The story of the American Civil War: 32 key moments in the landmark conflict

The story of the American Civil War: 32 key moments in the landmark conflict

Adam IP Smith charts the events of the American Civil War in 32 key moments, beginning with the rising tensions between the North and South and ending with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln

What caused the American Civil War?

With the Declaration of Independence in 1776, 13 former British colonies became the United States of America, but by the 1830s it was clear the new nation was divided. Adam IP Smith explains how the issue of slavery, above all, created discord between north and south, and forced political tension to rise...

What caused the American Civil War?

With the Declaration of Independence in 1776, 13 former British colonies became the United States of America, but by the 1830s it was clear the new nation was divided. Adam IP Smith explains how the issue of slavery, above all, created discord between north and south, and forced political tension to rise...The story of the American Civil War: 32 key moments in the landmark conflict

Adam IP Smith charts the events of the American Civil War in 32 key moments, beginning with the rising tensions between the North and South and ending with the assassination of Abraham LincolnWhat caused the American Civil War?

With the Declaration of Independence in 1776, 13 former British colonies became the United States of America, but by the 1830s it was clear the new nation was divided. Adam IP Smith explains how the issue of slavery, above all, created discord between north and south, and forced political tension to rise...

The cause of the trouble: slavery

At the time of the American revolution, it was legal to hold human beings as ‘property’ in all the British colonies that rebelled. But in the wake of the revolution, slavery was abolished in New England and, gradually, in the mid-Atlantic states as well. In the south though, where most enslaved people were held, abolitionism stalled and slavery expanded rapidly. Between the revolution and 1860, the slave population increased from 700,000 to nearly 4 million, geographically concentrated in the south. The increase was driven by the profits to be made from the sale of raw cotton – and to a lesser extent sugar, rice and tobacco – on world markets.As Abraham Lincoln was later to say, “all knew” that “somehow” slavery was the cause of the war. This is not the same as claiming that northerners and southerners went to war in 1861 with the desire to attack or defend slavery as a prime motivation: most did not. However, it became increasingly difficult to sustain a nation divided, “half slave and half free” in Lincoln’s phrase

Americans in 1861 had much in common with one another: a reverence for the Founding Fathers and a shared belief in freedom, opportunity and providential God. Most people, both north and south, worked on the land; almost all white folk assumed racial superiority, whatever their views on slavery. However, slavery shaped the south in ways that made the north see it as a threatening and alien society, just as northern attacks on slavery pushed southerners to see Yankees as their enemiesAbolitionism versus proslavery

Slavery was a capitalist institution: it depended on ‘owners’ being able to buy, sell and invest in human beings. That in turn required confidence on the part of buyers that their ‘property’ would be protected and recognised. This was why the rising antislavery movement, with campaigners’ core claim that human beings could never be turned into mere property, was so threatening to slaveholders. Unlike other moral issues that enter politics, abolitionism threatened billions of dollars of investments. Most Americans in both sections shared the common aspiration of property ownership and believed they lived in an open, free society where hard work was rewarded. The difference was that most southerners were comfortable with the idea that black people were just another type of property.In the 1830s, the abolitionist movement grew into a loud, if minority, force in the north. It was a transatlantic movement inspired by abolition in the British Empire, powered by evangelical fervour and horror at the human cost of slavery, not least in terms of the destruction of family life and the violation of women. From the 1830s onwards, the open discussion of emancipation in the south became impossible. Slaveholders needed the free states to recognise the legitimacy of their slave property. They tried, and briefly succeeded, to ban antislavery material from the US mail and to prevent the discussion of antislavery petitions in congress. They were caught in a cycle whereby, as more and more people denounced slavery, they needed ever-greater reassurances.

