The Civil War: America's Second Revolution, 1861-1865

Neither southern nor northern whites were united in the months leading to war. Despite these uncertainties, South Carolina led the secession movement, declaring its independence from the United States on December 20, 1860, just over a month after Lincoln’s election. In the early weeks of 1861, the other Deep South states of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, which were most dependent on slavery and farthest from the seat of federal power, followed suit. On February 9, a month before Lincoln took office, representatives from these seven states met in Montgomery, Alabama, to establish the Confederate States of America. They adopted a provisional constitution and elected a Mississippi enslaver and former U.S. senator, Jefferson Davis, as their president.

In response to the establishment of the Confederacy, inhabitants of other southern states had to decide whether to join the secession movement. Their northern counterparts faced an equally critical choice: whether to allow slaveholding states to form an independent nation or go to war to bring them back into the United States.

Large enslavers in the Deep South believed that Lincoln’s victory blocked the further growth of slavery and thus placed its future in doubt. As one planter at Alabama’s secession convention argued, “Expansion seems to be the law and destiny and necessity of our institutions. To remain healthful and prosperous within . . . it seems essential that we should grow without.” Although shortly after his election, Lincoln assured a southern acquaintance, Congressman Alexander H. Stephens, that he would not directly or indirectly interfere with slavery where it already existed, he did plan to keep slavery out of new territories. Lincoln summed up the issue to Stephens: “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub.” Soon thereafter, Stephens became vice-president of the Confederacy.

There were also grave concerns that the Republican Party would ignore the laws of the land so long as it suited their political interests. From the perspective of southern enslavers, the federal government had already failed to implement fully both the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and the Dred Scott decision of 1857. These concerns intensified once southern states began to secede. To keep border states like Maryland in the United States, President Lincoln put secessionists in jail, arrested state legislators, limited freedom of the press, and suspended the right of habeas corpus, which protects citizens against arbitrary arrest and detention. This last move was necessary, Lincoln believed, so that those disloyal to the nation could be easily detained and their cases tried in military rather than civilian courts. Secessionists responded that the formation of an independent nation was the only way to assure that southern states were not subject to such abuses of federal authority.

Enslavers had an even more immediate reason for supporting secession–the fear that a Republican government in Washington would lead to a massive uprising of enslaved persons. They remembered John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. One southern newspaper had warned at the time that the region was “slumbering over a volcano, whose smoldering fires may, at any quiet starry midnight, blacken the social sky with the smoke of desolation and death.” Some white Southerners believed that abolitionists were infiltrating the region and “tampering with our slaves, and furnishing them with arms and poisons to accomplish their hellish designs.” The Republican victory in 1860 sparked new fears that “subversive” ideas would “infect” the enslaved persons' quarters, inciting the enslaved to revolt. “Now that the black radical Republicans have the power I suppose they will [John] Brown us all,” punned one South Carolinian.

Enslavers’ fears and frustrations were compounded by their ongoing concern about the sentiments of white Southerners who did not own enslaved persons, a full three-quarters of the southern white population. “I mistrust our own people more than I fear all of the efforts of the Abolitionists,” a politician in South Carolina had admitted in 1859. The Republicans, they thought, would highlight the social and economic inequalities among southern whites to recruit non-enslavers to their party. A southern newspaper warned, “The contest for slavery will no longer be one between the North and the South. It will be in the South between people of the South.” Only southern independence, many planters believed, could effectively isolate southern yeomen from their potential Republican allies and thus protect the institution of slavery.

The views of southern yeomen, who had long lived on the margins of plantation society, reinforced planters’ concern. Most non-enslaving whites disparaged enslaved persons for what they considered their abject dependency and apparent powerlessness, but they also disliked the haughty pretensions and prerogatives of planters. In the South, as in the North, small farmers and landless whites were drawn to the ideas of free labor and free soil. They resented having the more restrictive policies of planters imposed on them. One farmer from Floyd County, Georgia, expressed this resentment in a letter to the Rome Weekly Courier. He and other militiamen had been called to muster one Saturday on the town square as a way of forcing them to listen to a pro-secessionist speech by Walter T. Colquitt, a Georgia planter and political leader.

This [sham muster sort of angered] me that I should be compelled to have the same politics as my general, and I and some of my neighbors are determined more than ever, that we will be for the [Unionists]. . . . I should like to know whether this is a free country, or whether we are to be dragged out from our business to gratify the military men and the political demagogues.

Other southerners also questioned the wisdom of separating from the federal union. In the Upper South, both poor and prosperous whites were less avid for secession than their brethren in the Deep South. The states of Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland had a smaller percentage of enslaved persons and enslavers than their counterparts who initially formed the Confederate States of America. Most whites in the Upper South favored a compromise that would maintain both slavery and the nation. The presence of a large number of former Whigs and moderate Democrats made these areas more critical of secessionist principles. The recognition that geography placed them in the path of war and suspicions about the ultimate goals of planters in the Deep South also contributed to unrest in the region. In three upper South states, no formal discussion of secession occurred prior to the outbreak of war; in three others, conventions met and rejected secession; and in two, voters rejected the idea of even holding a convention.

Anticipating resistance in the upper South and among non-enslaving whites throughout the region, secessionists did not propose a popular vote on the issue. Of the seven states that seceded in early 1861, only Texas allowed voters to speak directly on the question. A delegate to South Carolina’s secession convention observed that “the common people” did not understand the issues. “But who ever waited for the common people when a great movement was to be made?” he asked. “We must make the move and force them to follow.” Here, the enslaver class’s habit of command was wielded over poorer whites as well as Black people to uphold the existing social, economic, and political hierarchy.

Still, most southern yeomen followed their leaders and supported the Confederacy. They did so voluntarily, mainly because of their ties to large planters. Many small farmers had started farming cotton and tobacco in the 1850s, and in the process grew dependent on large planters for help with marketing and labor. These close economic ties, reinforced by bonds of kinship and the belief in states’ rights and white superiority, led most yeoman farmers to support secession.

Moreover, the vast majority of southern whites, whatever their economic fortunes, defined their own liberty in opposition to Black bondage. Fears of racial amalgamation also inspired support for secession among the masses of white Southerners. One Georgia secessionist offered this typical warning to his non-enslaving neighbors: “Do you love your mother, your wife, your sister, your daughter? If you remain in a nation ruled by Republicans, TEN years or less our CHILDREN will be the slaves of Negroes.” With such images in mind, most non-enslaving whites agreed with the enslaver who said, “These are desperate means, but then we must recollect that we live in desperate times.”

Times were desperate in the North as well. Southern secession threatened to throw the nation into a financial panic. The cities of the Northeast and the towns along the Ohio River were hardest hit. Stock-market prices plummeted, banks shut their doors, factories laid off workers, and unsold goods piled up on docks. Merchants and textile manufacturers worried about the permanent loss of the southern cotton crop, and bankers worried about whether southerners would repay their loans. Many northern businessmen, fearing for their future, called for peace, at almost any price.

Some northern working people joined in the call for compromise, concerned that the continuing conflict would lead to mass unemployment. Meeting in Philadelphia on February 22, a group of trade unionists from eight northern and border states denounced the secessionist “traitors” but also called for a peaceful resolution to the conflict. “Our Government never can be sustained by bloodshed,” they proclaimed, and opposed “any measures that will evoke civil war."

Yet other working-class citizens feared that compromise would undermine the Republican Party’s commitment to free soil. An elaborate compromise, offered by Kentucky Senator John J. Crittenden, suggested they might be right. He proposed that the North accept a return to the principles of the 1820 Missouri Compromise. (See Chapter 6.) In all western territory then held by the United States, slavery would be prohibited north of 36° 30 and permanently protected south of it, including land “hereafter acquired”—an open invitation to the acquisition of more southern territory for slavery. Crittenden also proposed constitutional amendments that would prohibit Congress from abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, forbid federal interference with the internal slave trade, and provide compensation for any enslaver prevented from recovering escaped enslaved persons in the North.

Northern free Black people and abolitionists as well as working men committed to free soil principles opposed such measures. Frederick Douglass spoke for the opposition when he said, “If the Union can only be maintained by new concessions to the slaveholders, if it can only be stuck together and held together by a new drain on the negro’s blood, then . . . let the Union perish.” And Lincoln secretly advised Republican congressmen to “entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery.” In the end, Congress defeated the Crittenden measures, and in doing so, expressed the political commitments of the Republican rank-and-file: the workers, farmers, and small businessmen who had elected Lincoln president.

Still, when Lincoln took control of the national government, he was not yet prepared to force the South back into the nation by military means. The new president nevertheless needed to demonstrate strength and thus focused his attention on Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston harbor. A small federal garrison there was running low on food and medical supplies. Lincoln dispatched reinforcements to Fort Sumter in April 1861, but he promised to use force only if the Confederates blocked a peaceful effort to send in supplies.

