The Civil War (1861–1865)

Why the Union Won and What the War Did to America

HIST 101 — United States to 1877

📚 What You Need to Know

This lecture explores the American Civil War (1861-1865), the deadliest conflict in American history with approximately 750,000 deaths. We'll examine why the Union won despite early Confederate advantages and how the war fundamentally transformed the United States.

📖 Key Questions

Why did the South lose a war it seemed positioned to win?
How did the war evolve from preserving the Union to ending slavery?
What were the turning points that shifted momentum?
How did the war change American society forever?

🎓 Senior Historians' Corner

James McPherson emphasizes contingency—the war's outcome was not predetermined. Drew Gilpin Faust examines how the scale of death transformed American culture. Gary Gallagher argues we must understand why the Confederate war effort lasted so long, not just why it failed.

The Civil War's Central Question

Why did the Union win a war it was losing early?
How did the war transform the nation?
Political, military, social, and moral dimensions intertwine
War as both national rupture and national rebirth

SECTION I

The Road to War

Long-Term Causes

Expansion of slavery divides every national debate
Failure of compromises (Missouri, Compromise of 1850)

Political Collapse of the 1850s

Kansas-Nebraska Act shatters the old party system
National parties replaced by sectional parties
Violence in "Bleeding Kansas" and Congress
Dred Scott and John Brown radicalize both sides

📖 The Cascade of Crises

1854: Kansas-Nebraska Act—Whig Party dies, Republicans born
1855-56: "Bleeding Kansas" violence
1856: Preston Brooks beats Charles Sumner on Senate floor—Southerners send Brooks new canes as gifts
1857: Dred Scott decision
1859: John Brown's raid
1860: Democratic Party splits; Lincoln wins

📚 Key Point

The Second Party System (Whigs vs. Democrats) was national—both parties had Northern and Southern wings, forcing compromise. After 1854, Republicans are purely Northern; Democrats increasingly Southern. Parties now amplify sectional conflict instead of muffling it.

Election of 1860: The Breaking Point

Four-way race fractures national politics
Lincoln wins without Southern electoral votes
Southern states see permanent minority status
Secession begins within weeks

Secession Winter 1860–61

December 20, 1860 South Carolina secedes first

Jan–Feb 1861 Six more states follow (MS, FL, AL, GA, LA, TX)

February 1861 Confederate States of America formed

April 12, 1861 Fort Sumter fired upon; war begins

April–May 1861 Upper South joins (VA, AR, TN, NC)

Throughout Border states (MD, DE, KY, MO) stay in Union—critical to victory

SECTION II

Early War: Overconfidence & Reality

"On to Richmond!" or First Bull Run (Manassas)

July 21, 1861

Americans expect a short war
Confederate victory shocks the North
Demonstrates inexperience on both sides
War becomes a long struggle

Reality: Union army fled in panic back to Washington

📚 How Battles Happened

Battles weren't scheduled by appointment. They happened where armies collided while pursuing strategic objectives. Manassas Junction was a critical railroad intersection—whoever controlled it controlled the rail lines into Virginia's interior. McDowell marched south to seize it; Beauregard positioned his forces along Bull Run creek to block him. The battle happened there because the terrain and the objective dictated it.

💡 Why Two Names?

Bull Run is the creek where Beauregard set his defensive line. The Union named battles after natural features (Bull Run, Antietam); the Confederacy named them after towns (Manassas, Sharpsburg). Same battle, different names—two cultures who couldn't even agree on what to call the fight.

📚 What Happened

First major battle fought near Manassas Junction, Virginia—about 25 miles from Washington. Both armies were green: 90-day volunteers, officers who'd never commanded large units, confusion everywhere. Civilians from Washington came out with picnic baskets expecting to watch a quick Union victory.

Union forces under Irvin McDowell initially pushed the Confederates back. But Confederate reinforcements arrived by rail—one of the first times railroads decisively affected a battle. Thomas Jackson earned his nickname "Stonewall" rallying troops on Henry House Hill. By afternoon, the Union line collapsed. Retreat became a rout, soldiers and civilians fleeing together back to Washington.

📖 Why It Matters

For the North: The "On to Richmond!" fantasy died. Lincoln called for 500,000 three-year volunteers the next day. This would not be a 90-day war.

For the South: Victory bred dangerous overconfidence. Some believed one Confederate could whip ten Yankees. This complacency would cost them later.

Key insight: Both sides learned that enthusiasm and courage weren't enough. This would be a war of logistics, training, and industrial capacity—exactly where the North held advantages it hadn't yet learned to use.

Early Union Struggles

McClellan's caution slows momentum
Poor coordination between armies
Limited goals: restore Union, not end slavery
Confederate morale and leadership advantage

📚 The McClellan Problem

George McClellan was brilliant at organization—he took the demoralized mob that fled Bull Run and built the Army of the Potomac into a disciplined fighting force. Soldiers loved him. But he wouldn't fight. He consistently overestimated Confederate strength (sometimes by 200%), demanded more troops, and found endless reasons to delay. Lincoln's frustration boiled over: "If McClellan is not using the army, I should like to borrow it for a while."

The Peninsula Campaign (spring 1862) captured McClellan's problem perfectly: he moved 100,000 men by sea to outflank the Confederates, got within miles of Richmond, then convinced himself he was outnumbered and retreated. A pattern emerged—McClellan prepared beautifully and executed timidly.

📖 Structural Problems

Political generals: Lincoln appointed men like Benjamin Butler and Nathaniel Banks not for military skill but to hold together his coalition—Democrats, ethnic constituencies, key states. These men commanded armies and got soldiers killed while learning on the job.