The Mexican War breaks out

In 1846, President James K Polk, a Democrat and a slaveholder, used a border dispute as a pretext to invade Mexico. Southerners were excited by the prospect of acquiring new slave territory but many northerners supported the war as well, assuming that it was the destiny of whites to settle the entire continent. The Mexican War was probably the most successful war of imperial expansion in modern history: a decisive and relatively low-cost victory for the USA that led, in 1848, to the annexation of the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico as well as parts of Texas and Colorado.However, the war also set the nation on a collision course over slavery. Very few northerners were out-and-out abolitionists but most, it turned out, were against the expansion of slavery into these new territories in the west. Increasing numbers of northerners believed that if the new territories were allowed to become a ‘vast slave empire’ then the character of the nation would be changed forever, and the ‘right to rise’ for the honest white working man would be sacrificed in the interest of a slaveholding class. Free white men did not want to have to compete for land with privileged slaveholders. Nor did they want to end up competing as labourers against black slaves.

In the end, a compromise was struck: California was admitted as a free state (just as the Gold Rush made it a magnet) but most of the rest of the former Mexican land was opened to the possibility of slavery, should the local settlers so desire it.

The Fugitive Slave Act 1850

Among the reassurances demanded by southerners was a new Fugitive Slave Act, passed by Congress in 1850 against northern opposition, which aimed to make it easier for slaveholders to reclaim runaway ‘property’ in the free states. Ironically in view of southerners’ later protestations about states’ rights, the act led to a massive expansion of the federal government, giving it the right to override northern states’ law-enforcement procedures.

Southerners saw the law as a test of how far the north was prepared to accommodate what they called their ‘peculiar institution’. “Respect and enforce the Fugitive Slave Law as it stands,” one proslavery editor warned the north. “If not, WE WILL LEAVE YOU!” By demanding that freemen be shackled and returned to slavery against the wishes of the local community, the Fugitive Slave Act made a formerly abstract issue frighteningly real.

A number of high-profile cases of allegedly runaway slaves being returned to bondage electrified the north. In 1854, thousands of Bostonians shouting “shame!” and “kidnappers!” watched in horror as Anthony Burns, a black man who had been living as a freeman in the city, was marched in chains by federal troops to the wharfside to be taken back south into slavery. This was the backdrop to the phenomenal popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a grim depiction of the harshness of plantation life that further raised northerners’ awareness of slaveryKansas-Nebraska Act 1854

Did railroads help cause the civil war? It was the desire to build a railroad to California that led Congress in 1854 to organise land to the west of Illinois, creating the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. This was land that had been part of the United States for half a century but had been barely settled by European Americans, and from which slavery had been banned under the terms of the Missouri Compromise in 1820.

Southerners in Congress only supported the bill once the prohibition on slavery was lifted. To millions of northerners, including many who had never previously considered themselves antislavery, this was a betrayal of a sacred promise that the lands of Kansas and Nebraska would be open to the free settlement of poor white men. More than that, it seemed to be evidence that the government was in the hands of sinister and ‘aristocratic’ proslavery interests.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act was the single most important catalyst for the rise of a new political party, the Republican Party, which presented itself as the only true defender of northern interests against the aggressions of the south. ‘The North is discovered!’ was one of many Republican campaign songs. If the party could unite the northern states, it could capture enough Electoral College votes to win the presidency even without having any support at all in the south.

It didn’t manage this in 1856. Hapless Pennsylvania Democrat James Buchanan won instead. But in the coming few years, the new party built support further as the south demanded even greater protection for its slave ‘property’.

The rise of Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809 in a log cabin in what was then the frontier state of Kentucky. Despite having virtually no formal education, Lincoln made his own way in life, shrugging off his subsistence-farming background and the whiskey-soaked roughness that went with it. He became a leading lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, and with a keen interest in politics, he also became a prominent state politician, arguing for transportation improvements and secure banksAfter one term in Congress in the late 1840s, his political career appeared to be over. But like many others, he thought the Kansas-Nebraska Act was a challenge that had to be faced. In a speech given at Peoria, Illinois, in 1854, Lincoln expressed the shame and anger so many northerners felt at the potential expansion of slavery. “Our republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust,” he declared. “Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood of the revolution.”