When a U.S. ship set sail for Charleston on April 8, the new Confederate government faced a major dilemma. It could either attack the vessel and bear the responsibility for firing the first shot of the war; or it could allow the supplies to be delivered, thus permitting what it had labeled a foreign power to maintain a fort in one of its key harbors. Jefferson Davis and his advisers chose the more aggressive course, demanding the unconditional surrender of the Fort Sumter garrison. The commanding officer refused, and on April 12 Confederate guns opened fire on the fort. Two days later Fort Sumter surrendered. The Civil War had begun.

The North and the South faced very different tasks in this war. The South had to defend its own territory and force the North to halt military action. The North had to bring the South to its knees, which in military terms meant invading the South and isolating it from potential allies abroad. Most northern policymakers believed that these ends could be accomplished without challenging the institution of slavery within the South.

But from the first shot, enslaved southerners knew that their future depended on the outcome of the Civil War, and they looked for chances to join the conflict. Their actions, both individually and collectively, had a profound impact not only on the course of the war but also on the aims for which it would be fought. The North went to war in April 1861 to preserve the United States and to stop the expansion of slavery, but the actions of African Americans and their abolitionist allies, along with the progress of the war, eventually forced the North to redirect its efforts and abolish the institution entirely.

The war also transformed the idea of the Union. Initially, a synonym for the United States, the term evolved as hostilities erupted. Increasingly Union was used to refer to the free states in opposition to the Confederacy. The Confederacy, too, was in transition as several states in the Upper South joined their southern brethren following the outbreak of war. Ultimately, Union came to mean a nation free of slavery, which could only be achieved by the defeat of the Confederacy, the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, and the re-union of the United States.

In the wake of Fort Sumter, northerners lined up behind Lincoln’s war policy. The loudest advocates of compromise—manufacturers and merchants, intent on maintaining economic links with the cotton South—now rushed to support Lincoln, hoping that force would succeed where compromise had failed The outbreak of fighting also galvanized northern workers. William Sylvis—who had earlier advocated that Philadelphia workers endorse the Crittenden compromise—raised an army company among his fellow iron molders. Foreign-born workers joined the patriotic muster. Germans organized ten regiments in New York State alone. New York City’s Irish formed a number of regiments, including the Sixty-Ninth, which headed south on April 23, 1861 and played a significant role in the First Battle of Bull Run.  Midwestern farmers and farm laborers, the backbone of the free-soil movement, also enlisted in large numbers, making up nearly half the Union Army. The wives and daughters of these volunteers also waxed enthusiastic for the war, believing— as did their menfolk—that the fighting would be short-lived.

Still, despite all the enthusiasm for the Union cause, the goals of the war were not yet clear. It would take efforts by African Americans, diplomatic concerns among Union leaders, prodding by abolitionists, and a year and a half of military engagement to convince a majority of northerners that fighting to unify the nation and stop the expansion of slavery was not enough. Only then would the war to save the Union become as well a war to end, rather than merely contain, slavery.

From a statistical perspective, the Union controlled most of the material resources essential to war. The Union states had a considerably larger population than that of the Confederate states, and the Confederacy included several million enslaved persons who were not likely to be armed for combat. The Union also far outstripped the Confederacy in the production of commodities. Although the gap between the two sections was greatest in manufacturing, the North also led the South in the amount of land under cultivation and the quantity and value of agricultural products. The North had far more miles of railroad track, too, assuring greater facility in moving troops and supplies. And the Union could launch far more ships, a critical advantage in sustaining naval blockades of southern harbors.

Yet despite the North’s material superiority, the South had many advantages that proved critical early in the war. Three were particularly significant. First, Southerners were fighting on their own ground. This gave them both knowledge of the terrain and a distinct psychological edge, which was often expressed as arrogance about their military superiority. Second, although the Confederate states held only thirty-nine percent of the total population of the United States, Black and white, enslaved labor initially freed a much larger proportion of white working-age men for military service. And, third, the military tradition of the slaveholding class took on crucial significance. The Confederacy had the support not only of more than 280 officers trained at West Point but also nearly all of those trained at Virginia Military Institute, the Citadel, and other southern military academies. Among the officers who had gained their experience on the battlefields of the Mexican War, the best and the brightest (or at least most daring) joined the Confederate ranks: Pierre G. T. Beauregard, James Longstreet, George Pickett, Albert Sidney Johnston, Joseph E. Johnston, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and Robert E. Lee.

All of the South’s advantages were apparent in the first major battle of the Civil War. On July 21, 1861, at Bull Run in northern Virginia, twenty-two thousand Southerners pushed back an attack by thirty thousand Union troops. Although only six hundred men lost their lives, the battle of Bull Run gave Americans their first taste of the carnage that lay ahead. Northern civilians, who had traveled to the battle site to picnic and witness an afternoon of martial jousting, ended up fleeing for their lives to escape Confederate artillery.

But the Battle of Bull Run was only one of many engagements in the early months of the war. In the others, which included confrontations in the western theater of war and the Union blockade of the South’s deep-water ports, northern troops were considerably more successful. This mixture of failure and success on both sides suggested to those involved that the war might be a prolonged struggle after all.

The 225,000 African Americans living in the free states initiated another prolonged struggle. One recalled that at the sound of the alarm bell, “Negro waiter, cook, barber, bootblack, groom, porter, and laborer stood ready at the enlisting office.” An African American recruitment meeting in Cleveland proclaimed, “Today, as in the times of ‘76, we are ready to go forth and do battle in the common cause of our country.” Their country, however, was not yet ready for them. Secretary of War Simon Cameron quickly announced that he had no intention of calling up Black soldiers. Local authorities drove his point home by prohibiting African American recruitment meetings as “disorderly gatherings.”

Northern optimism contributed in part to this hasty rejection. Although four slave states that had previously opposed secession—Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee—joined the Confederacy after Fort Sumter, northern leaders remained confident that the South would be subdued easily. “Jeff Davis and Co. will be swingin’ from the battlements at Washington at least by the 4th of July,” predicted newspaperman Horace Greeley. “This much-ado-about nothing will end in a month,” echoed a Philadelphia newspaper. The rejections were also motivated by a fear that white people would not enlist if Black people were allowed to serve in the Union Army.

But there was a deeper reason. Lincoln and his advisers were wary lest the war for the Union become a war for emancipation. Lincoln, like most Americans, believed that restricting slavery to the states where it already existed would “put slavery on the road to eventual extinction.” But it was a significant step from this position to a policy that demanded the immediate emancipation of enslaved persons throughout the nation. Moreover, despite the quick secession of the upper South once war was declared, four crucial border slave states (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware) remained in the Union. Any threat to end slavery, rather than merely confine it, might well drive these states into the Confederacy’s waiting arms. Enlisting Black soldiers would show that slavery’s future in the Union was not secure.

These concerns accounted for Lincoln’s reaction to the exceedingly tense situation in Missouri. In August 1861, General John C. Frémont, the famous explorer and former Republican presidential candidate who commanded Union military forces in the West, proclaimed martial law in Missouri and issued an order that freed the enslaved persons of all Confederate sympathizers in the state. Abolitionists hailed Frémont’s action as a brilliant military move and a bold step for freedom. Furious Unionist enslavers, however, called on Lincoln to reverse Frémont’s order. Noting that Frémont’s move would “alarm our Southern Union friends” and “perhaps ruin our rather fair prospects for Kentucky,” the president quickly followed their advice. He insisted to Frémont and the Republican leadership that such a major policy issue must be determined in Washington rather than in the field.

Whatever the intentions of northern politicians, most enslaved persons realized that if Union troops came, they would undermine the authority of enslavers and make freedom a distinct possibility. African Americans therefore carefully followed the course of the war, using the “grapevine telegraph” to learn about battles and follow Union troop movements. Even in the Deep South, far from the Union Army, enslaved persons were heartened by events. At the outset of the fighting, a white Alabama farmer wrote to Jefferson Davis that enslaved persons in his region “very hiley hope that they will soon be free.” Though trying to conceal their hopes from enslavers, Black people in bondage awaited their chance.

The first of these chances appeared in tidewater Virginia, where the Confederate commander impressed (that is, seized) nearly all the male enslaved persons in the area to build fortifications. Impressment, which became an official and widely used Confederate policy by 1863, allowed the army to take men, food, animals, and other property from farmers. The Confederacy paid farmers for these goods, but at prices fixed far below market value. Impressment angered enslavers, who objected to any infringement on what they regarded as their property rights. In response, the enslavers began “refugeeing” male enslaved persons, sending them out of the area. Knowing that either impressments or removal would mean separation from loved ones, some enslaved persons chose another course: escape.

On the night of May 23, 1861, three escaped enslaved persons paddled up the river to the Union outpost at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, requesting sanctuary from its commanding general, Benjamin Butler. Butler, a Democratic politician from Massachusetts, was no abolitionist, but he realized that the Confederacy would use enslaved persons against the Union. He therefore offered the freedom seekers military protection, refusing the owner’s pleas for their return. The enslaved persons, Butler proclaimed, were “contraband” of war, property that rebel enslavers had forfeited by the act of rebellion.