No unified command: Union armies in different theaters operated independently, sometimes at cross-purposes. The Confederacy could shift troops by rail to meet threats one at a time. Not until Grant took overall command in 1864 did the Union coordinate offensives.

Limited war aims: In 1861-62, the official goal was simply restoring the Union—not ending slavery. This created confusion. Why not negotiate? What were soldiers dying for? And it left the South's enslaved labor force intact, feeding Confederate armies.

💡 Key Insight

The Union had overwhelming advantages in men and materiel but hadn't yet developed the leadership, strategy, or political will to use them. The Confederacy didn't need to win—just outlast Northern resolve. In 1861-62, that looked achievable.

🤔 Why Was McClellan So Cautious?

Bad intelligence: His chief, Allan Pinkerton, consistently reported Confederate forces at double or triple actual strength. McClellan may have acted rationally on terrible information.

Perfectionism: He loved building armies but couldn't stomach watching them get torn apart. Always needed one more division, one more week. Some historians see a deep fear of failure—if he never fully committed, he couldn't fully lose.

Politics: McClellan was a Democrat who opposed emancipation. He wanted a limited war ending in negotiated reunion with slavery intact. Crushing the Confederacy would empower Radical Republicans—an outcome he may not have wanted. His 1864 presidential run against Lincoln on a peace platform suggests his heart was never in total victory.

Training: He came from the army's engineering tradition, which emphasized caution and siege warfare over aggressive maneuver. He fought like an engineer, not a risk-taker.

Probably all four factors combined. Lincoln needed a general willing to fight even knowing he'd take losses. McClellan never could.

Early Confederate Advantages

Strong officer corps and early unity
Defensive strategy fits Southern terrain
High early enlistment and confidence
Cotton diplomacy hopes for European aid

SECTION III

Turning the Tide (1862–63)

Antietam: Bloodiest Day
(Sharpsburg)

September 17, 1862

Lee invades the North
Tactical stalemate but strategic Union victory
Lincoln gains opportunity for Emancipation
Ends Confederate hopes for foreign recognition

23,000 casualties in a single day—the bloodiest day in American military history

Emancipation Proclamation

January 1, 1863

Reframes the war around slavery
Undermines Confederate labor system
Prevents European intervention
Opens enlistment to Black soldiers

📚 The Timing

Lincoln had drafted the Proclamation in July 1862, but Secretary of State Seward convinced him to wait for a military victory—otherwise it would look like desperation, "the last shriek on the retreat." Antietam (September 17, 1862) gave Lincoln his victory. He issued the preliminary proclamation five days later, warning the Confederacy: return to the Union by January 1, or emancipation becomes policy. No states returned.

📖 What It Actually Said

The Proclamation only freed enslaved people in areas "in rebellion"—meaning Confederate-controlled territory where Lincoln had no practical authority. It explicitly exempted the border states (still in the Union) and parts of the Confederacy already under Union control (like New Orleans and parts of Virginia). Critics then and now have mocked this: Lincoln "freed" people he couldn't reach while leaving enslaved people in areas he controlled.

But this misses the point. The limitation was constitutional—Lincoln justified emancipation as a war measure, a military necessity to weaken the enemy. He couldn't claim military necessity in areas not at war. The Proclamation's real power wasn't immediate liberation; it was transforming every Union soldier into an agent of emancipation. As armies advanced, slavery died.

💡 Why It Mattered

Transformed the war's purpose: Before January 1863, the Union fought to restore the old Union—potentially with slavery intact. After, the Union fought to create something new. There was no going back.

European intervention became impossible: Britain and France had antislavery publics. Once the war became explicitly about ending slavery, no European government could recognize the Confederacy without massive domestic backlash. Confederate hopes for foreign intervention died.

Authorized Black soldiers: The Proclamation explicitly opened military service to Black men. By war's end, 180,000 Black soldiers served—about 10% of the Union army. They weren't just fighting for the Union; they were fighting for their own freedom.

Encouraged self-emancipation: Enslaved people had been fleeing to Union lines since the war began. The Proclamation gave official sanction to what was already happening and accelerated the collapse of slavery wherever Union armies went.

🎓 Historian's Corner

Eric Foner calls it "Lincoln's most revolutionary act." But Foner also emphasizes that emancipation was a process, not a single moment—shaped by military events, political pressures, and the actions of enslaved people themselves who forced the issue by fleeing to Union lines.

Key point for students: Lincoln moved slowly, but when he moved, he moved decisively. The Proclamation couldn't be undone. Even if the North grew war-weary, even if Lincoln lost in 1864, emancipation was now Union policy. That's why Lincoln later pushed for the 13th Amendment—to make it constitutional and permanent.

Gettysburg & Vicksburg (1863)

Twin Turning Points - July 1863

Gettysburg (July 1-3)

Lee's second invasion halted
51,000 casualties
Pickett's Charge fails
Lee never recovers strength

Vicksburg (July 4)

Union controls Mississippi River
Splits Confederacy in two
Grant emerges as top general
Opens Deep South to invasion

📚 Gettysburg: How It Happened

Lee invaded the North for the second time in summer 1863, hoping to win a decisive victory on Union soil that might break Northern morale or bring European recognition. The armies stumbled into each other near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—Lee was actually looking for supplies (possibly shoes). Neither commander planned to fight there, but once engaged, neither could back down.

Day 1 (July 1): Confederate forces pushed Union troops through the town, but the Union army dug in on high ground south of town—Cemetery Hill, Cemetery Ridge, Little Round Top. This terrain advantage shaped everything that followed.

Day 2 (July 2): Lee attacked both Union flanks. Savage fighting at Little Round Top, Devil's Den, the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard. The Union line bent but didn't break. Colonel Joshua Chamberlain's 20th Maine held Little Round Top with a desperate bayonet charge when they ran out of ammunition.

