US Hist 6, Szkolne, historia i kultura USA

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Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States
Lecture 6
Lecture Six
The Retreat from Union and the Civil War (1850-1865)
Scope:
This lecture explores the prelude to the Civil War as it was fought politically in Congress, and
the actual course of the war as it was fought on battlefields. The economies of the North and the South
are compared, pointing out their strengths and weaknesses. The controversy over the expansion of
slavery is traced through the Wilmot Proviso, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the
Ostend Manifesto, and further milestones up to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. The course
of the Civil War is examined in its two phases: from the attack on Fort Sumter to the Emancipation
proclamation (1861-63), and from the Battle of Gettysburg to Lee’s surrender (1864-65). Lastly, the
gains and losses of the war are reviewed.
Outline
I.
Between 1840s and 1860s the US experienced tremendous economic growth. A sophisticated
transportation network of railroads and canals, together with the telegraph, helped integrate the
entire US into a single national market. Yet, by the 1850s the differences between North and South
overwhelmed the connections that bound them together.
A.
Between 1820s and 1860s the economy in the North changed in three important ways: it was
more productive, more populous, and more urban.
1.
Thanks to impressive new inventions, northern farmers’ productivity quadrupled.
2.
The US, predominantly the North, accepted five million immigrants. More than two-thirds
of them were Irish or German, usually Roman Catholic. By 1855 a larger proportion of
Americans was foreign born than at any other time in the nation’s history. By 1860
immigrants made up more than one-third of the residents in northern cities.
3.
The society in the North was becoming more urban and industry was replacing agriculture
as the driving economic force.
B.
Although the 1850s were among the most prosperous years in the South’s history, slavery
could not transform the South the way wage labor was transforming the North.
C.
Despite the growing economic differences between the North and the South, both sections
coveted western lands.
1.
By 1850 many northerners had come to believe that slavery degraded free labor and
undermined economic opportunity. If slavery were allowed to expand into the West it
would deprive free laborers of an important source of prosperity and independence.
2.
At the same time the slaveholders had come to believe that their own prosperity depended
on the diffusion of the slave economy into the West. By 1850 slavery had expanded more
than halfway across the continent of North America and white southerners grew
accustomed to viewing territorial expansion of slavery as a sign of progress.
II.
Westward expansion forced the issue of slavery into the political mainstream. The controversy
plagued national politics until the outbreak of the Civil War. It can be traced through the following
milestones: the Wilmot Proviso, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the
Ostend Manifesto.
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1.
The southern social structure was largely unchanged.
2.
A prosperous slave economy meant urban stagnation and no incentives for industry. In the
South good times reinforced the wealth of the long-established slave-owning class.
Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States
Lecture 6
A.
The Wilmot Proviso was an amendment to a bill concerning the future of the land acquired in
the War with Mexico. Proposed in 1846 by David Wilmot, the proviso proposed banning
slavery from all the territories acquired in the war. The bill was opposed by southern
representatives and defeated.
B.
To break congressional gridlock senator Henry Clay of Kentucky devised a series of
resolutions paired so as to balance the conflicting interests of North and South. This “Omnibus
Bill” again exposed insurmountable sectional hostilities and was killed by Senate.
C.
To rescue the compromise, senator Stephen A. Douglas from Illinois, broke the omnibus
package up into five separate bills. Although proslavery and antislavery forces in Congress
never once compromised on a single issue, the five bills were passed and came to be known as
the “Compromise of 1850.” The Compromise of 1850 worked well in the short run.
1.
One problem was that neither side saw it as victory, and to both it had the bitter taste of
defeat.
2.
Even worse, one feature of the compromise, the new fugitive slave law, provoked a
widespread opposition in the North.
D.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 provoked an uproar because of four reasons:
1.
It took jurisdiction over fugitive slave cases away from northern courts and gave it to a
newly established cadre of US commissioners.
2.
It “bribed” the commissioners to send captives into slavery (they were paid $10 if they
ruled that a black captive should be returned to slavery but only $5 if they ruled that the
captive was legitimately free).
3.
It allowed commissioners to draft local citizens to assist slave catchers, thereby forcing
northerners against their wills to send their neighbors into slavery.
4.
It seemed to be imposing southern laws and institutions onto the North, forcing northerners
into complicity with the slave regime.
F.
The next milestone that revived the slavery debate was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The
Act explicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise by allowing slavery north of the Missouri
Compromise line. As with other southern victories in the recent past, the Kansas-Nebraska Act
only increased support for anti-slavery politicians in the North.
G.
Northern patience was also strained by President Pierce’s political efforts to enable the further
southward expansion of slavery.