News of Butler’s decision spread like wildfire. Two days later, eight freedom seekers arrived at what they called “Freedom Fort.” Another fifty-nine African American men and women joined them the next day. Lincoln endorsed Butler’s contraband policy as a legitimate tactic of war. The North now possessed a formula that allowed it to strike at the institution of slavery, the linchpin of the southern economy, without proclaiming general abolition and thus alienating the loyal border states. Even African Americans, though offended by the use of a term relating to property—“contraband”—to describe escaped enslaved persons, recognized the significance of Butler’s policy. Now they had a new way to demonstrate their importance to the Union cause.

How were African Americans who fled enslavement during the Civil War depicted in popular visual media?

In the wake of the Union’s shocking defeat at Bull Run, Congress also began to move against slavery. On August 6, 1861, Congress passed its first confiscation act, proclaiming that any enslaver whose bondsmen were used by the Confederate Army would thereafter lose all claim to those enslaved persons. Although it was far from a clear-cut declaration of freedom, this act, in conjunction with Butler’s policy, gave enslaved persons and abolitionists a foundation for further action.

In every region touched by the war, African American men, women, and children moved quickly to reach the freedom offered by Union camps. In return for protection, they provided labor and knowledge of local terrain and Confederate troop movements. Enslavers also moved quickly, following freedom seekers into the camps and demanding their return. Although no such demands were honored at Fortress Monroe, some Union commanders either returned enslaved persons or simply denied them entrance.

The persistence of the enslaved persons’ attempts to gain freedom gradually led many Union officers and ordinary soldiers to help shield escapees from slave-catchers. In November 1861, Secretary of War Cameron, who had earlier opposed Black enlistment, now publicly supported the radical idea of arming enslaved persons to fight for the Union, labeling as “madness” the policy of leaving the enemy “in peaceful and secure possession of slave property.” Lincoln, again acting to calm loyal enslavers, forced Cameron to back down. Three months later, recognizing that the Secretary of War was inept and corrupt, the president removed him from office. Still, with the war dragging on and Union casualties rising, antislavery sentiment was growing in Congress, inside the Union army, and in the North as a whole.

The advocates of abolition, so long scorned by the majority of northern whites, now gained a hearing. In January 1862, Philadelphia abolitionist Mary Grew reflected, “It is hard to believe the wondrous change that has befallen us.” Grew had seen an anti-abolitionist mob burn Pennsylvania Hall in 1838. Now, she responded with glee to the respect accorded her coworkers in the cause. One of them, Wendell Phillips, who had been among the abolitionists attacked in 1861 for supposedly provoking southern secession, was a year later accorded a formal introduction in the U.S. Senate.

At the forefront of those in Congress who applauded Phillips’ presence was a handful of abolitionists—the so-called Radical Republicans—who sought to use the war to strike down the “peculiar institution.” Although they never represented more than a minority in Congress, the Radical Republicans were able to shape legislation by drawing on the North’s growing support for abolition and by emphasizing the military benefits to be gained by striking at the institution of slavery. The Radical Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner explained his strategy for success in November 1861: “You will observe that I propose no crusade for abolition. [Emancipation] is to be presented strictly as a measure of military necessity.”

The military argument for emancipation intensified as the war dragged on through 1861 and 1862. The Union Navy began a blockade of southern ports that grew ever more effective, leading to the capture of the major port of New Orleans in April 1862. Even more significant, in the same month, Union troops commanded by Ulysses S. Grant won a battle at Shiloh in western Tennessee. Shiloh provided a critical victory in the Union’s plan to control the Mississippi Valley, but it was a grisly bloodbath, a new kind of battle in which soldiers pushed forward yard by yard under heavy fire. When it was over, nearly four thousand men lay dead, and more than sixteen thousand were wounded. Grant’s troops were too exhausted to follow up on their victory, but the Confederacy had lost a major battle.

It was in these western campaigns that the diversity of army ranks became visible. At the battles of Pea Ridge on the Arkansas-Missouri border, in the prolonged campaign for Vicksburg, Mississippi, and in the Union capture of Little Rock, Arkansas, the forces that faced each other were not composed simply of native-born whites whose only difference lay in whether they were raised North or South of the Mason-Dixon Line. At Pea Ridge, General Earl van Dorn brought together a force of southern whites, three regiments of Choctaws and Chickasaws, two of Cherokees, and one of Seminoles and Muscogees (Creeks) under the leadership of Cherokee General Stand Watie, who hoped that a Confederate victory would provide Native Americans with greater autonomy. The Confederate forces were defeated, however, by Union troops that included both native-born white Midwesterners and Franz Sigel’s German-American regiments. Similarly diverse forces would converge on Vicksburg in July 1863. And in the fighting around Little Rock, also in 1863, African Americans would join native-born whites, immigrant, and Native soldiers on the Union side against regiments of white and Native American Confederates.

Union advances deep into the cotton belt during and after 1862 gave these diverse companies of Union soldiers a chance to observe slavery firsthand. Few white soldiers were abolitionists and some believed strongly in the necessity of enslaving African Americans, but many were nonetheless repulsed by what they saw. After visiting several captured plantations near New Orleans and discovering a number of instruments used to torture enslaved persons, a Union soldier concluded that he had seen “enough of the horror of slavery to make one an Abolitionist forever.” A Union officer wrote from Louisiana, “Since I am here, I have learned what the horrors of slavery was. . . . Never hereafter will I either speak or vote in favor of slavery.” Even though the majority of Union troops still questioned the wisdom of complete emancipation, some soldiers grew more sympathetic to the plight of freedom seekers and recognized that the Union could gain an advantage by employing African Americans. “The Negroes are our only friends,” wrote a Union officer in northern Alabama. “I shall very soon have watchful guards among the slaves on the plantations bordering the river from Bridgeport to Florence, and all who communicate to me valuable information I have promised the protection of my Government.”

As fighting continued in 1862, military reversals for the Union set off a panic in the North, which further contributed to antislavery sentiment. In the summer of 1862, Confederate troops led by Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson won a series of stunning victories in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The panic in the North increased when Union General George B. McClellan, known for his proslavery views and his vacillating approach to military strategy, ordered a retreat following the crucial Seven Days’ campaign at Richmond, Virginia, in June and July. The Confederate Army in Virginia, commanded by Robert E. Lee, now prepared to invade the North itself.

As the war turned against the North, the North turned against slavery. In the spring of 1862, Congress approved a measure to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, though they tried to mollify more conservative colleagues by appropriating, at the same time, 0,000 to assist in “colonizing” former enslaved persons to Haiti, Liberia, and Central America. The colonization efforts would collapse over the next year and a half, but the eradication of slavery in the nation’s capital stood as a symbol of a new era. That July, Congress passed a second confiscation act, this one declaring that the enslaved persons of anyone who supported the Confederacy should be “forever free of their servitude, and not again held as slaves.” Acceding to pleas from free Black people, enslaved persons, and some Union officers, Congress also passed a militia act that allowed “persons of African descent” to be employed in “any military or naval service for which they may be found competent.” The first Black Union regiment was organized before the end of 1862. And by 1863, African Americans would overcome the objections of whites to their use as front-line soldiers, serving with distinction and contributing directly to key northern victories. Moreover, as Union armies moved south, enslaved persons in greater and greater numbers deserted their owners to join the advancing forces. Enslaved labor was crucial to the South’s economy and military effort, and this massive transfer of labor from the Confederacy to the Union had a tremendous impact on the course of the war.

By the end of the summer of 1862, the numbers of African Americans employed by the Union Army increased dramatically. Black men built fortifications and roads, chopped wood, carried supplies, and guarded ever-lengthening supply lines. They also worked in more skilled jobs, piloting boats and driving teams. Black women, employed in far smaller numbers, performed essential services as cooks, laundresses, seamstresses, and nurses. The work was often hard and heavy, and although pay was promised, Black women and men often received their wages late—or not at all. They strongly protested this unfair treatment, since unpaid labor symbolized slavery. But they also believed that their labor played a central role in the struggle for freedom.

By the fall of 1862, African Americans and abolitionists were no longer alone in advocating emancipation as a necessary outcome of the war. Congress, the larger public, and even President Lincoln began to consider the possibility. Lincoln had to balance several factors, however. He wanted to prevent international recognition of southern independence, keep slaveholding border states in the Union, and unite northern whites behind the war effort.

The question of international recognition was paramount to the Confederacy. Support from European nations could undermine the Union cause and help persuade the North to accept southern independence. Of more immediate concern, the agricultural South was looking abroad for the manufactured products needed in a modern war. Southern attention focused mainly on Britain, the leading market for cotton and a potentially important supplier of goods. Many British political leaders sympathized with the Confederacy, particularly as the Union blockade of southern ports grew more effective, since the blockade had a disastrous effect on the British economy.