Day 3 (July 3): Lee ordered a massive frontal assault on the Union center—12,500 men marching across open ground toward Cemetery Ridge. Pickett's Charge. It was a catastrophe. Confederate soldiers advanced nearly a mile under artillery and rifle fire. A few hundred briefly breached the Union line ("the high water mark of the Confederacy"), then were killed or captured. Half the men who made the charge became casualties.

Aftermath: Lee retreated to Virginia. He offered his resignation to Jefferson Davis (refused). The Army of Northern Virginia would never again have the strength for major offensive operations. Lee told his men, "It is all my fault."

📚 Vicksburg: Grant's Masterpiece

Vicksburg, Mississippi, sat on high bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River—the last Confederate stronghold blocking Union control of the entire river. Grant tried multiple approaches through winter 1862-63: digging canals, running gunboats past the batteries, swampy overland routes. All failed. Critics called for his removal.

The brilliant gamble: Grant marched his army down the Louisiana side of the river, ran gunboats and supply barges past Vicksburg's guns at night (losing some), then crossed the river south of the city. He was now deep in enemy territory with no supply line. Instead of retreating, he moved fast—living off the land, winning five battles in three weeks, and driving the Confederate army back into Vicksburg.

The siege: Unable to take the city by assault, Grant besieged it for 47 days. Civilians dug caves into hillsides to escape bombardment. Food ran out—soldiers and civilians ate mules, then rats. On July 4, 1863—the day after Pickett's Charge—Vicksburg surrendered. 30,000 Confederate soldiers became prisoners.

Lincoln on Grant: When critics complained Grant was a butcher or a drunk, Lincoln replied, "I can't spare this man. He fights."

💡 Why July 1863 Was the Turning Point

Strategic shift: Before July 1863, the Confederacy could still win—one more invasion, one more European intervention, one more Northern election. After July 1863, the question changed. The Confederacy couldn't win militarily; it could only hope the North would tire of the war.

The Mississippi: Lincoln said it best: "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea." The Confederacy was now split in two. Texas, Arkansas, and most of Louisiana were cut off from the rest of the South.

Morale: July 4, 1863—Independence Day—Vicksburg fell. The symbolism was crushing. Vicksburg didn't celebrate July 4th again until 1945.

🎓 The Counterfactual

What if Pickett's Charge had broken through? What if Grant had been removed during the failed winter campaigns? These were genuine possibilities that would have changed everything. After July 1863, Confederate victory required the North to choose to stop fighting—and that choice would come down to the 1864 election.

SECTION IV

Total War & The Home Front

War Becomes a National Effort

Drafts and mass mobilization
New taxes and national banking system
Railroads and industry power the Union
Enormous logistical demands

📚 The Scale

Nothing like this had happened before in American history. 2.1 million men served in Union forces; 750,000 to 1 million in Confederate forces. At the war's peak, the Union army was larger than the entire federal government had been in 1860. The war cost roughly $6.7 billion—more than all federal expenditures from 1789 to 1860 combined.

📖 The Draft

Confederacy: Implemented conscription first (April 1862)—an astonishing step for a government founded on states' rights and individual liberty. All white men 18-35 were subject to the draft (later expanded to 17-50).

Union: Followed with the Enrollment Act (March 1863). But both systems allowed substitutes and exemptions that favored the wealthy. In the North, you could pay $300 (a year's wages for a laborer) to avoid service or hire a substitute. This created the bitter slogan: "Rich man's war, poor man's fight."

Draft riots: New York City exploded in July 1863—the worst urban violence in American history. Mostly Irish working-class men, furious about being drafted to fight a war they saw as freeing Black people who would then compete for their jobs. Rioters lynched Black New Yorkers, burned the Colored Orphan Asylum, and attacked abolitionists. Over 100 people died. Federal troops fresh from Gettysburg had to restore order.

📖 Building a Modern State

The war forced the federal government to do things it had never done before:

Income tax: First in American history (Revenue Act of 1861). 3% on incomes over $800. Americans had never paid direct federal taxes like this.

National banking system: The National Banking Acts (1863-64) created a uniform national currency. Before the war, money was chaos—thousands of different banknotes from state-chartered banks, many worthless. "Greenbacks" (federal paper money) became the first truly national currency.

Transcontinental railroad: Pacific Railroad Act (1862) chartered the Union Pacific and Central Pacific. Couldn't have passed before the war—Southern congressmen had blocked northern routes. With them gone, Congress acted.

Homestead Act (1862): Free land (160 acres) to settlers who would farm it. Again, blocked before the war by Southern opposition.

Land-grant colleges: Morrill Act (1862) gave federal land to states to fund public universities—the origin of schools like Illinois, Michigan State, Purdue.

💡 The Confederate Contradiction

The Confederacy seceded to protect states' rights from federal overreach. Then it had to fight a modern war, which required: conscription, impressment of property, suspension of habeas corpus, taxes, and centralized control of railroads. Jefferson Davis's government became more centralized than Lincoln's in many ways. Georgia's governor, Joseph Brown, spent as much energy fighting Richmond as fighting the Union. The Confederacy was undermined by its own founding ideology.

🎓 Long-Term Significance

The Civil War built the modern American state. Income taxes, national currency, federal support for higher education, continental railroads—all emerged from wartime necessity. The federal government that entered the war was tiny and weak; the one that emerged was powerful enough to reshape society. This is part of what historians mean when they call the Civil War a "Second American Revolution."

Northern Advantages Solidify

Superior industrial output
Larger population and immigrant manpower
Greater financial capacity
Effective naval blockade

By 1864, North producing war materials at levels South couldn't match. Union armies had food, ammunition, replacements. Confederate armies went hungry.