Although Lincoln repeatedly said that he disapproved of slavery as a violation of the rights of men to the fruits of their labour, he was not an abolitionist and he revered the American Constitution, even though it protected slavery within states that allowed it. But while he did not advocate the immediate overthrow of slavery, he said again and again that it should be placed “on the path to ultimate extinction”.

In Lincoln’s view, the United States would become either a slave nation or a modern free-labour nation. For the future president, the time had come to be clear about the final destination.

John Brown’s raid of 1859

In October 1859, the messianic abolitionist John Brown launched an amateurish raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His aim was to distribute the arms among local slaves and spark a general insurrection. Brown was quickly apprehended by US troops under the command of Colonel Robert E Lee.

Brown’s raid struck southern society at its weakest point, but shocking as it was for white southerners that violence had been used on their home soil, the most frightening aspect of the affair was the northern response. While most mainstream politicians, including Republican leaders, condemned Brown’s acts, there was also admiration for his bravery. In antislavery strongholds, including Massachusetts, supporters raised funds for Brown’s legal defence and to help his familyBrown played the part of martyr to perfection. Republican newspapers reported his well-aimed final words as he was led to the gallows: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away – but with blood.” Brown’s raid reinforced southerners’ conception of themselves as victims. One Virginia newspaper concluded: “Thousands of men who, a month ago, scoffed at the idea of a dissolution of the Union… now hold the opinion that its days are numbered.”

The 1860 election

The trigger for secession was the election of the Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln in November 1860. It was, in effect, two parallel elections, one in each section. The Democratic Party split, with one Democrat, Stephen

A Douglas, fighting Lincoln in the free states, while another, John C Breckinridge, fought for the votes of slave states against a more moderate third-party opponent. Lincoln won only 40 per cent of the national popular vote, but by winning almost all of the free states, he comfortably carried the Electoral College.

Antislavery men welcomed Lincoln’s election as a decisive break with the past. The patrician Bostonian Charles Francis Adams was elated that “the great revolution has actually taken place” and that “the country has once and for all thrown off the domination of the slaveholders”.

In southern states, the so-called ‘fire eaters’, who had been campaigning for secession for years, appeared to have been prescient. Lincoln, like the rest of his party, believed slavery was wrong. To the leaders of southern society, this was enough for them to believe that the federal government had fallen into the hands of people who were their enemies. Irrevocably so, since the rising population of the free states meant their Electoral College advantage would only increase and leave the south politically impotent. “The election of Lincoln,” wrote one southern politician, “has placed our necks under their heels.”Southern states secede from the Union

To no-one’s surprise, South Carolina, long the most radical proslavery region of the southern states, was the first to announce it was leaving the Federal Union, on 20 December 1860. The resolutions adopted that day made it explicit that the motive was the protection of slavery. South Carolina secessionists condemned the free states for denouncing “as sinful the institution of Slavery”.

Elsewhere, ‘fire eaters’ gained political momentum, capturing popular indignation at Lincoln’s election. By 1 February 1861, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas had passed secession resolutions. By 9 February, commissioners from the seven seceded states, meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, had adopted a provisional constitution and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi became the provisional president of the Confederate States of America.

Even so, the tide of secession was held back by Unionists in the upper south states of North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas. In Virginia, still the state with the largest number of slaves, secession was opposed by those counties with fewer slaves. Although not pro-emancipation, they argued that the Union, notwithstanding the election of a president who was a ‘Black Republican’, still provided more security for slavery than an untested southern Confederacy.

Conscious that Lincoln’s election had been entirely legitimate, some urged the southern states to wait for an ‘overt act’ of aggression.

That overt act soon came. By June 1861, 11 slave states formed the Confederacy and prepared to defend their independence.