Nonetheless, working people throughout England had long maintained a hatred of both slavery and the southern slaveholding aristocracy. During the war, lecture tours in England by American abolitionists like Sarah Parker Remond, a free Black activist from Philadelphia, intensified antislavery sentiments among Britons of all classes. But this powerful group of British abolitionists could not be fully mobilized until the North officially took a strong antislavery position. A firm Union commitment to emancipation might give the North an edge in the battle for British public opinion and prevent Britain’s diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy.

In response to these diplomatic considerations, the deteriorating military situation, and the unrelenting pressure from “contrabands,” Lincoln decided in the summer of 1862 to issue a proclamation emancipating all enslaved persons in the Confederacy. He withheld its announcement, however, until a Union victory made the proclamation a sign of strength rather than weakness. Confederate troops in the eastern states had won numerous victories in the preceding months. In the Shenandoah Valley, Stonewall Jackson led Confederate troops to five victories against three Union armies. During June and July of 1862, General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, fought McClellan to a standstill in the Seven Days’ battles. Lee and Jackson joined forces that August to defeat Union troops at the Second Battle of Bull Run. The chance to claim a victory finally came in the fall of 1862, when Lee led his army north into Maryland. On September 17, in the bloodiest battle yet, Union troops brought Lee’s advance to a standstill at Antietam. Nearly five thousand men lost their lives on that day; another three thousand would die later of wounds. Although Antietam was the site of the bloodiest single day in American warfare, Lincoln viewed the battle as a victory. Five days later, he announced his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to the assembled cabinet.  Republicans who had come to see the advantages of emancipation spoke on its behalf over the next three months, and white and Black abolitionists eagerly awaited the official pronouncement.

On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the final edict, proclaiming that enslaved persons in areas still in rebellion were “forever free” and inviting them to enlist in the Union Army. In many ways the proclamation was a conservative document, applying only to those enslaved persons far beyond the reach of federal power. Its provisions exempted 450,000 enslaved persons in the loyal border states, 275,000 enslaved persons in Union-occupied Tennessee, and tens of thousands more in areas controlled by the Union Army in Louisiana and Virginia. It also justified the abolition of southern slavery on military, not moral, grounds. Despite its limitations, the Emancipation Proclamation prompted joyous “Watch Meetings” on December 31, 1862, as white and Black abolitionists met to cheer and give thanks as the edict took effect. Freedom seekers in Washington, D.C., gathered in celebration and prayer. There was even jubilation among the enslaved in loyal border states who were exempted from the proclamation’s provisions. The deepest hopes of antislavery advocates like Amy Post and Frederick Douglass had finally become part and parcel of the Union cause.

African Americans, enslaved and free alike, understood, in ways that white Americans only partially did, that the aims of the war had now dramatically changed. The Emancipation Proclamation augured a total transformation of southern society, rather than the mere reintegration of the slave states into the nation if the Union proved victorious. Although Lincoln had admonished Congress in 1861 that the war should not become “a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle,” that is precisely what it had become by 1863.

For soldiers caught in the midst of battle, political pronouncements did little to alleviate the dangers they faced. The Civil War was one of the deadliest wars in history and the deadliest in the United States. Technological innovations in weaponry far outweighed advances in medicine. New forms of ammunition created wounds that could not be healed by existing surgical techniques; amputation saved some lives, but assured the death of others; and diseases ran rampant through army ranks on both the Confederate and Union sides.

The fighting at Antietam in the summer of 1862 had given Lincoln the victory he needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, but it did not mark an overall change in the North’s fortunes on the battlefield. The war continued to go poorly for the Union on the eastern front. Against a superior force, Confederate troops won an important victory in December 1862 at Fredericksburg, Virginia, inflicting nearly thirteen thousand Union casualties while suffering only five thousand of their own. In the same month, Confederate cavalry cut Union supply lines in the West, preventing a much larger Union force from seizing the strategic river town of Vicksburg, Mississippi. By early 1863, the war had reached a stalemate. Then in May, Lee’s army defeated a Union force twice its size at Chancellorsville, Virginia, setting the stage for a Confederate thrust north into Pennsylvania.

The South’s victories reflected the Confederacy’s advantages of fighting on its own terrain and its officers’ greater talents. They also made clear the generally disorganized nature of the Union war effort. Despite having more than twice as many soldiers under their command, northern officers seemed unable to press their advantages in the war’s first two years. Early battles, while intense, were separated by long periods of inactivity. Tradition—influenced by impassable roads and the difficulty of providing food, clothing, and shelter—dictated that both armies refrain from fighting during the winter months. Instead, the armies built semi-permanent camps to reside in while awaiting the spring thaw. One estimate suggests that in its first two years of operation, the Union’s Army of the Potomac spent a total of only one month in actual battle.

The war’s casual pace fulfilled the expectations of both northern and southern soldiers. With the exception of those officers who had gained their experience in the Mexican American war in the mid-1840s, most soldiers were too young to remember, much less to have experienced, any organized war. Most young men expected war to be conducted in an orderly, even chivalrous fashion. They were in for a rude shock. A young private wrote home that his idea of combat had been that the soldiers “would all be in line, all standing in a nice level field fighting, a number of ladies taking care of the wounded, etc., etc., but it isn’t so.”

One reason that this soldier’s idea of battle proved wrong had to do with the development of the minié ball, a conical bullet with a hollow end that expands when fired. This bullet made possible the use of the muzzle-loading rifle, which had extraordinary range and accuracy. These rifles turned early battlefields into scenes of chaos and carnage. Although an individual soldier could fire only a few times a minute, their Enfield and Springfield rifles were murderously effective at great distances.

In early Civil War battles, soldiers marched in tight formation toward an enemy that began killing and wounding them from a quarter of a mile away. These battles thus put a premium on the courage of ordinary soldiers, valuing their willingness to move forward relentlessly under withering fire. In the face of such efficient killing, fixed infantry formations soon gave way to the realities of self-defense and self-protection. By 1863 the nature of battle had changed considerably, relying on heavy fortifications, elaborate trenches, and distant heavy mortar and artillery fire—tactics that resembled World War I more than the American Revolution, or even the Mexican War.

In general, the Civil War proved to be an exhausting, trying experience for the ordinary infantrymen who bore the brunt of the fighting. After a major battle, one Vermont soldier described himself as “so completely worn out that I can’t tell how many days . . . in the last two weeks . . . I went without sleeping or eating.” The hardships and discomforts experienced on both sides extended far beyond the actual fighting. Many soldiers went into battle in ragged uniforms, some without shoes. A Georgia major reported after the battle of Manassas (or, Bull Run; northerners named battles after local rivers while southerners named battles after nearby towns) that he “carried into the fight over one hundred men who were barefoot, many of whom left bloody foot-prints among the thorns and briars through which they rushed.”

Rations on both sides were sporadic at best; food was often adulterated, and even that was in short supply. Staples of the Union Army diet were bread—actually, an unleavened biscuit called hardtack—meat, beans, and coffee, the latter drunk in enormous quantities. Confederate troops got even less, subsisting on cornmeal and fatty meat. Vegetables and fruit were scarce on both sides, making scurvy common. Confederate rations were so short that after some battles, officers sent details of men to gather food from the haversacks of Union dead. As the war progressed, the Confederate government actually reduced rations to its soldiers. “I came nearer to starving than I ever did before,” noted one soldier in Virginia. The Union soldiers’ diet, in contrast, generally improved because of the greater scope and efficiency of the North’s supply system.

Disease proved a greater adversary than enemy soldiers. “There is more dies by sickness than gets killed,” a recruit from New York had complained in 1861. His assessment would prove chillingly accurate. For every soldier who died as a result of battle, three died of disease. Measles, dysentery, typhoid, and malaria became major killers, caused or made worse by contaminated water, bad food, and exposure to the elements. One soldier stationed in Louisiana described an outbreak of malaria:

Two-thirds of the regiment are buried or in hospital. It is woeful to see how nearly destitute of comforts and of attendance the sick are. They cannot be kept in their wretched bunks, but stagger about, jabbering and muttering insanities, till they lie down and die in their ragged, dirty uniforms.

African American troops fared worst of all. The death rate for Black Union soldiers from disease was nearly three times greater than for white Union soldiers, reflecting their generally poorer health upon enlistment, their meager food, the hard labor they performed, and the minimal medical care they received while in the field.

Even for white soldiers, medical assistance was primitive. One commentator described military hospitals in the war’s early years as “dirty dens of butchery and horror.” After the battle of Shiloh in 1862, General Grant’s medical director told of “thousands of human beings . . . wounded and lacerated in every conceivable manner, on the ground, under a pelting rain, without shelter, without bedding, without straw to lie upon, and with but little food. . . . The agonies of the wounded were beyond all description.” Army doctors on both sides provided little relief. “I believe the Doctors kills more than they cure,” wrote an Alabama private; “Doctors haint Got half Sence.”

