American Civil War

C

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.

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D

Strategies

As men poured into the armies, Northern and Southern leaders discussed strategies that would achieve victory. These strategies contrasted significantly because the two sides had very different war aims. The Confederacy sought independence and only had to defend itself. The North sought to restore the Union, which meant it had to compel the seceded states to give up their hopes to found a new nation. Northern armies would have to invade the Confederacy, destroy its capacity to wage war, and crush the will of the Southern people to resist. The Confederacy could win by prolonging the war to a point where the Northern people would consider the effort too costly in lives and money to persist. The South had a compelling example in the American Revolution of a seemingly weaker power defeating a much stronger one. The colonies had been at an even greater material disadvantage in relation to Britain than were the Confederate states in relation to the North, yet the colonies won, with the help of France, by dragging the war out and exhausting the British will to win. If the North chose not to mount a military effort to coerce the seceded states back into the Union, the Confederacy would win independence by default.

Lincoln and other Northern leaders, however, had no intention of letting the Southern states go without a fight. The most prominent American military figure in the spring of 1861 was Winfield Scott, the general-in-chief of the United States Army. Physically frail but with a brilliant mind, Scott conceived a long-range strategy to bring Northern victory. Subsequently named the “Anaconda Plan” (after the South American snake that squeezes its prey to death), Scott’s plan sought to apply pressure on the Confederacy from all sides. A combined force of naval and army units would sweep down the Mississippi River, dividing the Confederacy’s eastern and western states. At the same time, the Union navy would institute a blockade to deny the Confederacy access to European manufactured goods. Should the South continue to resist even after the loss of the Mississippi and the closing of its ports, Scott envisioned a major invasion into the heart of the Confederacy. He estimated it would take two to three years and 300,000 men to carry out this strategy.

Except for underestimating, by about half, the length of time and number of men it would take to bring success, Scott had sketched the broad strategy the North would implement to defeat the South over the next four years. The United States Navy applied increasing pressure along the Confederate coasts, Northern forces took control of the Mississippi River by the middle of 1863, and large armies marched into Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas, eventually forcing a Confederate surrender in the spring of 1865.

The Confederacy pursued what often is termed a defensive-offensive strategy. Simply put, Confederate armies generally adopted a defensive strategy, protecting as much of their territory as possible against Northern incursions. However, when circumstances seemed to offer an opportunity to gain a decided advantage over Northern forces, the Confederacy launched offensives—the three most important of which culminated in the battles of Antietam (Maryland) and Perryville (Kentucky) in 1862, and Gettysburg (Pennsylvania) in 1863.

E

Effects of Geography

Geography played a major role in how effectively the two sides were able to carry out their strategies. The sheer size of the Confederacy posed a daunting obstacle to Northern military forces. Totaling more than 1,940,000 sq km (750,000 sq mi) and without a well-developed network of roads, the Southern landscape challenged the North’s ability to supply armies that maneuvered at increasing distances from Union bases. It was also almost impossible to make the North’s blockade of Southern ports completely effective because the South’s coastline stretched 5600 km (3500 mi) and contained nearly 200 harbors and mouths of navigable rivers. The Appalachian Mountains also hindered rapid movement of Northern forces between the eastern and western areas of the Confederacy while the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia offered a protected route through which Confederate armies could invade the North. The placement of Southern rivers, however, favored the North. The Mississippi, Tennessee, and Cumberland rivers provided excellent north-south avenues of advance for Union armies west of the Appalachians. In Virginia, Confederates defended from behind the state’s principal rivers, but the James River also served as a secure line of communications and supply for Union offensives against Richmond in 1862 and again in 1864.

F

Technology

Technological advances helped both sides deal with the great distances over which the armies fought. The Civil War was the first large conflict that featured railroads and the telegraph. Railroads rapidly moved hundreds of thousands of soldiers and vast quantities of supplies; the North contained almost twice as many miles of railroad lines as the South. Telegraphic communication permitted both governments to coordinate military movements on sprawling geographical fronts.

The combatants also took advantage of numerous other recent advances in military technology. The most important was the rifle musket carried by most of the infantrymen on both sides. Prior to the Civil War, infantry generally had been armed with smoothbore muskets, weapons without rifling in the barrels. These muskets had an effective range of less than 90 m (300 ft). As a result, massed attacks had a good chance of success because one side could launch an assault and not take serious casualties until they were almost on top of the defenders. The rifle musket, with an effective range of 225 to 275 m (750 to 900 ft), allowed defenders to break up attacks long before they reached the defenders’ positions. Combined with field fortifications, which were widely used during the war, the rifle musket changed military tactics by making charges against defensive positions more difficult. It also gave a significant advantage to the defending force.

Other new technologies included ironclad warships, which were used by both sides; the deployment of manned balloons for aerial reconnaissance on battlefields, used mainly by the North; the first sinking of a warship by the South’s submarine, known as the CSS Hunley; and the arming of significant numbers of soldiers with repeating weapons, carried mainly by the northern cavalry. The technology for all of these weapons had been present before the Civil War, but never before had armies applied the technology so widely.

G

Manpower and Finance

At the beginning of the war, state militias provided most of the troops for both Union and Confederate armies. Soon large numbers of civilians were volunteering for military service. Throughout the war, the bulk of the forces consisted of volunteers. When the number of volunteers lagged behind the growing battle casualties, both the Northern and Southern governments resorted to drafting men into the armies.

The Confederacy passed the first draft act in April 1862. The Union followed almost a year later. In both North and South, men of certain classes, occupations, and professions were exempted from the draft. Furthermore, a man who was drafted in the North could avoid military service by making a money payment to the government and in both the North and South, a draftee could hire a substitute to go to war for him. Opposition to the draft was general throughout the country. In New York City the publication of the first draft lists caused four days of violent rioting in which many were killed and $1.5 million worth of property was destroyed. Although the draft itself did not produce a sufficient number of soldiers, the threat of being drafted led many to volunteer and collect a bounty, which was paid to volunteers. Some soldiers were unscrupulous enough to enlist, desert, and reenlist to collect the bounty more than once.

The Civil War, like all wars, called for great sums of money to pay troops and supply them with equipment. At the outset of the war the Confederacy depended on loans, but this source of finance soon disappeared as Southerners began to be affected financially by the cost of the war and unable to buy bonds. The South never really tried heavy taxation because the government had no means to collect taxes and people in the South were reluctant and often unable to pay them. Instead it relied on paper money, freely printed. Backed only by the possibility of Southern victory, the money dropped in value as the war went on and as its outcome became more uncertain. The Confederacy suffered greatly from severe inflation and debt throughout the war. The Confederate rate of inflation was about 9000 percent, meaning that an item that cost $1 in the Confederacy at the beginning of the war would have cost $92 at the end of the war. In contrast, the North’s rate of inflation was only about 80 percent. As the value of money declined, prices rose accordingly.

The Union financed its armies by loans and taxes to a much greater degree than the Confederacy, even resorting to an income tax. The people of the North were more prosperous than those of the South. A national banking system was established by Congress to stimulate sales of U.S. bonds. Northerners had savings with which they could buy the bonds and had earnings from which taxes could be taken. The North also resorted to printing large amounts of paper money, called greenbacks, which were not backed by gold in the U.S. Treasury. As in the South, though to a much lesser degree, the paper money dropped in value in relation to gold, and prices rose. However, the North and South continued to fight as if their treasuries were full.

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