Sumter and the outbreak of war, 1861

The first shots of the American Civil War were fired at 4.30am on 12 April 1861 by South Carolina forces. Their target was Fort Sumter, an island in Charleston’s harbour garrisoned by Union troops. Perhaps deliberately, the new president, Abraham Lincoln, had precipitated this aggression by making public his plan to re-supply (though not reinforce) the fort

By opening fire on Fort Sumter, the Confederates played into Lincoln’s hands by making the issue a test of whether a free government could and would defend itself.

The shocking image of the stars and stripes under fire stirred the north in defence of the Union, overshadowing the slavery issue. Newspapers, which the day before had called for compromise and a cooling of passions, now called for vengeance and urged their readers to rally behind the flag.

On 15 April, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers under the 1795 Militia Act to serve for 90 days, the maximum amount prescribed by the law. This was the ‘overt act’ of aggression that prompted the states of Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas and Tennessee to join their fellow southern slave states in seceding. With the seceded states making clear they were fighting for nothing less than independence, the Lincoln administration mobilised for a war to bring the rebels forcibly back into the Union.

Abraham Lincoln never recognised the Confederacy: to him these states were simply rebels and the war a giant police action to restore the authority of the national government. “Secession”, Lincoln insisted, was “the essence of anarchy”.

Key battles of the American Civil War

By 1861, the United States had been launched into a vicious civil war that would last four years – the next stage would be characterised by ferocious battles, with heavy defeats and hard-won victories for both sides...

Battle of Bull Run, 1861

One of the main reasons a political conflict turned to war was that, in 1861, the vast majority of Americans were not trying to seek an accommodation; they wanted a fight. A few wise heads on both sides knew that once war came it would be long and costly. For many, though, resorting to violence was not a sign of failure but a manly, healthy, possibly even purifying way of resolving an intractable conflict.The Confederate government was established in Richmond, Virginia, less than 100 miles due south of Washington. Northern newspapers emblazoned, “Forward to Richmond!” atop their editorial pages. Volunteer troops gathered in Washington in their makeshift uniforms. On all sides the expectation was that one quick and decisive battle would probably decide the fate of the rebellion.A scene from the first battle of Bull Run, between Union and Confederate forces, during the American Civil War, c1861. (PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

Instead, the first big confrontation between North and South was a chaotic battle outside Washington, near Bull Run creek, on 21 July 1861. The cavalry on both sides seemingly operatedat random, certainly without any proper co-ordination with infantry attacks. Troops mistook units on their own side for the enemy. After an inconclusive few hours of fighting, the Union army was sent into a panic-stricken retreat by a Confederate attack.

The losses in this first great conflict were tiny compared to the carnage of later battles, yet at the time casualty figures of 1,982 Confederate troops and 2,896 Union soldiers shocked both sides profoundly. While southerners rejoiced at victory, northerners were forced to confront for the first time the scale of the undertaking they had so blithely embraced.

Strategy and tactics

In grand strategic terms, the Union needed to be on the offensive in order to conquer the South. Yet the South took the offensive whenever it could. General Lee invaded Maryland and Pennsylvania in the summers of 1862 and 1863, taking the war onto northern soil, in part because there was huge popular pressure on both sides to be seen to be on the attack.

However, technological innovations gave defending forces much greater tactical strength. Whereas in the Mexican War the army was still using smooth-bore muskets, by 1861 the use of rifled muskets and new conical-shaped bullets called Minié balls greatly increased the accuracy of firepower from a longer range. Towards the end of the war, entrenchments and barbed wire – notably in the long siege of Petersburg – made the conflict resemble the Western Front in the First World War.

Nevertheless, offensives against well-defended positions could still succeed when commanders not only had a numerical advantage but were also prepared to be persistent and flexible – as Grant and Sherman proved in 1864, and as British generals on the Western Front learned after 1916.

The Union army and slavery

From the moment war began, abolitionists argued that a conflict caused by slaveholders could only be ended by ending slavery, the “taproot of the rebellion”. But other northerners vowed they wouldn’t support an ‘abolition war’. The official line from Lincoln was clear: this was a war to restore the Union, with no other aim.