Sick and wounded soldiers were cared for by doctors who had not yet heard of antibiotics or antisepsis, who had no cure for peritonitis or gangrene, and who were perennially short of anesthetics. Union soldiers, however, at least had access to supplies and medical care provided by the U.S. Sanitary Commission. This commission, established by the federal government in 1861, had grown out of the efforts of the Women’s Central Association for Relief, a volunteer organization that initially focused on training nurses. By 1862, tens of thousands of women had volunteered through hundreds of local chapters across the North and Midwest, hosting “Sanitary Fairs” to raise money; rolling bandages; shipping food, medicine, clothing, and bedding; and sending nurses to army camps along the battlefront. In the South, much of the medical care was also voluntary and performed by women. The difference was that, without a government-sanctioned body to coordinate efforts and lobby for resources, a Confederate soldier’s chances of dying from wounds or disease was even greater than that of his Union counterpart.

The difficulties of camp life and the horrors of battle affected ordinary soldiers’ morale. As food, sanitation, and medical care deteriorated and casualties mounted, a large number of soldiers deserted. At Antietam, in the fall of 1862, Confederate general Robert E. Lee estimated that one-third to one-half of his soldiers were “straggling”—that is, absent without leave. Early the next year, Union general Joseph Hooker reported that one in four soldiers under his command was similarly absent. Morale problems in the Union Army during this period were compounded by the fact that the North kept losing battles to seemingly inferior Confederate forces. By 1863, many Union soldiers were openly critical of their leaders. A Massachusetts private concluded that “there is very little zeal or patriotism in the army now; the men have seen so much more of defeat than of victory and so much bloody slaughter that all patriotism is played out.”

What turned the tide for the Union was not simply improved army leadership and better military tactics, but an improved supply of armaments, food, and clothing to Union troops and of the necessities of life to their families and friends back home as well. The North’s economic advantage grew as the war dragged on, but to maintain it required far more Union women than ever before to enter the paid labor force. The sacrifices required on the home front were only deemed worthy, however, if Union armies were winning victories on the battlefront. Dissent and protest thus blossomed in the North until the tide of war turned decisively toward the Union in 1864. By then African Americans had distinguished themselves in battle, though they continued to struggle against prejudice in the North and for the final eradication of slavery in the South.

As the Civil War unfolded, economic change in the North occurred at a quickening pace. Despite military and economic setbacks in 1861 and 1862, the Union grew stronger as the war progressed. Northern factories turned out weapons, ammunition, blankets, clothing, shoes, and other products, and shipyards built the fleets that blockaded southern ports. Leading in the production of war materials, the North continued to serve as the center of American industrial development. By 1860, manufacturing establishments in the North outnumbered those in the South six to one; and there were 1.3 million industrial workers in the North, compared with 110,000 in the South.

Initially, however, the effects of the war on northern industry had been little short of disastrous. New England textile production declined precipitously as the flow of raw southern cotton dried up. Shoe factories, which relied heavily on the orders of southern enslavers, fell silent. The large seaboard cities of the Northeast, whose very lifeblood was trade, also suffered greatly. By 1863, however, the economic picture had changed dramatically. Coal mining and iron production boomed in Pennsylvania. In New England, woolen manufacturing took up the slack left by the decline of cotton. Merchants dealing in war orders made handsome profits, and industrialists ran their factories at a frenzied pace. The lower wages paid to desperate women and children, recently arrived immigrants, and free Black Americans seeking entry into new occupations contributed to increases in both profits and the pace of work.

The economic boom of 1863 to 1864 was also linked to a vast expansion in the federal government’s activities. Direct orders from the War Office for blankets, firearms, and other goods did much to spark the manufacturing upturn. The government also stimulated the economy by granting large contracts to northern railroads to carry troops and supplies, and by making loans and land grants that would finance the railroads’ dramatic postwar expansion. Congress instituted a steep tariff on imported manufactured goods, giving American manufacturers protection from competition and encouraging industrial development, policies that northern industrialists had long demanded. With southern Democrats removed from the halls of Congress, Republicans now rushed to meet these demands.

Perhaps the federal government’s most significant long-term contribution to the economy was the creation of a national currency and a national banking system. Before the Civil War, private banks (chartered by the states) issued their own banknotes, which were used in most economic transactions; the federal government paid all of its expenses in gold or silver. Various wartime acts of Congress revolutionized this system, giving the federal government the power to create currency, to issue federal charters to banks, and to create a national debt (which totaled billion by the war’s end). These developments helped to shape the full flowering of industrial capitalism after the war.

They also had profound short-term effects. To finance the war, the government used its new power to flood the nation with 0 million in treasury bills, commonly called “greenbacks.” The federal budget mushroomed—from million in 1860 to nearly .3 billion in 1865. By the war’s end, the federal bureaucracy had grown to be the nation’s largest single employer. These federal actions provided a tremendous stimulus to industry, and northern manufacturers greeted them, on the whole, with enthusiasm.

But industrialists continued to face one daunting problem that government expansion only exacerbated: a shortage of labor. Over half a million workers left their jobs to serve in the Union Army, and others were drawn into jobs with the expanding federal bureaucracy, just as the need for increased production intensified the competition for workers. Employers dealt with the shortage in a variety of ways. Then as now, mechanization could lessen the need for workers. Reapers and mowers had been developed in the 1850s, but the shortage of labor greatly hastened their adoption by midwestern farmers. “The severe manual toil of mowing, raking, pitching, and cradling is now performed by machinery,” noted Scientific American in 1863. The war similarly quickened the trend toward mechanization in the manufacture of clothing and shoes.

Northern industrialists also led the way in hiring immigrants to remedy the labor shortage. The industrialists formed organizations like the Boston Foreign Emigrant Aid Society and were extremely successful in encouraging migration from the European countryside to U.S. factories, mines, and mills. Immigration had fallen off sharply in the first two years of the war, with only about 90,000 immigrants arriving in 1861 and again in 1862—less than half the level of each of the preceding five years. By 1863, the number of immigrants—mostly Irish, German, and British—had again reached the pre-1860 level. The figure climbed to nearly 200,000 in 1864, and exceeded 300,000 in 1865.

The entry of women—immigrant and native-born—into both the agricultural and industrial workforce was a critical factor in easing the wartime labor shortage. On northern farms, women took over much of the work. A popular verse called “The Volunteer’s Wife” described the situation:

Take your gun and go, John,
Take your gun and go,
For Ruth can drive the oxen,
And I can use the hoe.

A missionary traveling through Iowa in 1863 reported that he “met more women driving teams on the road and saw more at work in the fields than men.” Factories and armories hired women in ever-larger numbers to churn out northern war orders. Most important to the war effort were the thousands of “sewing women,” who were mainly poor and working-class women, many of them single or widowed and immigrants. They worked under government contract in their own homes (often in crowded tenements) to make the uniforms worn by Union soldiers. Opportunities for more well-educated native-born white women also opened up in the fields of teaching, government clerical work, and retail sales.

Women’s employment in some of the newer industrial jobs was temporary; when the war ended, so did women’s employment. But in other areas, such as the nursing profession, women made permanent inroads. Despite strong initial opposition, women eventually obtained work in northern hospitals and Union Army camps. This movement was led by such memorable figures as Clara Barton, Mary Ann “Mother” Bickerdyke, and Dr. Mary Walker, the first woman to be awarded the Medal of Honor. The work these women accomplished created popular support for their entrance into the medical profession. By the end of the war, women had almost entirely replaced men in nursing the sick and wounded.

Northern women played an astonishing array of roles over the course of the war. The Woman’s National Loyal League gathered some four hundred thousand signatures on petitions calling for a constitutional amendment to end slavery. They served as spies, couriers, recruiting agents, and even soldiers. Some four hundred women, on both sides of the conflict, are known to have disguised themselves as men in order to join infantry companies; the identities of several were discovered only after they were wounded in battle. Although the financial rewards for such services were small, the efforts of women in wartime helped to transform popular notions of appropriate gender roles and set the stage for new debates in the postwar era over women’s rights and responsibilities.

Despite an expanding economy, northern working people suffered tremendously during the war years. For those not facing enemy fire, the main problem was inflation. As greenbacks flooded the economy and as consumer goods fell into short supply, prices climbed rapidly—about twenty percent faster than wages. Skilled workers, whose labor was in high demand, might be able to keep up. But unskilled workers, especially women, were hit hard by inflation. “We are barely able to sustain life for the prices offered by contractors, who fatten on their contracts by grinding immense profits out of the labor of their operatives,” wrote a group of Cincinnati seamstresses to President Lincoln in 1864.

Industrialists garnered huge profits as production boomed. Profits in the woolen industry nearly tripled. Railroad stocks climbed to unheard-of-prices. Government contractors made huge gains—sometimes by supplying inferior goods at vastly inflated prices. To working people suffering the ravages of inflation, such extraordinary profits seemed grossly unfair.