📚 The Numbers

Population: 22 million in the North vs. 9 million in the South—and 3.5 million of those Southerners were enslaved people who wouldn't be fighting for the Confederacy. The Union could absorb staggering losses and keep fielding armies; the Confederacy couldn't replace its dead.

Industry: The North manufactured 97% of American firearms, 96% of railroad equipment, 94% of cloth, 90% of shoes and boots. The South had agriculture and cotton—but you can't eat cotton, and you can't shoot it at the enemy.

Railroads: Union had 22,000 miles of track vs. Confederate 9,000—and the Union could manufacture new rails while the Confederacy couldn't. As the war ground on, Confederate railroads fell apart. Broken rails couldn't be replaced. Locomotives wore out. By 1864, moving troops and supplies across the South had become agonizingly slow.

Immigration: During the war, roughly 800,000 immigrants arrived in the North—many of them military-age men who could enlist or work in factories. The South received almost none. The Union was actually growing stronger in manpower while fighting the war.

📖 The Naval Blockade

Lincoln declared a blockade of Southern ports in April 1861. Initially it was leaky—the Union didn't have enough ships to cover 3,500 miles of coastline. But the navy grew from 42 ships to over 600. By 1864, Southern exports had dropped 95%.

King Cotton failed: Southerners believed cotton would force European intervention—"Cotton is King," they said. Britain would have to break the blockade to keep its textile mills running. It didn't happen. Britain had stockpiled cotton before the war, found new sources in Egypt and India, and had no appetite for war with the Union. The Confederacy's one economic trump card turned out to be worthless.

What couldn't get in: Medicine, manufactured goods, shoes, salt (essential for preserving meat), coffee, weapons, ammunition. Confederate soldiers fought barefoot, ate half-rations, and died from wounds that could have been treated with proper supplies.

💡 Why Advantages Took Time

Students sometimes wonder: if the North was so much stronger, why didn't it win immediately? Because advantages on paper take time to convert into battlefield results. You need to mobilize industry, train soldiers, find competent generals, and build political will. The South had interior lines, better initial officer corps, and the morale that comes from defending home. By 1864, Northern advantages had fully materialized while Confederate resources were exhausted. That's when the war became unwinnable for the South.

🎓 What the South Had

It's easy to make the Confederacy look hopeless, but they had real advantages early on: fighting on the defensive (requiring fewer troops), interior lines (shorter distances to move troops), a professional officer corps (many of the best U.S. Army officers were Southern), and fierce motivation—they were defending their homes. The American Revolution proved a weaker force could outlast a stronger one. The South didn't need to win; it just needed the North to give up. That remained possible until Sherman took Atlanta in September 1864.

Social Upheaval

Women enter nursing and wartime industries
Food shortages and inflation in the South
Enslaved people flee plantations
War reshapes daily life on both fronts

War as Social Revolution

Collapse of slavery becomes inevitable
Union armies act as agents of emancipation
Southern social order destabilizes
New definitions of freedom emerge

The Civil War was the Second American Revolution—it destroyed an entire social system and forced the nation to rebuild on new foundations.

📚 Slavery's Collapse

Slavery didn't end with a single proclamation—it collapsed as Union armies advanced. Every time Union forces occupied new territory, enslaved people fled to their lines. By 1863, this wasn't just tolerated; it was policy. Union armies became engines of liberation whether individual soldiers wanted that or not.

Self-emancipation: Enslaved people didn't wait to be freed. They escaped at enormous risk, provided intelligence to Union forces, sabotaged Confederate operations, and forced the issue politically. When "contraband" (escaped enslaved people) showed up at Union camps, commanders had to decide what to do—and those decisions pushed Washington toward emancipation. Foner and other historians emphasize that enslaved people were actors in their own liberation, not passive recipients of freedom granted by Lincoln.

📖 The Southern Home Front Cracks

White women's burden: With men at war, white women ran plantations and farms. Many had never managed enslaved workers directly. Discipline broke down. Enslaved people slowed work, feigned illness, demanded better treatment, or simply walked away when the opportunity came.

Class resentment: The "twenty-negro law" exempted overseers on plantations with 20+ enslaved people from the draft. Poor whites, already suspicious of a "rich man's war," saw planters' sons staying home while they died in Virginia. Desertion rates soared. By 1865, perhaps half of Confederate soldiers had deserted at some point—many to help starving families.

Food riots: Richmond's bread riot (April 1863) saw hundreds of women, many of them soldiers' wives, march through the Confederate capital demanding food, smashing shop windows, shouting "Bread or blood!" Jefferson Davis personally confronted the crowd. Similar riots broke out across the South. The Confederacy was collapsing from within.

💭 What Freedom Meant

For freedpeople, freedom meant many things at once:

Family: First priority for many—finding spouses, children, parents sold away. Freedpeople traveled hundreds of miles searching. They legalized marriages that slavery had denied recognition.

Autonomy: Control over your own body, your own time, your own movement. No more passes, no more whips, no more being sold.

Education: Literacy had been illegal for enslaved people in most Southern states. Freedpeople built schools almost immediately—sometimes before they had stable housing. They understood that education meant power.

Land: "Forty acres and a mule" became the symbol of economic independence. Without land, freedpeople would remain dependent on white landowners. This was the great failure of Reconstruction—land redistribution never happened at scale.

Political participation: Voting, holding office, serving on juries—the full rights of citizenship. During Reconstruction, Black men voted in huge numbers, held state and federal offices, shaped Southern governments.

📖 What They Didn't Get

Land: Most freedpeople became sharecroppers—working land they didn't own, caught in cycles of debt. Economic independence remained elusive.

