pope believed that he had defeated Jackson and sent a wire to that effect to Washington. The following day, James Longstreet and Lee moved up to reinforce Jackson. Pope’s army was shattered by Longstreet’s artillery and infantry and fled in disorder. Lee pursued and tried to cut off Pope’s retreat the next day at Chantilly.

Pope, thoroughly and humiliatingly beaten, limped back to Washington. He had lost about 14,500 men to Lee’s 9200. Pope’s force was merged with the Army of the Potomac, and McClellan again was put in command of the entire force.

Civil War, 1863

Overview

The year opened poorly for the Northern military. In the West, their efforts to capture Vicksburg during the winter and spring were continually frustrated. In the East, the Union forces were defeated at Chancellorsville in early May. The North rebounded in June and July with a trio of successes: the Tullahoma campaign, which cleared major Confederate forces from Tennessee; the capture of Vicksburg, which together with the fall of Port Hudson, Louisiana, gave the North control of the Mississippi River; and the Battle of Gettysburg, where Lee’s last movement across the Potomac River ended in bloody repulse. Another success at Chattanooga in late November closed a most auspicous year of campaigning for the North. The Union also adopted a national conscription act in 1863, prompting wide opposition and considerable violence. The Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, and soon thereafter the North began recruiting black soldiers on a large scale. Shortages of food and material goods became quite severe in the Confederacy, which experienced bread riots at several locations.

Gettysburg

While Grant slowly strangled Vicksburg and Rosecrans feinted Bragg halfway across Tennessee, Lee decided to march his troops north toward Pennsylvania. There were several reasons for this bold move. The Confederate government hoped that a decisive victory on Northern soil would win foreign recognition of the Confederacy. In addition, Lee argued that an invasion of the wealthiest urban area of the North would probably lessen the pressure on Confederate forces in Tennessee and at Vicksburg. Perhaps most important, the lush Cumberland Valley would yield food and clothing for Lee’s ragged and hungry army.

On June 3, 1863, Lee began to move his Army of Northern Virginia across the Rappahannock. Hooker, who was aware of Lee’s movements, shifted the Army of the Potomac northward, using it as a shield between Lee and the capital at Washington. Late in June, Hooker resigned his command, convinced that he had lost the confidence of the administration. On June 28, General George G. Meade replaced Hooker. Meade had been one of Hooker’s corps commanders.

On July 1 advance units of the two armies stumbled into each other near the little town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 16 km (10 mi) north of the Maryland border. Both Lee and Meade realized that a battle was unavoidable. Fighting began that day. Union troops, after early reverses, managed to hold a strategic position on Cemetery Hill. The second day, July 2, saw confused fighting on both Union flanks. Generals Longstreet and John B. Hood assaulted high ground at the Peach Orchard and Little Round Top, but by night the Federals held key positions. The most dramatic action of the battle came on the third day, when General George E. Pickett led a gallant but hopeless charge against the Union center, "the bloody angle." Pickett’s drive tried to charge across an open field at Cemetery Ridge, but concentrated Union fire stopped him. The battle was a decisive Union victory, but both armies suffered very heavy losses. Meade’s casualties numbered 23,000 and Lee’s about 25,000. Lee began his retreat on July 4. To the great disappointment of President Lincoln, Meade did not pursue the Confederate army and make Lee stand and fight. By July 14 the Confederate commander had brought the remnant of his army back to the safety of Virginia. Gettysburg had been a severe defeat for the South, both in terms of men lost and the army’s morale. In November 1863 President Lincoln dedicated a national cemetery to those who had died in the Battle of Gettysburg. His speech, known as the Gettysburg Address, became famous as an expression of the democratic spirit and reconfirmed Lincoln’s intention to reunite the country.

Grant Becomes Union Commander

With the onset of winter, military operations practically stopped. In Washington, Lincoln came to a decision. In two and a half years of war, he had seen one Union commander rise above all others. Grant had made mistakes. At Shiloh he had been caught off guard. At Vicksburg he had ordered assaults that had cost many lives to no purpose. However, he fought, without complaining, with the men and resources the War Department could give him, and he won. On March 9, 1864, Grant was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general, a grade that Congress had recently revived for his benefit. Three days later, Lincoln placed him in command of all the Union armies, and Grant came east to fight.

Britain Abandons the South

Meanwhile, the Union had won a major diplomatic battle. Since the beginning of the war, the Confederacy had had a naval officer, James D. Bulloch, in Great Britain to buy or contract for cruisers to raid Northern commerce. In 1861 and 1862, Bulloch had managed to acquire and equip several ships. In 1862 he contracted through third parties with the British shipbuilding firm of Laird Brothers for two rams, or ironclads, which he believed would be able to sweep Northern commerce from the seas and destroy the trade from the Atlantic seaports of the Union.

Charles Francis Adams, the Union minister to Great Britain, knew very well that the rams were intended for Confederate service. Time after time, Adams warned the British government of the destination of the rams and demanded that their delivery be prevented. He could get no promise. The British government, however, had decided to prevent departure of the vessels and, on October 9, 1863, seized the ships. Bulloch sadly reported to the Confederate secretary of the navy: "No amount of discretion or management on my part can effect the release of the ships." Thereafter the Confederacy could no longer hope for aid from Europe.

Civil War, 1864

Overview

The year 1864 began optimistically for the North, which expected Grant, its new general-in-chief, to bring victory. However, the bloody Overland Campaign in Virginia during May and June, which featured clashes at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, depressed Northern morale, as did the failure of General Sherman to capture Atlanta. A swift strike through the Shenandoah Valley brought a small Confederate army to the outskirts of Washington in early July, which further alarmed the North. By August, Northern morale had reached its lowest point of the war, and there were expectations that Lincoln would be defeated in his bid for reelection in November. As Grant and Lee settled into a siege along the Petersburg-Richmond lines, Union victories at Mobile Bay in late August, at Atlanta in early September, and in the Shenandoah Valley in September and October raised Northern morale and ensured Lincoln’s reelection. Lincoln’s political triumph in turn guaranteed that the North would continue to prosecute the war vigorously. The year ended with Union victories at Franklin and Nashville, Tennessee, in November and December, and Sherman’s destructive march across the interior of Georgia. Hopes for Confederate success had virtually ended, the Northern blockade was tightening, and civilian and military morale in the South sagged badly.

For 1864 Grant planned an aggressive campaign. In the spring, when the roads had dried, the Army of the Potomac, still under Meade’s direct command, moved against Lee in Virginia. Union General Benjamin F. Butler’s Army of the James would advance from Bermuda Hundred, Virginia, on the James River. Sherman, now in full command in the West, would take the offensive against Johnston’s army and Atlanta. For these moves the Union armies could muster 235,000 men. The Confederates had no more than 150,000 to oppose them.