American Civil War

At the outset of the war, Lincoln and Congress made it clear that their sole objective was to maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union. Conscious of the need to retain the loyalty of the border slave states, the president exercised caution in dealing with the slavery issue, but he could not avoid it. Not only were slaves fleeing to the Union lines and claiming their freedom, but slave labour was of critical value to the Confederate war effort. Moreover, freed slaves could be enlisted in the Union army; by the end of the war some 186,000 black men, most of them recruited or conscripted in the slave states, had served on the Union side.

On August 6, 1861, Congress passed the Confiscation Bill, which ordered the seizure of all property, including slaves, used “in aid of the rebellion”. Nevertheless, the legal status of such slaves was left uncertain, and federal policy vacillated during the first 18 months of the war.

The preliminary proclamation of emancipation, issued by Lincoln in September 1862, stipulated that on January 1, 1863, in those states or portions of states that were still engaged in rebellion, the slaves would be “forever free”. Despite the reprieve granted the South, Lincoln thought it unlikely that the Confederate states would choose to return to the Union. Nevertheless, partly to appease a sceptical Northern public, Lincoln had made it clear that preserving the Union, not abolishing slavery, remained his principal objective. When he later issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln defended it on the grounds of military necessity; emancipation would, he declared, weaken the productive forces of the Confederacy and thus hasten the end of the war. Tennessee and the loyal border slave states were excluded from the proclamation, as were designated portions of Louisiana, Virginia, and West Virginia. (The 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery throughout the United States, was ratified in December 1865.)

When much of Tennessee, Louisiana, and North Carolina had fallen to Union armies, Lincoln appointed military governors to bring those states back into the Union. On December 8, 1863, the president issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction. Except for high military and civil officers of the Confederacy or its states, all Southerners who took an oath of loyalty to the Constitution and swore to obey the wartime legislation and proclamations regarding slavery would be granted amnesty. As soon as 10 per cent of a state's 1860 electorate had complied with these provisions, that state could write a new constitution, elect new state officers, and send members to Congress. This plan became the basis of presidential Reconstruction, bringing Lincoln into sharp conflict with Republicans in Congress who demanded protection for the freed slaves and a more thorough reconstruction.

Measured in physical devastation and human lives, the American Civil War was the costliest war in the experience of the American people. When the war ended, 620,000 men (in a nation of 35 million people) had been killed and at least that many more had been wounded. The North lost a total of 364,000 (nearly one of every five Union soldiers) and the South 258,000 (nearly one of every four Confederate soldiers). More men died of disease and sickness than on the battlefield; the ratio was about four to one.

The physical devastation was largely limited to the South, where almost all the fighting took place. Large sections of Richmond, Charleston, Atlanta, Mobile, and Vicksburg lay in ruins. The countryside through which the contending armies had passed was littered with gutted plantation houses and barns, burned bridges, and uprooted railway lines. Many crops were destroyed or confiscated, and much livestock was slain. More than $4 billion worth of property had been wiped out through emancipation, the repudiation of Confederate bonds and currency, the confiscation of cotton, and war damage.

The war settled the question of the permanence of the Union; the doctrine of secession was discredited, and after 1865 states would find other ways to manifest their grievances. The war expanded the authority of the federal government, with the executive branch in particular exercising broader jurisdiction and powers than at any previous time in the nation's history. The US Congress, meanwhile, enacted much of the legislation to which the South had objected so strenuously before the war, including a homestead act, liberal appropriations for internal improvements, and the highest tariff duties in American history to that date. Economically, the war encouraged the mechanization of production and the accumulation of capital in the North. The needs of the armies in the field resulted in the mass production of processed foods, ready-made clothing, and shoes, and after the war, industry converted such production to civilian use. By 1865 the United States was on its way to becoming an industrial power.

Finally, the American Civil War brought freedom to nearly 4 million blacks. But the attitudes that had sustained slavery in the South for more than 300 years did not end with the war, and were not properly dealt with in the Reconstruction, thereby creating tensions and problems that would persist through the 20th century.