Northern workers tried to improve their plight in a variety of ways. From 1863 through 1865, there were dozens of strikes as workers began to form unions to demand higher wages. But wartime strikes could also exacerbate divisions among workers. In a number of cases, such as the longshoremen’s walkout in New York City in June 1863, employers broke strikes staged by largely immigrant workers by hiring African Americans for jobs from which they had traditionally been excluded.

Both Black and white workers looked to Lincoln and the federal government for help. The Republicans, after all, had pledged themselves to protect the rights of free labor. But government proved to be a better friend of business. Employers successfully lobbied a number of state legislatures to pass laws prohibiting strikes. They also persuaded the increasingly powerful federal government to help block workers’ efforts to organize. When workers at the Parrott arms factory in Cold Spring, New York, struck for higher wages in 1864, the government sent in two companies of troops, declared martial law, and arrested the strike leaders. The army similarly intervened in labor disputes in St. Louis and in the Pennsylvania coalfields. All three strikes were crushed.

Workers who protested federal intervention in strikes raised the hopes of Democrats seeking greater political power. The Civil War had deeply divided the Democratic Party in the North. Although some party leaders supported Lincoln and the war effort, many others—whom opponents called Copperheads, after the poisonous snake—rallied behind Ohio politician Clement L. Vallandigham in opposing the war. These antiwar Democrats sought desperately to build support for their position among midwestern farmers and eastern industrial workers. In areas of the Midwest where sympathy for the southern cause and antipathy to African Americans ran deep, both women and men enthusiastically joined the Copperhead campaign.

Democrats enjoyed considerable success in eastern cities as well. There inflation was running rampant and immigrant workers had long supported Democratic political machines. Racism was the strongest weapon in the party’s arsenal. As the Civil War increasingly became a war against slavery, many white workers found an outlet for their racism in supporting the peace wing of the Democratic Party.

The Republican draft law further fueled northern opposition to the war. The Conscription Act of March 1863 provided that draftees would be selected by an impartial lottery. But the act contained a loophole that exempted men with 0 to spare. A man could pay that 0 to the government in place of serving, or to another man who served as the draftee’s substitute. This option was unavailable to most workers, who were lucky to earn 0 in an entire year, and they deeply resented the draft law’s profound inequality. Others opposed the recent expansion of the North’s war aims to include emancipation, as they assumed freed enslaved persons would join free Black people as competitors for scarce jobs after the war ended.

The simmering resentment of the urban poor reached the boiling point in July 1863, when the new draft law went into effect. Riots broke out in cities across the North. In New York, where war-induced inflation had caused tremendous suffering and where a large immigrant population solidly supported a powerful Democratic machine, implementation of the draft triggered four days of the worst rioting Americans had ever seen. Violence quickly spread through the entire city. Both women and men, many of them poor Irish immigrants, attacked Protestant missionaries, Republican draft officials, and wealthy businessmen. New York City’s small free-Black population became the rioters’ main target, however. Enraged immigrants turned on Black New Yorkers. One observer reported that he saw “a black man hanged . . . for no offense but his Negritude.” Rioters lynched at least a dozen African Americans and looted and burned the city’s Colored Orphan Asylum. Leading trade unionists joined middle-class leaders in condemning the riots, but to no avail. The violence ended only when Union troops were rushed back from the front to put down the riot by force. At the end, over one hundred New Yorkers lay dead.

 In the weeks preceding the draft riots, the military situation did not bode well for the Union. Following victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, Virginia, the Confederate army’s premiere general, Robert E. Lee, had led his troops on the first direct invasion of northern territory. By late June 1863, the Confederate army had crossed into Pennsylvania. If Lee won a substantial victory there, European nations might be convinced to recognize the Confederacy and Peace Democrats might gain substantial support among war-weary Northerners.

But then, as New Yorkers rioted against the draft, the Union won two decisive victories, marking the beginning of its military success. In the eastern theater, Union forces turned back a major Confederate drive at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Neither Lee nor his Union counterpart, General George A. Meade, had set out to wage a major battle in Gettysburg. But Lee was concerned about losing his supply lines if he moved further north, and Meade was anxious that the Confederates not gain control of the major roads that crossed in the town. So on July 1, the battle commenced, and three grueling days of fighting followed. Although it appeared at several points that the Confederate Army had the advantage, they failed to gain the victory. The battle of Gettysburg was the bloodiest of the war. Twenty-three thousand Union soldiers were killed, wounded, or listed as missing, as well as twenty-eight thousand Confederate soldiers, more than a third of Lee’s army.

It was probably good that on July 4, as the weary and wounded Confederate troops retreated South, they had no idea of the events unfolding in Vicksburg, Mississippi. There troops under Ulysses S. Grant had been pounding entrenched Confederate forces for weeks. In June, Grant had sent his men in a wide arc around the city and attacked from the east, setting the stage for a six-week siege of the city. Exhausted and starving Confederate soldiers finally wrote a letter to their commander, General John C. Pemberton, stating: “If you can’t feed us, you had better surrender, horrible as this idea is. . . .” On July 4, thirty thousand Confederate troops surrendered, giving the Union Army control of the richest plantation region in the South.

The changing Union fortunes helped turn the tide of northern public opinion, increasing support for Lincoln. At the same time, the heroics of African American soldiers, who in 1863 engaged in direct and often brutal combat against Confederate troops, encouraged wider support for emancipation. In addition, the Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg convinced Great Britain not to recognize the Confederate States of America as an independent government.

The 1864 fall elections tested Northerners’ support for Lincoln’s wartime policies against the peace platform of the Democrats. The Democrats nominated George B. McClellan, the one-time Union commander, as their candidate for president. McClellan managed to attract many working people who had traditionally supported the Democrats and who now bore the heaviest burden of the war. But whatever hopes for victory these northern Democrats had were crushed when Union General William Tecumseh Sherman captured Atlanta just two months before the presidential election. Lincoln’s substantial victory over McClellan won the president a clear mandate to carry the war to its conclusion. Combined with the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Lincoln’s reelection raised the curtain on the most important act of the Civil War: the destruction, root and branch, of slavery.

African Americans intervened decisively in the Civil War in two interrelated ways. From January 1863 on, African American soldiers were allowed to serve in the Union Army, and they helped ensure that nothing short of universal emancipation would be the outcome of the war. In addition, rapid Union advances after 1864 enhanced enslaved persons’ opportunities for seizing freedom, further disrupting Confederate war efforts.

When the Union finally began to recruit African Americans into the military, the response was overwhelming. By spring 1865, nearly two hundred thousand African Americans were serving in the Union Army or Navy, constituting about one-tenth of the total number of men in uniform. Nearly eighty percent of Black soldiers had been recruited in the slave states, and these men struck a blow for their own and their people’s freedom. As George W. Hatton, a Black sergeant with Company C, First Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, observed in 1864, “though the Government declared that it did not want Negroes in this conflict, I look around me and see hundreds of colored men armed and ready to defend the Government at any moment, and such are my feelings, that I can only say, the fetters have fallen—our bondage is over.”

Of course, for many white northerners, recruitment of African Americans into the Union army was not so much a matter of giving Black people a chance to end slavery as it was a practical necessity. As Union manpower needs grew, even outright racists could support Black recruitment. “When this war is over and we have summed up the entire loss of life it has imposed on the country,” wrote Iowa’s governor, Samuel Kirkwood, “I shall not have any regrets if it is found that a part of the dead are niggers and that all are not white men.”

Recruitment policies sometimes reflected this racism. In Louisiana and Mississippi, for example, squads from the invading Union Army swept through plantation slave quarters, impressing all able-bodied men into the military. “The Soldiers have taken my husband away . . . and it is against his will,” protested one Black woman in a letter to the government. African Americans throughout the South condemned these policies, which undermined any real exercise of freedom and tore families apart. In the border states, however, enslaved persons had less mixed feelings about recruitment into the Union Army. Because they had remained in the Union, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri had been exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation. But enslaved persons in these states who enlisted in the Union Army were granted their freedom. Enslavers in these loyal states did everything in their power to prevent their enslaved persons from joining the army, including assault, harsh treatment of family members left behind, and even murder. Despite these actions, the proportion of military-age enslaved men in these four states joining the Union Army was staggering, ranging from twenty-five to sixty percent. By their enlistments, these men delivered slavery in the border states a blow from which it could never recover.

African American soldiers, wherever they were recruited, quickly distinguished themselves in battle. In May 1863, Louisiana Black regiments fought with great gallantry and almost reckless disregard for their own lives in the assault on Port Hudson, downriver from Vicksburg. Two weeks later, formerly enslaved persons helped fight off a Confederate attack at Milliken’s Bend in the same region. The valor of African American troops at Port Hudson and Milliken’s Bend helped ensure Grant’s victory at Vicksburg the following month.

African American soldiers had to be courageous, for they faced not only death on the battlefield but torture and death if they were captured. The Confederate government threatened that any Black people taken prisoner would be treated as enslaved persons in rebellion and be subject to execution. This policy was generally not enforced because Lincoln intervened and threatened northern retaliation. In some instances, however, as at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in April 1864, Confederate troops cold-bloodedly murdered Black Union soldiers who had surrendered. By the end of the war, thirty-seven thousand Black soldiers had given their lives for freedom and the Union.