Sustained protection: Federal troops withdrew in 1877. Without protection, Black political power was crushed through violence, fraud, and eventually Jim Crow laws.

Long-term power: The revolution was real but incomplete. By the 1890s, Black Southerners had been systematically disenfranchised. The gains of Reconstruction wouldn't be recovered until the Civil Rights Movement.

🎓 Historian's Corner

Eric Foner: "Reconstruction was an 'unfinished revolution.'" The war destroyed slavery—revolutionary and permanent. But the promise of full equality was abandoned. The Civil War settled that the nation would survive and slavery would end; it didn't settle what freedom would actually mean for four million people.

The Second American Revolution: Historians call the Civil War this because it destroyed a social system (slavery), redefined citizenship (14th Amendment), and permanently expanded federal power. The America that emerged in 1865 was a fundamentally different nation than the one that existed in 1860.

SECTION V

Endgame

Union Strategy Under Grant

Coordinated offensives across all theaters
War of attrition strains Confederate resources
Relentless pressure on Lee's army
Goal: destroy capacity to resist

📚 What Changed in 1864

In March 1864, Lincoln promoted Grant to lieutenant general—a rank no one had held since George Washington—and gave him command of all Union armies. For the first time, the Union had a general-in-chief who would actually coordinate the war.

The problem Grant inherited: Union armies had been fighting separate wars. While one army attacked, others rested, allowing the Confederacy to shift troops by rail to meet each threat. Lee had exploited this repeatedly—reinforcing at critical moments because he only faced one enemy at a time.

Grant's solution: Attack everywhere simultaneously. Lee couldn't reinforce one theater if every theater was under assault. Even if individual Union armies didn't win, constant pressure would grind down Confederate resources. Grant compared it to a man holding a bulldog's ears: "He doesn't want to hold on but he's afraid to let go."

📖 The Overland Campaign (May-June 1864)

Grant personally accompanied the Army of the Potomac against Lee in Virginia. What followed was six weeks of nearly continuous combat—the most intense sustained fighting of the war.

The Wilderness, Virginia (May 5-7): Dense forest negated Union advantages in artillery. Fighting was chaotic, sometimes hand-to-hand. Woods caught fire; wounded men burned to death. Tactically inconclusive.

The critical moment: After the Wilderness, soldiers expected what always happened—retreat north to lick their wounds, like every commander before. Instead, Grant ordered the army to march south, around Lee's flank, toward Spotsylvania Court House. Soldiers realized this general was different. They cheered.

Spotsylvania Court House, Virginia (May 8-21): Twelve days of brutal trench warfare. At the "Bloody Angle," men fought hand-to-hand for nearly 24 hours in pouring rain. Trees were cut down by musket fire alone.

Cold Harbor, Virginia (June 3): Grant's worst mistake. A frontal assault against entrenched Confederates cost 7,000 Union casualties in under an hour. Grant later wrote, "I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made."

The cost: In six weeks, Grant lost roughly 55,000 men—almost as many as Lee's entire army. Northern newspapers called him "Butcher Grant." But Lee lost 35,000 he couldn't replace. Grant could get reinforcements; Lee couldn't.

📖 The Siege of Petersburg (June 1864-April 1865)

Unable to destroy Lee's army in open battle, Grant pinned it at Petersburg, Virginia—a railroad hub 25 miles south of Richmond. If Petersburg fell, Richmond couldn't be supplied. Lee had to hold it.

For ten months, the armies faced each other across elaborate trench networks. Grant extended his lines westward, forcing Lee to stretch thinner and thinner. Lee couldn't retreat without abandoning Richmond; he couldn't attack without suicidal losses. He was trapped, slowly strangling.

📖 The Other Offensives

Sherman in Georgia: While Grant pinned Lee, Sherman advanced toward Atlanta, Georgia with 100,000 men. His capture of Atlanta in September 1864 saved Lincoln's re-election and broke Southern morale.

Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia: Philip Sheridan destroyed the Shenandoah Valley—the "breadbasket of the Confederacy"—so thoroughly that, as he reported, "a crow flying over it would have to carry its own provisions." No more food, no more invasion route toward Washington.

💡 Grant's Philosophy

Grant understood something his predecessors hadn't: the math favored the Union. Every battle cost both sides, but only the Union could replace its losses. If Grant traded casualties one-for-one, he would eventually win. This wasn't butchery—it was brutal arithmetic. The war couldn't end until Lee's army was destroyed, and destroying it required accepting horrific losses.

"I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." It took longer than summer. But it worked.

🎓 The Reputation Question

Was Grant a butcher or a strategic genius? Both views persist. Critics note his staggering casualty rates. Defenders argue he did what had to be done—that the war would have dragged on far longer under more cautious generals, costing more lives in the long run. Grant himself was tormented by the losses. But he kept fighting because he believed the Union cause justified the cost.

Sherman's March

March to the Sea targets infrastructure
Breaks Confederate morale
Psychological warfare as strategy
Shows the shift to total war

📚 Atlanta and the 1864 Election

By summer 1864, Lincoln expected to lose re-election. Grant was stuck at Petersburg, Virginia, casualties were horrific, and war-weariness was overwhelming. The Democrats nominated George McClellan on a platform calling the war a "failure" and seeking negotiated peace. If McClellan won, the Confederacy might survive.

Then, on September 2, 1864, Sherman telegraphed: "Atlanta is ours, and fairly won." The fall of Atlanta, Georgia—the Deep South's industrial and railroad hub—transformed Northern morale overnight. Suddenly the war looked winnable. Lincoln won re-election with 55% of the vote. The Confederacy's last political hope died.

