American Civil War

Civil War Overview

The Civil War marked the history of the United States more indelibly than any conflict that preceded or followed it. In fact, not until the end of the Vietnam War did the combined total casualties in all U.S. wars equal the Civil War's totals. The root cause of the conflict lay in the South's economy, which depended on a system that utilized the labor of Black slaves to grow certain crops, particularly cotton and tobacco. As the United States expanded in the nineteenth century, the contrast between the economic systems of the North and South exacerbated tensions. The election of Abraham Lincoln, leader of the Republican Party (which possessed strong abolitionist sentiments), brought the quarrel to a head in late 1860. The states of the Deep South immediately seceded; Lincoln's call for volunteers after the South Carolina militia shelled the federal garrison of Fort Sumter in early April 1861 caused Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas to join the rebellion.

A superficial comparison of the opposing sides seemed to favor the North. The former possessed a population of twenty-six million, far exceeding the South's nine million; moreover, nearly three million of the South's population were slaves--unavailable for military service and representing a serious threat of insurrection. The North also possessed nearly all the industrial resources in the United States, most of the nation's financial resources, and most of its railroads.

But the South, which remained on the defensive for much of the conflict, enjoyed some substantial advantages. Its vast geographical expanse played a major role in its lengthy resistance. Taken together, Mississippi and Alabama by themselves are slightly larger than the entire area of the former West German state. The distance from central Georgia to northern Virginia is approximately the same distance as that from East Prussia to Moscow, and the distance from central Texas to Richmond exceeds the distance from the Franco-German border to Moscow, a distance that Napoleon traveled in 1812. The fact that substantial portions of the South were primeval wilderness exacerbated the problems of distance. To supply the North's military operations in the West, railroads had to transport the industrial production of the East fifteen hundred miles to Cairo, Illinois, where its operations down the Mississippi and into Tennessee only began.

At the start, neither side had any sense of the magnitude of the tasks on which they were embarking. The tiny army of the United States was a constabulary force that barely provided enough soldiers to intimidate the Indians. The United States had waged a war against Mexico (Mexican War), but that conflict had provided only a glimmering of the problems of mobilization and conducting war over long distances. Following secession, most Southern officers resigned their commissions and returned to their states to join the Confederate militia. In the North, however, the federal army maintained control over most of its officers, leaving the volunteer regiments for the most part in the hands of amateurs. This situation gave Southern forces an advantage, particularly in the East, during the war's first year.

But what remains inexplicable is the considerable contrast between the eastern and western theaters in terms of the performance of the opposing forces. Unfortunately, the disparity in the military effectiveness of the armies has to a great extent eluded historians. All too often, histories of the war have depicted Southern troops as an idealized country folk, trained and prepared for war by their youth on farms, whereas Northern troops, living in dank factory slums, were incapable of fighting. In fact, 85 percent of the North's population lived on farms; and if Northern armies had a difficult time against Confederate forces in the eastern theater, their comrades in the West dominated their Southern opponents throughout the war. The performance of Northern and Southern armies had less to do with the makeup of the armies--they were all drawn from similar backgrounds--than with the particular styles of leadership and battle effectiveness that resulted from idiosyncratic factors, such as the ability of senior leaders including Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, George B. McClellan, and Braxton Bragg to impose their personalities on the character of the armies they led.