The American Civil War

Introduction

Between April 1861 and April 1865 America was involved in a devastating civil war. It cost the lives of 600,000 soldiers. More Americans died in the Civil War than in the First and Second World Wars and the Vietnam War combined.

In 1860 the Democrat Party split in two allowing the Republican Party, which represented only the North of the country to gain control of the presidency. The South then declared itself an independent nation and began seizing military installations within its borders. This the North would not accept and war began.

The Civil War was the culmination of four decades of deep-seated economic, social, and political conflict:

• the agrarian southern states, produced cash crops - cotton, tobacco, and sugar cane - for export to Europe. They wanted import tariffs kept down, to enable them to obtain manufactured goods from Britain at low prices;
• the north-eastern states wanted high import tariffs to protect its emerging industries;
• the agricultural north-western states, which might have been expected to side with their southern sisters, became alarmed at the prospect of the mouth of their principle export artery - the Mississippi River - being in the hands of another nation. They finally sided with their northern counterparts; and
• both sides were competing to have the transcontinental railroad put through their sections.

These differences were serious, but could probably have been settled by negotiation but for one thing, the South's economy and social system were underpinned by chattel slavery.

There were over three-million black slaves south of the Mason-Dixon line, representing substantial percentage of the region's wealth. Even those who did not own slaves were prepared to support the system for fear of what would happen if it was dismantled.

Statistics

	North	South
Population	22 million	9 million including 3 million enslaved blacks
Size of army	2.5 million men including 180,000 blacks	1 million white males

War

Hostilities commenced on April 12th, 1861, when Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor was fired upon by the Confederates and bombarded into submission. Lincoln then called for 75,000 volunteers to put down the 'insurrection'. It was the beginning of a bloody sectional conflict fought by citizen soldiers over mountains, through swamps, in tangled woodland and along the banks of broad rivers. Napoleonic formations were used, with troops advancing in close order against weapons that made such tactics a desperate undertaking.

In other respects the war encouraged many innovations:

• strategic troop movements by rail
• direct control of field commanders by central governments using telegraphy
• wide-spread use of rifled muskets and cannon
• repeating carbines with metallic cartridges, although these were not widely available until the closing stages of the war
• iron-clad warships, mines and even a submarine