📖 The March to the Sea (November-December 1864)

After taking Atlanta, Sherman did something unprecedented: he cut loose from his supply lines entirely. He burned Atlanta's military infrastructure, severed his own communications with the North, and marched 60,000 men southeast toward Savannah, Georgia—285 miles away. For a month, the North had no idea where Sherman was or whether he was alive.

The method: Sherman's army advanced on a 60-mile-wide front, living off the land. Soldiers were authorized to "forage liberally"—a polite term for taking whatever food, livestock, and supplies they found. Special units destroyed anything of military value: railroads (heating the rails and twisting them around trees into "Sherman's neckties"), factories, cotton gins, warehouses, bridges.

What was targeted: Sherman was explicit—this was war on Confederate resources and morale, not on civilians directly. His orders prohibited entering private homes and harming non-combatants. In practice, discipline varied. Some units followed orders strictly; others looted freely. The destruction was enormous either way.

Savannah falls: Sherman reached Savannah, Georgia on December 21, 1864, presenting the city to Lincoln as a "Christmas gift." He'd lost only 2,000 men while destroying an estimated $100 million in property and proving the Confederacy couldn't protect its own heartland.

📖 The Carolinas Campaign (January-April 1865)

Sherman then turned north through the Carolinas—and here the destruction intensified. South Carolina, as the birthplace of secession, received special attention. Columbia, South Carolina burned (whether by Sherman's orders, fleeing Confederates, or accident remains debated). Soldiers who had restrained themselves in Georgia felt South Carolina deserved punishment.

By the time Sherman reached North Carolina, Confederate resistance had collapsed. Joseph Johnston surrendered his army on April 26, 1865—the largest Confederate surrender of the war.

💡 Total War

Sherman pioneered what later generations would call "total war"—the idea that modern war isn't just army vs. army but society vs. society. Destroying the enemy's capacity to fight meant destroying infrastructure, supplies, and morale. Make war so terrible that the enemy gives up.

Sherman was blunt about it: "War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over." And: "We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war."

Did it work? Arguably, yes. Confederate morale collapsed. Desertion skyrocketed. Soldiers who might have fought to the last man realized their families were unprotected. The march didn't just destroy property—it destroyed the Confederate will to fight.

🎓 The Controversy

Sherman remains controversial. Was the march a war crime or a strategic masterstroke that shortened the war and saved lives? Lost Cause mythology portrayed Sherman as a monster who waged war on women and children. Modern historians generally argue the destruction, while severe, was targeted at military resources, and that Sherman's methods—however brutal—ended the war faster than prolonged conventional fighting would have.

Sherman himself never apologized: "War is hell." He believed he'd done what was necessary.

📚 Enslaved People and the March

Thousands of enslaved people fled plantations to follow Sherman's army—a "jubilee" of self-liberation. Sherman's attitude toward them was complicated at best; he saw them as a logistical burden and wasn't fighting for racial equality. At Ebenezer Creek, Georgia, Union officers pulled up pontoon bridges after crossing, leaving hundreds of Black refugees stranded with Confederate cavalry approaching. Many drowned trying to swim across; others were captured. It was one of the war's uglier episodes—liberation and abandonment in the same campaign.

Collapse of the Confederacy

Winter 1864-65 Desertion rises as shortages worsen

April 2, 1865 Richmond falls; Davis flees

April 9, 1865 Lee surrenders at Appomattox

April-May 1865 Other Confederate armies surrender

SECTION VI

Legacy

The Human Cost

~750,000 deaths reshape the nation
Wounded and amputee population enormous
National cemeteries created
Trauma becomes part of public memory

More Americans died in the Civil War than in all other American wars combined until Vietnam. Nearly every family was touched by death.

📚 The Numbers

Approximately 750,000 Americans died—2.5% of the total population. To put that in perspective, the equivalent today would be 7-8 million deaths. Union dead: roughly 360,000. Confederate dead: roughly 290,000. More Americans died in the Civil War than in all other American wars combined until Vietnam.

Disease vs. combat: For every soldier killed in battle, two died of disease—dysentery, typhoid, pneumonia, malaria, measles. Armies concentrated thousands of young men from isolated rural areas who had never been exposed to common diseases. Camp sanitation was primitive. Hospitals were overwhelmed. A minor wound could mean death from infection; surgeons didn't yet understand germ theory.

The wounded: Roughly 500,000 men were wounded seriously enough to be counted. Amputation was the standard treatment for serious limb wounds—surgeons could remove a leg in under two minutes. An estimated 60,000 amputations were performed during the war. After 1865, one-armed and one-legged men became a common sight in every American town. Mississippi spent 20% of its state budget on artificial limbs in 1866.

📖 The Problem of the Dead

Americans in 1861 expected soldiers to die at home, surrounded by family, with time for last words and proper Christian burial. The war made that impossible. Men died in heaps on distant battlefields, unidentified, hastily buried in shallow graves, or not buried at all.

Identification: There were no dog tags. Soldiers sometimes pinned paper with their names to their uniforms before battle, knowing they might not be recognizable afterward. Families often never learned where or how their sons died—only that they were "missing."

Notifying families: No systematic process existed. Soldiers wrote letters for dying comrades. Officers sent terse notes. Chaplains did what they could. Many families learned of deaths through casualty lists published in newspapers—scanning columns of names, hoping not to see one they knew.

Bringing bodies home: Wealthy families sometimes hired agents to locate and ship bodies home—embalming became a growth industry. Most families couldn't afford this. Their sons stayed where they fell.

📖 National Cemeteries

The federal government took unprecedented responsibility for the dead. In 1862, Congress authorized national cemeteries for Union soldiers. After the war, the U.S. Army reinterred hundreds of thousands of Union dead—locating remains, identifying them where possible, and creating the national cemetery system that still exists. Gettysburg National Cemetery, dedicated in November 1863, became the model. Confederate dead, initially, were left to Southern states and private organizations.