Yet the reality on the ground in the south meant the Union army had to make de facto decisions about whether to encourage the dismantling of slavery. Wherever there was a Union military presence in a slave state, enslaved people sought sanctuary.

Some Union generals sent them back to their ‘owners’. Others allowed them to stay, and refugee camps grew up around military camps. It was General Benjamin F Butler, in command of a Union-held enclave in Virginia, who found a way of protecting runaway slaves without publicly challenging the official line that the Union did not seek emancipation. In the summer of 1861, he announced that any fugitive slave who sought refuge with his forces would be held as “contraband of war”.

This phrase deftly turned the argument that slaves were property against southerners. Just as horses or guns, if captured, could legitimately be impounded since they were likely to be of military value to the enemy then so too ‘human property’, likely to be used to dig fortifications or supply the Confederate army, could be seized – and effectively freed. Contraband became the normal term to describe runaway slaves for the rest of the war. As the debate about emancipation raged in the north, the reality was always that, intentionally or otherwise, the Union army was an instrument of emancipation.

Battle of Shiloh, 1862

Most of the press attention was on the eastern theatre of the war in Virginia. But in the first phase of the war, during the winter and spring of 1861–2, there was little action in the east as General-in-Chief George B McClellan, a man of enormous self-confidence who rejoiced in the moniker “the Little Napoleon”, painstakingly drilled and built up his troops.Meanwhile in the west, Union commanders made big gains in a plan to force Confederate forces out of Kentucky and Tennessee, and then take control of the Mississippi River. In particular, General Ulysses S Grant was stunningly successful at putting this strategy into practice. He captured Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, opening up the southward-flowing Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers to the Union. These brilliant successes were followed, on 6–7 April 1862, by a major battle at Shiloh in south-western Tennessee. Grant’s forces were surprised by a Confederate force under Albert Sidney Johnston and PGT Beauregard but, in the bloodiest battle of the war to that point, the Union army held its ground, helped by the timely arrival of reinforcements.

The outcome of Shiloh was that a Confederate counter-offensive had been thwarted, albeit at heavy cost. Grant was initially criticised for his part in the battle, but when Lincoln was urged to remove him from command, he replied, “I can’t spare this man, he fights.”

The Trent affair

The greatest danger of war between Britain and the USA came from a conflict over the rights of British shipping. The US Navy tried to seize British merchant vessels bound for neutral ports near the Confederate coast, such as the Bahamas or Cuba, on the grounds that cargo was then to be transferred to southern blockade-runners. On occasion, the US succeeded. Britain had done much the same to American shipping during the Napoleonic Wars, and at the time the US had protested fiercely (the issue was one of the triggers of the war of 1812). Now the roles were reversed.

The conflict came to a head on 8 November 1861, when sailors from the USS San Jacinto boarded a British ship, RMS Trent, 300 miles east of Havana, and removed two Confederate envoys, James Mason and John Slidell, en route to Europe to press Britain and France for support. The British government was furious at the violation of its flag and there was talk of war. The diplomatic row was defused after US secretary of state William Seward apologised and released the envoys, insisting as he did so that the case proved that the British had finally accepted the United States’ conception of neutral shipping rights.

The larger issue was what role Britain might play in the war. Northerners were frustrated by British recognition of the South as a belligerent power (although Britain never gave the Confederacy diplomatic recognition) and angry about blockade-running ships and a couple of naval vessels that were built in British ports. The Confederacy for its part hoped the cotton embargo would precipitate European intervention of the kind that had tipped the balance for the rebels in the War of Independence. It never cameThe Peninsula Campaign

In the Peninsula Campaign of the spring of 1862, Union commander George B McClellan launched the Army of the Potomac in what he hoped would be the decisive move against the Confederacy. Rather than taking the direct approach due south, troops were sent by sea to the mouth of the James River from where they approached the Confederate capital Richmond from the east in a bid to evade Confederate defences. McClellan, who was fiercely opposed to emancipation, hoped to fight a limited war according to the “highest principles known to Christian civilisation”. At first the plan seemed to go well as Confederate forces fell back. But then General Robert E Lee took field command of the Army of Northern Virginia for the first time. An undemonstrative taciturn man, Lee was to about to prove himself one of the wiliest, most courageous and most effective commanders of the war. He believed the Confederacy could counter the manpower advantage of the Union army only by seizing and keeping the initiative.