1.
In 1853 Pierce sent a South Carolinian, James Gadsden, to Mexico with instructions to
spend up to $50 million to acquire a substantial portion of northern Mexico for the US.
After Gadsden returned to Washington with a treaty, for the first time in American history
the Congress rejected land ceded to the US. Northern Senators were unwilling to add any
more potential slave territory to the Union, and the Gadsden Purchase ended up securing
only a small piece of land to even out the southern border of the US.
2.
Pierce also tried bullying Spain to sell Cuba to the US. In 1854, following an international
meeting about Cuba, the US representative in Europe issued the Ostend Manifesto: a
shockingly aggressive declaration that Cuba was “naturally” a part of the US and will be
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E.
One measure of northern anxiety about the Fugitive Slave Act was the phenomenal success of
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(1852). The novel quickly established itself as the
most popular American book of the 19
th
century.
Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States
Lecture 6
wrested from Spain by force, if necessary. When it reached the US, the Ostend Manifesto
was immediately denounced as yet another example of slavery’s insatiable hunger for
expansion. The Pierce administration quickly withdrew support for designs against Cuba.
III.
The sectionalism of the political disputes severely weakened American political parties. By 1854 a
new and powerful political force emerged. Called the Republican Party, it was dedicated to halting
slavery’s westward expansion and appealed exclusively to northern voters.
A.
In the presidential election of 1856 the choice between the Republican and the Democratic
candidate meant that for the first time in their history, Americans were being asked to decide
whether the Union was worth preserving. The Republicans lost, but President James
Buchanan’s efforts to silence the slavery issue proved a disastrous failure.
1.
In 1857 sectional tensions were fueled by the Dred Scott decision. The US Supreme Court
declared that African Americans were not and never had been citizens. It also defined slave
ownership as a constitutional right, thereby threatening the power of states to abolish
slavery within their borders.
2.
Hostilities were blown up even further by the publication of Hinton Rowan Helper’s
The
Impending Crisis of the South
(1857). A modest farmer from North Carolina, Helper
savagely attacked the entire political economy of slavery, arguing that it ruined small
southern farmers and the entire region.
3.
1859 saw John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, through which this radical Calvinist
attempted to incite a full-scale slave rebellion in Virginia. The attempt failed, Brown was
captured, tried and hanged.
(1)
Although the raid was absurd and the north condemned it, Brown’s calm and dignified
behavior in prison, at his trial, and at his own hanging moved northerners to sympathy.
(2)
Northern sympathy for John Brown shocked the white South even more than the actual
raid. Brown’s trial and execution galvanized northern public opinion against slavery
and southern opinion against the Union.
B.
In the 1860 presidential election no major party presented a candidate who could appeal to
both the North and the South. There were two different presidential elections that year: in the
slave states a southern Democrat ran against a Constitutional Unionist, in the free states a
northern Democrat ran against a Republican.
C.
Abraham Lincoln was the Republican candidate. He did not campaign in the South, and he was
able to win a presidential election by appealing exclusively to voters in the North.
IV.
Lincoln’s presidential election provoked the secession of some southern states; others followed
after his decision to keep the Union by force of arms.
A.
In December 1860 South Carolina withdrew from the Union on the grounds that northerners
had denied to southerners their “rights of property” in slaves. A few weeks later, in January
1861, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed suit. The slave
states of the upper South refused to leave the Union simply because Lincoln was elected.
B.
In late March Lincoln declared that he was going to resupply Fort Sumter, a federal fort
located on an island in the middle of Charleston harbor. To prevent this, on April 12, 1861,
Confederates began the assault on Fort Sumter. The Civil War began.
C.
After Lincoln had maneuvered the South into firing the first shot, he issued a call to the states
for militiamen. The governors of Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Kentucky,
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Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States
Lecture 6
and Missouri refused to comply with this request. Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North
Carolina joined the secession.
D.
The South remained divided.
1.
Four slave states—Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri—never joined the
Confederacy.
2.
In the mountains of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, Unionist sentiment
remained strong throughout the war years.
3.
Virginia was torn apart. The western third of the state voted overwhelmingly against
secession and then refused to accept the decision of the eastern slaveholders to leave the
Union. Some fifty western counties formed their own state government, and in 1863 the
state of West Virginia was admitted to the Union.
V.
Most Americans expected the war to last only a few months. Yet, the Civil War lasted four years,
and demanded all the resources the North and South could command.
A.
Both sides commenced the fighting with relatively limited military and political goals. The
Union’s initial strategy, called the Anaconda strategy, was to blockade the entire South.