Northern whites began to acknowledge the courage of the African American soldiers who served with them, helping to undermine the whites’ ingrained racism. “The bravery of the blacks in the battle of Milliken’s Bend completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of negro troops,” wrote the assistant secretary of war. Rank-and-file white soldiers, too, were often impressed with the valor of Black troops. They gave three cheers to a Tennessee Black regiment after one hard-fought battle. “One year ago the regiment was unknown, and it was considered . . . very doubtful whether Negroes would make good soldiers,” a white commander noted. “Today the regiment is known throughout the army and is honored.”

Nevertheless, African Americans in the army felt the effects of continuing racism. They were segregated in camps, given all the most menial jobs, and treated as inferiors by white recruits and officers. Particularly galling was the early Union policy of paying Black soldiers less than whites: versus per month. This inequality outraged African American troops. Black soldiers who openly struggled against this discrimination, like Third South Carolina Volunteers’ sergeant William Walker, paid dearly for their courage. Walker, who refused to take orders until given equal pay, was charged with mutiny and executed by firing squad in February 1864.

Despite the execution of William Walker, the protests continued, and in June 1864, the War Department finally equalized wages among Black and white recruits. Moreover, the struggle had begun to transform African American soldiers. They now understood that the battle for equality would go on after the war was over, and that it would be fought in the North as well as the South. The war had thus not only transformed the North, but it had transformed the lives and expectations of African Americans, North and South.

How did photographs express the hopes and challenges of Black soldiers?

The destruction of slavery was the most dramatic, but by no means the only, effect the Civil War had on the South. In the South, as in the North, the war intensified conflict between social classes, altered the role of women, increased the size of cities, and—at least temporarily—launched a small industrial revolution. It also fostered dissent and protest, which was not diminished, as it was in the North, by military victory.

Although Southerners had gone to war to protect an essentially rural society, the war fostered the growth of cities and industry. Prior to the war, New Orleans had been the only really large southern city. Now Atlanta mushroomed, and Richmond’s population more than doubled. Smaller cities also grew tremendously. The population of Mobile, Alabama, for example, climbed from twenty-nine thousand people in 1860 to forty-one thousand five years later.

Several factors encouraged the rapid growth of southern cities. One was the creation of a large governmental and military bureaucracy in Richmond, Virginia. Hundreds of women were recruited to work in government offices in the Confederate capitol, such as the Treasury Department, a job considered sufficiently genteel to be respectable. Women, along with children and the elderly, also moved to cities during the war in hopes of finding protection from Union troops. These refugees trickled in during the early years of the war, but by 1863 and 1864, they were flooding cities like Richmond, Atlanta, and Savannah. Perhaps the most important contribution to urban growth was industrialization. By 1863, for example, more than ten thousand people in Selma, Alabama, worked in war industries—industries that had not existed three years earlier.

Military necessity was the spur to industrialization. At the beginning of the war, the South contained only fifteen percent of the factories in the United States and produced only thirty percent of the nation’s commodities. No longer able to buy industrial goods from the North and handicapped in its trade with Europe by the Union blockade, the South had either to industrialize or die. The thirty thousand troops that defended Vicksburg in 1863 depended almost exclusively on clothing and equipment manufactured in Mississippi, some of it by war widows and orphans. Factories in Natchez, Columbus, Jackson, and other southern towns turned out ten thousand garments and eight thousand pairs of shoes a week. At the base of the South’s new industries was the huge Tredegar ironworks in Richmond, which, by January 1863, employed over twenty-five hundred men, Black and white.

In the end, the South’s industrial revolution would be aborted. The victorious Union Army destroyed factories and machinery all across the region as the war drew to a close. Confederates sometimes destroyed their own factories to keep resources from falling into Union hands.  More important, even at its height, southern industrialization was a creation of government rather than of an independent class of industrial capitalists. The South remained only a pale reflection of industrial New England. Still, while it lasted, industrialization did trigger wider social change in the South.

One such change was an undermining of traditional gender roles when large numbers of southern women took jobs in the new factories. Women flocked to the mills to make clothing, powder, cartridges, and other armaments. When a roomful of explosives blew up in a Richmond factory in March 1863, most of the sixty-nine workers killed were women. Many women became the sole support of their families as fathers, husbands, and brothers in the Confederate Army received inadequate pay, died of injuries or disease, or returned home as invalids.

Industrialization also led to a vast expansion of the region’s small urban working class and to a new activism on its part. Led by skilled craftsmen in the war industries, workers formed unions, went on strike, and tried to put political pressure on the Confederate government. When Virginia legislators introduced a bill in the fall of 1863 to control food prices, a large crowd of Richmond workers expressed their support for price controls and their resentment toward the rich. “From the fact that he consumes all and produces nothing,” they proclaimed, “we know that without [our] labor and production the man with money could not exist.” Lavish balls hosted by the wives of wealthy industrialists, planters, and politicians only reinforced southern workers’ disparaging views of Confederate leaders. Although women like Mary Chesnut, a planter’s wife and prolific diarist, insisted that such events were necessary to maintain morale and demonstrate that the South was far from defeated, the Richmond Enquirer argued that they were “shameful displays of indifference to national calamity . . . a mockery of the misery and desolation that covers the land.”

Even more pronounced than the growing class antagonisms in the South was the growing dissatisfaction with the war. Popular protests initially emerged when the Confederate Congress introduced a draft in April 1862. It came a full year before the Union passed its own draft law. Concerned with the weariness of troops in the field and with Grant’s successes in the West, Confederate president Jefferson Davis concluded that the war effort required conscription. Other southerners disagreed, maintaining that the very idea of a national (that is, a Confederate) draft undermined the southern tradition of states’ rights. Georgia’s governor, Joseph E. Brown, for example, attempted to block implementation of the act, arguing that it conflicted with the very principles that had been used to justify secession in the first place. Many ordinary southerners agreed. “I volunteered for six months and I am perfectly willing to serve my time out, and come home and stay awhile and go again,” wrote a Georgia soldier to his family, “But I don’t want to be forced to go.”

As in the North, inequalities in the execution of the draft also incited opposition. A draftee with money could hire a substitute to serve in his place. Moreover, an October 1862 law exempted any white man owning twenty or more enslaved persons from service in the army. This special exemption arose in part as a response to the growing unruliness of enslaved persons on plantations in the absence of overseers or owners. In practice, however, it meant that large enslavers, the very ones who had led the South into war, had exempted themselves from dying in it. The point was not lost on the non-enslaving whites who fought and died for the Confederacy. “All they want is to get you pumpt up and go to fight for their infernal negroes,” said one farmer from Alabama, “and after you do their fighting you may kiss their hine parts for all they care.”

Impressment, which allowed the Confederate army to take whatever supplies it needed from farmers, planters, and other residents, also caused discontent. By 1863, the Confederate Congress had set prices for the goods taken at well below market value. A group of farmers from Floyd County, Georgia, complained, “These seizures are not impressment, [they] are robbery.” Along with a more stringent tax bill introduced the same year, impressment placed a heavy burden on the small, food-producing farm families that had the least to gain from a Confederate victory. It brought to crisis proportions a food shortage that had been building for some time in southern cities.

Although overwhelmingly agricultural, the South had built its economy primarily on cotton, tobacco, and other nonedible crops. The absence of a good railroad or canal system in the South, coupled with the Union blockade of coastal shipping and occupation of grain-producing areas in the Confederacy, further hindered distribution of food. As the specter of starvation came to haunt the cities of the South, even people in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, went hungry. In March 1863, when government agents began using impressment to take scarce food from city markets to feed the Confederate Army, Richmond’s poor channeled their anger into protest.

On April 2, a group of women, including the wives of Richmond ironworkers and Confederate soldiers, marched to the governor’s mansion, demanding food. A young woman in the growing throng declared, “We celebrate our right to live. We are starving. As soon as enough of us get together we are going to the bakeries, and each of us will take a loaf of bread. This is little enough for the government to give us after it has taken all our men.” The protest soon turned into a major riot, which ended only when Jefferson Davis personally threatened to have troops open fire on the women. Food riots also broke out in other cities in Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama.

Food shortages were closely tied to another problem: inflation. Food shortages forced food prices up, while the blockade and the military focus of southern industry increased the prices of manufactured goods. As the Confederate government issued more and more treasury notes to finance the war, inflation soared. By January 1864 it took twenty-seven Confederate dollars to buy what one dollar had bought in April 1861—an inflation rate of 2,600 percent in less than three years. Urban workers were overwhelmed. In the aftermath of the Richmond bread riots, a woman diarist declared, “I am for a tidal wave of peace—and I am not alone. . . . if we can afford to give for a pound of bacon, for a small dish of green corn, and for a watermelon, we can have a dinner of three courses for four persons. . . . Somebody, somewhere, is mightily to blame for all this business. . . . .” The culprits, to her mind, were the political leaders who had started the war in the first place.

