Chapter 14: The Civil War

The Election of 1860 and Secession

• The election of President Abraham Lincoln and the perceived threat to the institution of slavery proved too much for the deep southern states

  • South Carolina acted almost immediately, calling a convention to declare secession

• Confederates quickly shed their American identity and adopted a new Confederate nationalism

  • Confederate nationalism was based on several ideals, foremost being slavery
  • Slavery was omnipresent in the prewar South, and it served as the most common frame of reference for unequal power
  • Religion likewise shaped Confederate nationalism, as southerners believed that the Confederacy was fulfilling God’s will

• Unionist southerners, most common in the upcountry where slavery was weakest, retained their loyalty to the Union

  Crittenden’s Compromise:

• Senator Crittenden proposed a series of Constitutional amendments that guaranteed slavery in southern states and territories, denied the federal government interstate slave trade regulatory power, and offered to compensate enslavers whose enslaved people had escaped

A War for Union (1861-1863)

• While Lincoln initially did not intend to invade southern states, he would use force to maintain possession of the federal property within seceded states
• On April 12, 1861, Confederate Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina
  • In response to the attack, President Abraham Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand volunteers to serve three months to suppress the rebellion → the beginning of the American Civil War
• In total, eleven states renounced their allegiance to the United States
  • The new Confederate nation was predicated on the institution of slavery and the promotion of any and all interests that reinforced that objective
  • Some southerners couched their defense of slavery as preservation of states’ rights
  • In order to protect slavery, the Confederate constitution left even less power to the states than the U.S. Constitution, an irony not lost on many
• Foreign countries, primarily in Europe, also watched the unfolding war with deep interest
• By the summer of 1862, the actions of Black Americans were pushing the Union toward a full-blown war of emancipation
• The Battle of Antietam (the single bloodiest day in American history) was a decisive “victory” for the Union that resulted in Lincoln issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed enslaved people in areas under Confederate control
  • There were significant exemptions to the Emancipation Proclamation, including the border states and parts of other states in the Confederacy
  • A far cry from a universal end to slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation nevertheless proved vital, shifting the war’s aims from simple union to emancipation
  • Furthermore, the Battle of Antietam and the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation all but ensured that the Confederacy would not be recognized by European powers

War for Empancipation (1863-1865)

• As Union armies penetrated deeper into the Confederacy, politicians and generals came to understand the necessity and benefit of enlisting Black men in the army and navy
  • Black soldiers in the Union army endured rampant discrimination and earned less pay than white soldiers, while also facing the possibility of being murdered or sold into slavery if captured
• Despite Union success in the summer of 1863, discontent over the war simmered across the North
  • This was particularly true in the wake of the Enrollment Act—the first effort at a draft among the northern populace during the Civil War
  • The Emancipation Proclamation convinced many immigrants in northern cities that freed people would soon take their jobs
  • These economic and racial anxieties culminated in the New York City Draft Riots in July 1863, in which white rioters killed some 120 citizens (including the lynching of at least eleven Black New Yorkers)
• To ensure the permanent legal end of slavery, Republicans drafted the Thirteenth Amendment during the war
  • Yet the end of legal slavery did not mean the end of racial injustice, with the effects of slavery enduring long after emancipation

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