American Civil War

Introduction:
 American Civil War also called the War between States was a war fought in the United States from 1861 to

1865 between the United States and 11 southern states that seceded from the Union and formed the

Confederate States of America.

 The war broke out in April 1861 primarily as a result of the long-standing Controversy over the enslavement of

black people when secessionist forces Attacked Fort Sumter in southern Carolina shortly after Abraham

Lincoln had been inaugurated as the president of the United States.

 The loyalist of the Union in the North proclaimed support for the constitution and they had to face secessionists

of the Confederate States in the South, who advocated for the state's right to uphold slavery.

 The Civil War is the central event in America's historical consciousness; it determined what kind of nation America

would be.

 The war resolved two fundamental questions left unresolved by the American Revolution:

 Whether the United States was to be dissolvable Confederation of Sovereign States or an indivisible nation

with a sovereign national government.

 Whether America, born of a declaration that all men were created with an equal right to Liberty, would continue

to exist as the largest slaveholding country in the world.

Prelude to the War:
 The secession of the Southern States (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas,
Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina) in 1860-1861 and the outbreak of armed hostilities were the
Culmination of decades of growing sectional friction over slavery.
 Between 1815 and 1861 the economy of the Northern States was rapidly modernizing and diversifying.
 The Republican Party dominant in the North and led by Abraham Lincoln supported banning slavery in all the
United States territories in the 1860 presidential election.
 Southern States viewed this as a violation of their constitutional rights.
 The Republican Party secured a majority of the electoral votes nationally and Lincoln was constitutionally
elected the president.
 It was the first Republican Party candidate to win the presidency.
 However, before his inauguration, 7 slave states with cotton based economic declared secession and formed
the Confederacy.
 The first 6 to declare secession had the highest proportions of slaves in their populations with an average of
49%.
 The confederacy grew to control over half the territory in 11 States and it claimed the additional state of Kentucky
and Missouri by assertion from exiled native secessionists without territory or population.
 These were then given full representation in the Confederate Congress throughout the Civil War.
The War:

 The Confederate states were never diplomatically recognized by the government of the United States or by
that of any foreign country.
 The States that remained loyal to the US were known as the Union.
 The Union and the Confederacy quickly raised volunteer and conscription armies that fought mostly in South
over the course of four years.
 After Confederate forces seized numerous federal forts within territory claimed by confederacy efforts at
compromise failed and both sides prepared for war.
 The Confederates assumed that European countries were so dependent on “King Cotton" that they would
intervene but none did and none recognized the new Confederate States of America.
 Claiming the Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay as their own, the Confederate army on April 12, 1861 opened fire
on the federal Garrison and forced it to lower the American flag in surrender.
 This event triggered the war.
 Lincoln called out the militia to suppress this "insurrection".
 Four more slave states seceded and joined the confederacy.
 By the end of 1861 nearly a million armed men confronted each other along a line stretching 1200 miles from
Virginia to Missouri.
 Several battles had been taken place near Manassas junction in Virginia, in the mountains of western Virginia,
where Union victories paved the way for the creation of new state of West Virginia, with the Wilson's Creek in
Missouri, at Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, etc.
 The most significant encounters in the war begin in 1862.
 Battles, like Shiloh in Tennessee, Gaines' Mill, Second Manassas and Fredericksburg in Virginia, and Antietam in
Maryland foreshadowed even bigger campaigns and battles in subsequent years.
 By 1864, the original Northern goal of a “limited War" to restore the Union had given way to a new strategy of
"Total War" to destroy the Old South and its basic institution of slavery and to give the restored union a "new
birth of freedom".
 *All the principal Confederate armies surrendered by the spring of 1865 and when Union cavalry captured
the fleeing Confederate president Jefferson Davis in Georgia on May 10th 1865 residents collapsed and the
war ended and thus begin the long painful process of rebuilding a united nation free of slavery.
 Much of the South's infrastructure was destroyed especially the transportation systems.
 The confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and four million black slaves were freed.
 During the Reconstruction Era that followed the war, national unity was slowly restored, the national government
expanded its power and civil rights were granted to free black slaves through amendments to the constitution
and federal legislation.
Cost and Significance of the Civil War:
 American Civil War was among the earliest industrial wars.

 Railroads, the Telegraph, steamships and ironclad ships , and mass produced weapons were employed

extensively.

 The mobilization of civilian factories, mines, shipyards, banks, transportation, and food supplies all

foreshadowed the impact of industrialization in World War One, World War Two , and subsequent conflicts.

 It is recounted as the deadliest war in American history.

 From 1861 to 1865, it is estimated that 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers died, along with an undetermined number of

civilians.

 By one estimate, the war claimed the lives of 10% of all northern men 20 to 45 years old, and 30% of all southern

white men aged 18 to 40.

 The American civil war was the largest and most destructive conflict in the western world between the end of the

new Napoleonic wars in 1815 and the onset of World War One in 1914.

 On the basis of three year standard of enlistment, about 1,556,000 soldiers served in federal armies, and about

800,000 men probably served in Confederate forces, those spotty records make it impossible to know for sure

 Traditionally, historians have put war deaths at about 360,000 for the union and 260,000 for the

Confederates.

 In the second decade of the 21st century, however, a demographer used better data and more sophisticated tools to

convincingly revise the total death toll up world to 750,000 and indicated that it could be as high as 851,000.

 A death rate roughly 2% of the 1860 population Of the US died in the war.

 This had a huge impact on American Society.

 Americans were deeply religious, and they struggled to understand how benevolent God could allow such

destruction to go on for so long.

 A new mode of dealing with corpses emerged with the advent of embalm in and expensive method of

preservation that helped wealthier families to being their dead sons, brothers, or father's home.

 A network of federal military cemeteries and private Confederate cemeteries grew out of the need to Bury

the men in uniform who had succumbed to the wounds or diseases.

 The triumph of the northern states, above and beyond its superior naval forces, numbers, and industrial and

financial resources, was partly due to the statesmanship of Lincoln, who by 1864 had become a masterful political

and war leader, to the prevailing valour of federal soldiers, and to the increasing skill of their officers.

 The victory can also be attributed in part to failures of Confederate transportation, and political leadership .

 The American civil war is termed as the last of the old fashioned wars while others have termed it as the first

modern war.

 Actually, it was a traditional war, and it had a profound impact, technological on the development of modern

weapons and techniques.

 There were many innovations:

 It was the first war in history in which ironclad warships clashed.

 It was the first war in which, the Telegraph and railroad played significant roles.

 Was the 1st war to use, extensively, rifled ordnance and shell guns to introduce a machine gun(the gating gun).

 It was the first war to have widespread newspaper coverage, voting by servicemen in the field in national

elections, and photographic recordings.

 It was the first war to organize medical care of troops systematically.

 It was the first war to use land and water mines and to employ a submarine that could sink a warship.

 It was also the first war in which armies widely employed aerial reconnaissance by means of balloons.