Small farmers and their families also bore heavy burdens. Despite their loyalty to the Confederacy early in the war, taxation, impressment, inflation, and the inequities of the draft eventually took their toll. To these grievances was added the devastation of war. Since most of the war was fought in the upper South, small non-enslaving farmers saw their crops, their animals, and sometimes their very farms destroyed. During the last year of the war, increasing desertion rates and protests by white farmers against the depredation of their property, crops, and homes by Confederate soldiers marked their growing disaffection from a war that would benefit largely the enslaving elite.

The phrase that had seemed so cynical in 1862—“A rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight”—had become the rallying cry of the southern peace movement by 1864. The Washington Constitutional Union, a secret peace society with a large following among farmers in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, elected several of its members to the Confederate Congress. The Heroes of America, another secret organization with strength in North Carolina, provided Union forces with information on southern troop movements and encouraged desertion from the Confederate Army. By war’s end, more Confederate soldiers had deserted than remained in uniform. In some isolated mountainous regions of the South, such as western North Carolina, draft evaders and deserters formed guerrilla groups that not only killed draft officials but actively impeded the war effort.

In the eastern part of North Carolina, Native peoples fueled opposition to the Confederate cause. Native Americans from Robeson County were, like enslaved persons, forced to labor for the Confederate Army. They used the knowledge they gained to mount guerrilla operations and pass information to Union officers. By 1864, Henry Berry Lowry, a Lumbee man and, according to his supporters, the Robin Hood of Robeson County, had organized a band that consisted of his Native peoples plus aggrieved white people and poor Black people to wage a guerrilla war against Confederate troops and the North Carolina Home Guard. Native peoples also helped guide Union General William Tecumseh Sherman and his troops—including a number of Onyota'á:kas (Oneidas) serving with Company F—through the North Carolina swamps, helping to increase the devastation wreaked on the area but also to hasten the Union victory.

As the Confederate cause unraveled, many southern white women grew weary of the conflict. Across the South, women had organized aid societies, which provided bandages, blankets, clothing, ammunition, and food to the army. The women also supplied hospitals, raised funds, and supported an increasing number of widows and orphans. Individual women volunteered as nurses, served as couriers and spies, picked up guns in defense of homes and farms, and raised regiments. Among the enslaving class, many mistresses became “enslavers,” taking over the management of fieldwork and field hands. As one soldier wrote to his wife on a Georgia farm, “You must be a man and woman both while the war lasts.” Given the restrictions on women’s activities before the war, the changes demanded by the protracted conflict became too much to ask of more and more women. In addition to anxieties about the safety of their men on the front lines of battle, enslaving southern white women feared the wrath of Yankee soldiers, the antipathy of enslaved persons and free Black people, and the desperation of poor whites. They found obtaining the necessities of life a heavier and heavier burden; and there was no relief, no victory, in sight.

With the military defeats of 1863 and 1864, many women who had once supported the Confederate cause began to pray for peace, whatever the price. Some even urged their sons and husbands to abandon the battlefield and return home. Though some women remained ardent supporters of secession, berating generals who ordered retreat or suffered defeat, a growing number agreed with Georgia plantation mistress Gertrude Thomas. In October 1864, she wrote in her diary, “It would be a brilliant thing to recapture Atlanta. And I wish it could be done.” But she continued, “Am I willing to give my husband to gain Atlanta for the Confederacy? No, No, No, a thousand times No!”

How did images from Union and Confederate sources offer opposing views about southern white women and the Confederate cause?

The war had now entered its final months. In March 1864, Lincoln placed General Ulysses S. Grant in charge of all Union forces. In early May, Grant embarked on a strategy that included attacks against military and civilian targets alike and that accepted huge casualties in order to achieve victory. Grant led his troops overland through the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg in attempts to take Richmond and defeat Lee’s Confederate forces. General William Tecumseh Sherman, meanwhile, pushed back the Confederate Army in Tennessee and invaded Georgia. By August 1864, Sherman had forced Confederate General John Bell Hood’s army to retreat to Atlanta, one of the most important cities in the South. Early the following month, Sherman’s army swept into Atlanta, cutting the South in half. A sense of impending doom spread among those loyal to the Confederacy.

Sherman then began his three-hundred mile march across Georgia, from Atlanta to the sea, and then up through the Carolinas. Embracing the concept of “total war,” his troops sought to destroy everything in their path. They cut a swath of destruction fifty to sixty miles wide, destroying crops, livestock, and houses before they reached Savannah in late December. Civilians—which often meant women and children—were now official targets of Union military strategists. Sherman’s all-white army uprooted thousands of enslaved persons, many of whom tried to attach themselves to the Union forces. In all, nearly eighteen thousand enslaved persons—men, women, and children—left their plantations to join the victorious Union Army on its march to the sea. To the fleeing enslaved persons’ dismay, Sherman’s troops turned many away. Marauding Confederate forces subsequently captured many of them, killing some and re-enslaving others.

Sherman’s callous actions caused a scandal in Washington. In January 1865, Lincoln dispatched Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to Georgia to investigate the charges. In an extraordinary meeting held in Savannah, Stanton and Sherman met with twenty Black ministers to hear their complaints about mistreatment of contrabands and to inquire what, in their opinion, African Americans wanted, now that slavery was ending. The ministers spoke movingly of the war lifting “the yoke of bondage”; freed enslaved persons now “could reap the fruit of their own labor” and, by being given land, could “take care of ourselves, and assist the Government in maintaining our freedom.” Four days later, Sherman responded to the ministers’ demands and issued his controversial Field Order Number 15, setting aside more than four hundred thousand acres of captured Confederate land to be divided into small plots for the freed enslaved persons. Perhaps as significant as Sherman’s order was the fact that a major official of the national government had traveled to Georgia to ask ordinary African Americans what they wanted. The Civil War had truly had revolutionary consequences.

Those consequences were far-reaching. At the end of 1864, as defeat loomed, Confederate leaders themselves began to talk of emancipating the enslaved persons. At almost the same moment as Stanton and Sherman were meeting with African American ministers in Savannah, Jefferson Davis was calling for the general recruitment of enslaved persons into the Confederate Army, with their payment to include freedom for themselves and their families. The Confederate Congress ultimately passed such a law in early 1865, but it came too late to allow African Americans to actually enlist in the southern army. The event nonetheless demonstrated a startling fact: the southern planters who had seceded from the Union to protect the institution of slavery were now openly adopting policies that would inevitably destroy it.

As Sherman led his troops north from Georgia and through the Carolinas, Grant’s troops were overwhelming Lee’s besieged army in Richmond. In one of the war’s most dramatic moments, seasoned African American troops under Grant’s command led the final assault on Richmond. They marched into the capitol of the Confederacy carrying the Stars and Stripes and singing the anthem to John Brown, much to the amazement of Richmond’s citizenry, Black and white. Finally, in April 1865, with fewer than thirty thousand soldiers remaining under his command, Lee surrendered, signing the agreement along with Grant at the home of William McLean in Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Though two large Confederate armies continued to engage Union forces in North Carolina and west of the Mississippi, the Civil War, for all intents and purposes, had come to an end.

The legal abolition of slavery had been initiated in Washington a few months earlier. In 1864 the Republican Party had endorsed a constitutional amendment that would forever end slavery in the United States. On January 31, 1865, Congress finally passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude anywhere within the jurisdiction of the United States.

Wartime experiences, moreover, had changed the attitudes of many northerners, who had seen firsthand the “peculiar institution” and the suffering it inflicted on African Americans. In some places, new attitudes were translated into law. Ohio, California, and Illinois repealed statutes barring Black people from testifying in court and serving on juries. In May 1865, Massachusetts passed the first comprehensive public accommodations law in U.S. history, ensuring equal treatment for Black and white people in theaters, stores, schools, and other social spaces. Earlier, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and even New York City had desegregated their streetcars. The logic of a war against the enslavement of Black southerners was now extended to encompass at least limited rights for African Americans in the North.

Still, the task of rebuilding the United States following four years of bitter warfare was daunting. Before it could even begin, however, a new tragedy engulfed the nation. On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln as he sat in a box at the Ford Theatre watching a play. It was just a week after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House.

Lincoln’s assassination marked the end of an era. Conflict between two social systems—one based on slavery, the other on free labor—had plagued the nation since the American Revolution. More than six hundred thousand Americans had died in the Civil War, but the issue of slavery was resolved once and for all. In the process, nearly four million Americans who had once been enslaved were freed. Now, in the spring of 1865, all Americans had to confront difficult new questions: Who would lead the nation during this difficult time? Would Confederate political and military leaders be punished for their participation in the war? Could the nation prosper given the devastating impact of the war on southern agriculture? How could the nation address the balance between federal power and states’ rights that had fueled secession? And most importantly, what would be the role of newly-freed African Americans in the political and economic reconstruction of the South and the nation?