The Civil War
Eleven Southern states secede to protect slavery; four years of war kill an estimated 620,000–750,000 people, preserve the Union and end slavery.
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era — James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press (1988)
- A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead — J. David Hacker, Civil War History (2011)
- The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2010)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
By 1860 the country was split between a free-labour North and a South whose economy and social order rested on nearly four million enslaved people. The question that tore it apart was whether slavery could spread into the western territories. When Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in November 1860 on a platform of stopping that spread, South Carolina seceded within weeks, followed by ten more states that formed the Confederate States of America. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens declared that its “cornerstone” rested on “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man”.
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era — James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press (1988)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
The war
Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour in April 1861. Both sides expected a short war; it lasted four years. The South had brilliant generals, above all Robert E. Lee, and fought on home ground; the North had more people, factories and railroads. Battles such as Antietam (1862), the bloodiest single day in American history, and Gettysburg (1863) produced casualties on a scale the country had never known.
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era — James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press (1988)
The old figure of about 620,000 soldiers dead comes from late nineteenth-century counts; in 2011 demographer J. David Hacker used census data to estimate about 750,000, with a range of roughly 620,000 to 850,000. Either way, it is roughly as many American military deaths as in all the country’s other wars combined.
- A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead — J. David Hacker, Civil War History (2011)
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era — James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press (1988)
From union to freedom
Lincoln at first fought only to restore the Union. But enslaved people forced the question by fleeing to Union lines in their thousands, and on 1 January 1863 his Emancipation Proclamation declared free those enslaved in rebel areas and opened the army to Black men. About 180,000 Black soldiers served in the Union army. At Gettysburg that November, Lincoln described the war as a test of whether a nation “conceived in Liberty” could survive, promising “a new birth of freedom”.
- The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2010)
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era — James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press (1988)
Ulysses S. Grant’s grinding campaigns in Virginia and William T. Sherman’s march through Georgia broke the Confederacy. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on 9 April 1865. Five days later Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathiser, and died the next morning. The Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, was ratified in December 1865.
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era — James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press (1988)
- The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2010)
The long shadow
The war settled two questions, that states could not leave the Union and that slavery was over, but left a third, what freedom would mean for Black Americans, to Reconstruction and the century beyond. The fight over memory began immediately: monuments to Confederate leaders went up across the South, many during the Jim Crow era and the civil rights years, and since 2015 hundreds have been removed amid fierce argument.
- Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 — Eric Foner, Harper & Row (1988)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
The South seceded to protect slavery, as the secession declarations themselves say. The war began as a fight to preserve the Union and became, through emancipation and Black soldiers, a war to end slavery.
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era — James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press (1988)
- The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2010)
A view built by ex-Confederates after 1865 and long dominant in Southern memory and textbooks: the war was about states' rights and honour, not slavery, and Confederate leaders were noble men overwhelmed by Northern numbers. Historians reject it, but it still shapes how some white Southerners remember ancestors who fought.
- Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 — Eric Foner, Harper & Row (1988)
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era — James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press (1988)
Why it matters today
The Civil War remains the moral centre of American history. Arguments over Confederate flags and statues, "states' rights", and the political map itself (the old Confederacy is now the Republican heartland, once Democratic) trace back to it. For Black Americans it is the war that brought freedom, at a terrible price, but not equality.