The American Civil War

Background

The American Civil War was the consequence of a four-decade political conflict over the legal status, geographic expansion, and federal-state regulatory relationship of chattel slavery in the United States. The new states organized in the antebellum American west each forced a renewed national negotiation over whether they would be free or slave. The Missouri Compromise (1820), the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), and the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision (1857) progressively radicalized northern Free Soil opinion and southern pro-slavery opinion. The political system designed to mediate the dispute progressively lost the capacity to do so.

The decisive political moment was the 1860 presidential election. Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the new Republican Party (which opposed the further expansion of slavery into the western territories but not its persistence in the existing slave states), won a narrow plurality in a four-way contest. Lincoln’s name was not on the ballot in ten of the fifteen slave states.

South Carolina seceded from the Union on 20 December 1860. By February 1861 six additional Deep South states had followed (Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas). The seven seceding states formed the Confederate States of America under President Jefferson Davis. Lincoln was inaugurated on 4 March 1861. The political conflict had become a constitutional crisis.

The war

The war began with the Confederate bombardment of the federal Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour on 12 April 1861. Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers two days later prompted four additional states (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas) to secede. The total Confederate population was approximately 9 million, including approximately 3.5 million enslaved African Americans; the Union population was approximately 22 million.

The war was fought across the eastern and western theatres of the continent. The major engagements:

First Bull Run / Manassas (21 July 1861) was the first major battle and an unexpected Confederate victory that established that the war would be long. Antietam (17 September 1862) — the single bloodiest day in American military history, with approximately 23,000 casualties — was a tactical draw but allowed Lincoln to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation five days later. Gettysburg (1–3 July 1863) and Vicksburg (4 July 1863) were near-simultaneous Union victories in the east and west that are conventionally treated as the war’s turning points. Sherman’s March to the Sea (November–December 1864) destroyed the Confederate economic infrastructure of Georgia. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865 effectively ended the war, though scattered Confederate forces continued to surrender through May and June.

The total military deaths exceeded those of all subsequent American wars combined until the Second World War. The conventional estimate of 620,000 dead has been revised upward by recent demographic analysis to 750,000 or more — approximately 2.5% of the entire American population, the demographic equivalent of approximately 8 million dead in the modern American population.

Emancipation

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, effective 1 January 1863, declared that all enslaved persons in territories still in rebellion against the United States were “thenceforward, and forever free.” The proclamation did not directly free a single person at issue (it applied only to areas the federal government did not control); it did transform the war’s stated political purpose from preservation of the Union into the abolition of slavery and convert the Union army into the legal-military instrument of emancipation as it advanced into Confederate territory. Approximately 180,000 African Americans served in the Union army by the end of the war.

The 13th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified 6 December 1865, formally abolished slavery in the United States. The 14th Amendment (1868) and the 15th Amendment (1870) extended constitutional citizenship and voting rights to the freedmen. The three Reconstruction amendments together produced the most consequential constitutional reorganization of the federal-state relationship since the original Constitution of 1787.

Lincoln’s assassination

Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre in Washington by the actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth on the evening of 14 April 1865, five days after Lee’s surrender. He died the following morning. The vice-president Andrew Johnson succeeded as president. Booth’s small conspiracy had also targeted Vice President Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward (Seward was wounded but survived); Booth himself was killed in a federal raid on a Virginia farm twelve days later. Four other conspirators were hanged on 7 July 1865.

Abraham Lincoln was the first American president to be assassinated.

Reconstruction and aftermath

The Reconstruction era (1865–1877) was the federal political-military reorganization of the defeated southern states. The Republican-controlled Congress imposed federal military occupation of the former Confederacy and required the southern states to ratify the 14th and 15th Amendments as a condition of restoration to the Union. African American men voted in substantial numbers and elected approximately 2,000 African American officials including 16 members of Congress and 2 U.S. senators during the Reconstruction period.

The Compromise of 1877 ended federal Reconstruction enforcement. The subsequent four decades produced the legal-political institutionalization of Jim Crow segregation, the effective disenfranchisement of southern African Americans, and the sustained system of racial discrimination that would persist until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Legacy

The Civil War produced the unified American federal nation-state (the political-constitutional question of whether “United States” was a plural or singular noun was decided by the war), the formal abolition of slavery, the constitutional citizenship of African Americans, and the political-economic conditions that allowed the postbellum United States to industrialize at the scale that would make it the world’s largest economy by approximately 1890. The war’s institutional legacies — federal supremacy, the 13th-14th-15th Amendments, the political-legal framework of post-slavery race relations — remain foundational to the modern American constitutional order.