The Gettysburg Address: Lincoln's 272-word speech at the cemetery dedication tried to give meaning to mass death. The soldiers had died so that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." The war wasn't just slaughter—it was sacrifice for democracy's survival.

📖 Trauma and Memory

"Soldier's heart": What we now call PTSD was recognized but not understood. Doctors called it "soldier's heart," "nostalgia," or "irritable heart." Thousands of veterans suffered flashbacks, depression, alcoholism, and inability to readjust to civilian life. Families absorbed the trauma; it passed down generations.

Veterans' organizations: The Grand Army of the Republic (Union) and United Confederate Veterans became powerful political and social forces. Veterans gathered annually to remember, to mourn, and increasingly to reconcile—sometimes at the expense of remembering what the war had actually been about.

Memorial culture: Monument-building, Memorial Day (originally "Decoration Day," started by Black Southerners in Charleston honoring Union dead), veteran's pensions, old soldiers' homes—the war created an entire culture of commemoration. Americans had never experienced loss on this scale and built new institutions to process it.

🎓 Historian's Corner

Drew Gilpin Faust, in This Republic of Suffering (2008), examines how the Civil War created a "republic of suffering"—Americans had to invent new ways to handle death at industrial scale. The war transformed burial practices, grief rituals, government responsibilities, and how Americans thought about mortality itself.

Key insight: The death toll wasn't just a statistic—it was a social catastrophe that reshaped families, communities, and national identity. The war's trauma didn't end at Appomattox; it echoed for generations.

A New Birth of Freedom

Slavery abolished; freedom's future contested
Federal power dramatically expanded
Black citizenship struggles begin immediately
Reconstruction emerges from wartime debates

📚 The Reconstruction Amendments

The Civil War produced three constitutional amendments that fundamentally redefined American citizenship. Together, they represent the most significant change to the Constitution since the Bill of Rights.

13th Amendment (1865): "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude... shall exist within the United States." Simple, absolute, permanent. Lincoln pushed for it before the war ended because he worried the Emancipation Proclamation—a war measure—might not survive peacetime legal challenges. Ratified December 1865. Four million people were now legally free.

14th Amendment (1868): The most important and most contested amendment in American history. It did several revolutionary things:

Birthright citizenship: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States... are citizens." This overturned Dred Scott, which had ruled Black people could never be citizens.
Equal protection: No state shall "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." This became the basis for nearly every civil rights victory for the next 150 years—Brown v. Board of Education, Loving v. Virginia, Obergefell v. Hodges.
Due process: No state shall "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." Applied the Bill of Rights to state governments.

15th Amendment (1870): "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied... on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." But notice what it didn't prohibit: literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, property requirements. Southern states would exploit these loopholes to disenfranchise Black voters for nearly a century.

📖 The Revolution in Federal Power

Before the war: The federal government was distant and weak. Most Americans never interacted with it except through the post office. States held primary power over citizens' lives.

After the war: The federal government had raised armies, printed money, collected income taxes, freed four million enslaved people, and now defined citizenship itself. The 14th Amendment's key phrase—"No state shall"—turned the federal government into the protector of individual rights against state governments. This was a fundamental shift in American federalism.

The nationalist vision: Radical Republicans like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens wanted to use this new federal power to remake the South—to guarantee Black political rights, redistribute land, and destroy the planter class. They saw Reconstruction as a continuation of the war by other means.

📖 Black Citizenship in Practice

The promise: During Reconstruction (1865-1877), Black men voted in huge numbers across the South. They elected sheriffs, judges, state legislators, congressmen, and two U.S. senators (Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, both from Mississippi). South Carolina's legislature had a Black majority. Black citizens served on juries, held office, built schools and churches. It was a genuine political revolution.

The resistance: White Southerners fought back with terrorism. The Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, murdered Black voters, burned schools, and assassinated Republican officials. Other groups—the White League, Red Shirts—operated openly. The message was clear: political participation meant risking your life.

The abandonment: Northern will to enforce Reconstruction faded. Federal troops withdrew after the contested 1876 election. By the 1890s, Southern states had systematically disenfranchised Black voters through poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and white primaries—all technically legal under the 15th Amendment's loopholes. The revolution was over.

💡 What Was Won, What Was Lost

Permanent gains: Slavery was destroyed—four million people freed. The constitutional amendments remained, even when unenforced. They became the legal foundation for the Civil Rights Movement a century later. Brown v. Board (1954), the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965)—all built on the 14th and 15th Amendments.

Temporary gains: Black political power in the South lasted barely a decade. The promise of "forty acres and a mule"—economic independence through land ownership—never materialized at scale. Most freedpeople became sharecroppers, trapped in cycles of debt on land they didn't own.

Deferred promises: The Reconstruction Amendments promised equality; Jim Crow delivered segregation, disenfranchisement, and terror. The gap between constitutional text and lived reality wouldn't begin to close until the 1950s and 1960s.

🎓 Historian's Corner

Eric Foner: "Reconstruction was an 'unfinished revolution.'" The era represented America's first attempt at interracial democracy—and its first failure. But the amendments survived, waiting to be activated by future generations.

The long view: Some historians argue we're still fighting over Reconstruction—that debates about voting rights, federal power, and racial equality today are direct continuations of battles that began in 1865. The Civil War ended slavery; the struggle over what freedom means continues.

Competing Memories

Union narrative vs. Lost Cause mythology
Battle over meaning begins immediately
Memory wars shape textbooks and monuments
Legacy still contested today

📚 Three Competing Memories

Historian David Blight identifies three visions of Civil War memory that competed after 1865:

The emancipationist vision: The war was a struggle for freedom that destroyed slavery and promised Black citizenship. Held by Black Americans, abolitionists, and Radical Republicans. Frederick Douglass championed this view: the war must be remembered as a victory for human liberty, not just national reunification.