Confederate strategists hoped to maintain a defensive posture, holding its ground in the South.
C.
The population of the North was nearly 23 million compared to 9 million in the South (of
which over 3,5 million were slaves). By the end of the war approximately 2.1 million men had
served in the Union forces; another 900,000 served the Confederacy. To raise and sustain such
numbers was an immense political, social, technological and economic problem. As the Civil
War progressed, it therefore became a test of the competing political economies of the North
and the South.
D.
At the outset of the war the Union’s advantage was superior naval forces. On land, however,
the southern military had an important edge over the northern.
1.
The South’s first advantage was larger numbers of trained officers.
2.
Their second advantage was that it was defending its own territory. Southern armies fought
on familiar territory, virtually in defense of their own homes, in the midst of a friendly
civilian population, and closer to their sources of supply.
E.
By the spring of 1861 the eleven secessionists states had constructed an impressive political
apparatus. They had proclaimed the Confederate States of America, with Richmond, Virginia,
as their nation’s capital, and elected an experienced politician and Mississippi planter,
Jefferson Davis, as their president.
1.
Secessionists argued that slavery gave the South clear assets and that the industrial world’s
dependence on cotton would soon cripple northern textile mills and bring diplomatic
recognition from England. They assumed incorrectly.
2.
Secessionists failed to see in how many ways slavery inhibited the South’s industrial
strength. Confederate soldiers were not well fed or well clothed. They often fought
barefoot and in rags.
3.
Slavery also crippled the South’s ability to finance its war adequately. By 1865 a
Confederate dollar had the purchasing power of one Confederate cent from 1861.
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B.
After the first few battles in the summer 1861, all lost by the Union, the conflict descended
into a “hard” war, aimed at unconditional surrender rather than a negotiated settlement.
Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States
Lecture 6
VI.
The course of the war can be broken into two phases: early battles to the Emancipation
Proclamation (1861-63), and from Gettysburg to Lee’s surrender (1863-65).
A.
By 1862 Union commanders adopted the principle of unconditional surrender and the
confiscation of supplies from southern civilians. Also the encounters were becoming
exceedingly bloody.
1.
The battle of Shiloh, TN, (1862) ended with the Confederates’ defeat and an astounding
23,741 casualties on both sides.
2.
1862 saw the first failed Confederate invasion of the North. At the Battle of Antietam
Creek, MD, the Confederate forces led by General Robert E. Lee suffered staggering
casualties—22,800 on both sides—and were turned back.
B.
Lincoln took advantage of the Union victory at Antietam to announce an important shift in
northern war aims. His preliminary Emancipation Proclamation promised to declare free all
slaves held by masters in areas still in rebellion against the Union on January 1, 1863. When
the New Year arrived, Lincoln’s final proclamation added another twist by sanctioning the
enlistment of African Americans in the Union Army.
1.
The proclamation transformed Union soldiers into an army of liberation. It was an open
invitation for slaves to run away to Union lines, disrupting the Confederacy still further.
2.
African-American Union troops were conclusive evidence that the Civil War had become a
social revolution. By the war’s end 186,000 African Americans had enlisted, two thirds of
them recruited in the South.
C.
1863 saw two greatest Union victories of the war, Gettysburg and Vicksburg, as well as the
articulation, in Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” of the northern understanding of the war as a
test of the principle of human equality upon which democracy was based.
1.
In the summer Lee launched a second invasion of the North. The most decisive battle of
the war, fought for three days near Gettysburg, PA, ended with the Confederate defeat and
the loss of about 50,000 men on both sides.
2.
Another astonishing Union victory in the West was the capture of the invincible town of
Vicksburg, Mississippi. Vicksburg opened the Mississippi River to Union navigation and
split the Confederacy in two.
3.
In November, Lincoln spoke at the dedication of a military cemetery at Gettysburg. His
“Gettysburg Address” articulated a profound justification of the Union war effort as the
test of democracy, ensuring “that government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth.”
D.
Throughout the war Lincoln struggled to find a commander who could stand up to great
southern generals like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Every commander Lincoln had
put in charge of Union forces in Virginia proved more disastrous than the last. Finally, in
1864, Lincoln put General Ulysses Grant in charge of the entire Union Army.
1.
Having taken control of the Army of the Potomac, Grant confronted Lee’s Army of
Northern Virginia. The immediate result was a month-long series of unspeakably bloody
encounters in the spring of 1864.
(1)
The brutal Virginia campaign cost both sides over 100,000 men killed or wounded, yet
Grant had not destroyed Lee’s army nor taken Richmond. The Army of Northern
Virginia and the Army of the Potomac were at a standoff.
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