The reconciliationist vision: The war was a tragic conflict between brothers, both sides brave and honorable. Reunion required forgetting the causes and celebrating shared sacrifice. By the 1880s-90s, Blue-Gray reunions brought aging veterans together to shake hands over stone walls. The problem: reconciliation required white Northerners to abandon Black Southerners.

The white supremacist/Lost Cause vision: The South fought nobly for states' rights and constitutional liberty. Slavery was benign and slaves were content. Reconstruction was a corrupt disaster imposed by vengeful Northerners and incompetent Black people. Redemption—the restoration of white Democratic rule—saved civilization.

Which vision won? By 1900, the reconciliationist and Lost Cause visions had merged and become dominant. The emancipationist vision was suppressed. Blight: "The white reunion came at the cost of Black freedom."

📖 The Lost Cause: What It Claimed

"States' rights, not slavery": The central lie. Confederate leaders were explicit at the time: they seceded to protect slavery. Mississippi's declaration of secession: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world." Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens called slavery the Confederacy's "cornerstone." The states' rights argument was invented after the war to make the cause seem noble.

"Slavery was benevolent": Enslaved people were happy, loyal, and better off than free workers in the North. Mammies, faithful servants, slaves who refused freedom—these stereotypes became staples of Lost Cause literature and later Hollywood (Gone with the Wind, 1939).

"Confederate soldiers were heroes": Lee became a marble saint—brilliant, honorable, reluctantly fighting for his state. Common soldiers were noble defenders of home and hearth, never fighting for slavery. This erased the war's actual stakes.

"The South only lost because of numbers": Confederate defeat owed nothing to strategic failures or internal contradictions—just overwhelming Northern manpower and industry. The South was martyred, not beaten.

"Reconstruction was a disaster": Corrupt carpetbaggers, ignorant freedmen, and vengeful Radicals ruined the South until heroic Redeemers restored good government. This narrative justified Jim Crow as necessary and permanent.

📖 How the Lost Cause Spread

Veterans' organizations: The United Confederate Veterans and especially the United Daughters of the Confederacy (founded 1894) policed textbooks, funded monuments, and shaped public memory. The UDC reviewed history books and pressured schools to adopt Lost Cause narratives. They largely succeeded—generations of American students, North and South, learned Lost Cause history.

Monuments: Most Confederate monuments weren't built during or immediately after the war. Two major waves: the Jim Crow era (1890s-1920s) and the Civil Rights era (1950s-60s). These weren't simply memorials to the dead—they were assertions of white supremacy, often erected explicitly to intimidate Black citizens. A statue of a Confederate soldier in front of a courthouse sent a clear message about who controlled justice.

Popular culture: Birth of a Nation (1915) portrayed the Klan as heroes saving the South from Black rule. Gone with the Wind (1939) romanticized the plantation South. These weren't fringe productions—they were massive cultural phenomena that shaped how Americans imagined the war for generations.

💡 Why Memory Matters

How we remember the Civil War shapes how we think about race today. If the war was about states' rights, then Confederate symbols are heritage, not hate. If the war was about slavery, those symbols celebrate treason in defense of human bondage.

The Lost Cause wasn't just bad history—it was a political project. It justified disenfranchisement, segregation, and racial terror by portraying Reconstruction as proof that Black people couldn't handle freedom. It made Jim Crow seem natural and permanent.

The long echo: When Dylann Roof murdered nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, he posed with the Confederate flag. When protesters marched in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 to defend a Lee statue, they chanted "Jews will not replace us." Lost Cause mythology isn't just history—it remains a living ideology for white supremacist movements.

🎓 Historian's Corner

David Blight's Race and Reunion (2001) is the essential work on Civil War memory. His argument: white reconciliation between North and South came at the direct expense of Black freedom. The nation chose reunion over justice.

The emancipationist recovery: Since the Civil Rights Movement, historians have worked to recover the emancipationist vision—centering slavery as the war's cause and Black Americans as agents in their own liberation. But Lost Cause mythology persists in public memory, political rhetoric, and ongoing fights over monuments, flags, and textbooks.

Closing Question

Did the Union win the war but lose the peace?

The Confederacy was defeated militarily, but many of the ideas it fought for—white supremacy, racial hierarchy—survived and shaped the post-war South.

Next lecture: Lost Cause Historiography: Myth, Memory, and Power

The Civil War (1861–1865)

Why the Union Won and What the War Did to America

The Civil War's Central Question

SECTION I

The Road to War

Long-Term Causes

The Slavery Question

Political Collapse of the 1850s

Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)

Election of 1860: The Breaking Point

Secession Winter 1860–61

SECTION II

Early War: Overconfidence & Reality

"On to Richmond!" or First Bull Run (Manassas)

Early Union Struggles

Early Confederate Advantages

SECTION III

Turning the Tide (1862–63)

Antietam: Bloodiest Day(Sharpsburg)

Emancipation Proclamation

Gettysburg & Vicksburg (1863)

Gettysburg (July 1-3)

Vicksburg (July 4)

SECTION IV

Total War & The Home Front

War Becomes a National Effort

Northern Advantages Solidify

Social Upheaval

War as Social Revolution

SECTION V

Endgame

Union Strategy Under Grant

Sherman's March

Collapse of the Confederacy

SECTION VI

Legacy

The Human Cost

A New Birth of Freedom

Competing Memories

Lost Cause Mythology

Closing Question

Antietam: Bloodiest Day
(Sharpsburg)