In a stunning series of victories known as the Seven Days Battles (25 June–1 July), Lee’s leadership transformed the Confederacy’s position in one week, forcing McClellan’s army back. Thereafter officers and men in the Army of the Potomac developed what almost amounted to an inferiority complex in the face of Lee’s army, a spell that was only partially broken a year later at Gettysburg. McClellan’s star waned after the Peninsula Campaign and with him the idea the war could be fought in a ‘limited’ way.

Battle of Antietam, 1862

In September 1862, Lee launched the first of his two grand raids into the north. In optimistic moments, Confederate leaders hoped Lee’s invasion might persuade Maryland slaveholders to support the South and foreign powers to recognise it, but at the very least they wanted to prove the North could never subdue the South militarily.

The ‘invasion’ culminated in a battle at Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on 17 September. The conflict was a fluid, confused and messy affair, with friendly fire compounding the difficulties of communication on a large battle area where no one had more than a partial view of the fighting. Particular spots on the battlefield acquired an especially gruesome reputation, including Miller’s cornfield, which changed hands six times in just a few hours, and ‘Bloody Lane’, a sunken road from which the rebel South held the attacking forces of the North at bay for over three hours in late morning.

By nightfall, at the cost of around 23,000 casualties, the Confederate line had been pushed back a few hundred yards. Still, it was a victory for the Union, although to Lincoln’s frustration McClellan failed to pursue Lee’s forces after the battle.

The Emancipation Proclamation

The limited Union victory at Antietam was to be the final battle of the first phase of the war. Just a few days later, on 22 September 1862, Lincoln issued a proclamation stating that if, by 1 January 1863, the rebel states of the Confederacy had not returned to the Union, the United States would, from that date onwards, regard slaves held in rebel areas as free. This Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation had an incendiary effect. It was an ultimatum to the South: return to the Union within 100 days with slavery intact, or face total destruction.

Confederate leader Jefferson Davis called it “the most execrable measure in the history of guilty man”. The three-month delay was intended to send a clear message that emancipation was a tool of war rather than an end in itself. Like a riot policeman giving notice that a mob was about to fired upon if it did not disperse, Lincoln wanted to give the appearance of due process. But no one had any illusions: the President had tied the Union’s fate to emancipation.

On 1 January 1863, the president duly issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It applied only to those areas of the United States that were still in arms against the government and much of the document was taken up with a list of counties in rebel states that, because they were no longer under rebel control, were exempted from the proclamation. Lincoln took a political and strategic risk in coupling together the fate ofthe Union with the fate of slavery.

In some Union regiments there were near-mutinies at the news. But abolitionists rejoiced that at last the day of jubilee was at hand.

Emancipation and racial attitudes in the Union Army

Union soldiers commonly used terms such as ‘darkie’ and ‘nigger’ in their letters. Even proudly antislavery soldiers exhibited an unquestioning racism. There was no contradiction in holding racist views while also thinking that a war against secession was inherently a war against slavery, and that the Confederacy was a repressive society that challenged American values of freedom and opportunity.

Encounters with runaway slaves had a dramatic impact on some Union soldiers. Black people were exotic and fascinating to rural farm boys from the north. In addition, many soldiers interpreted their encounters with freed slaves in the light of what they had heard and read of the cruelties of slavery. Private Chauncey Cooke wrote to his mother in Wisconsin about “a toothless old slave with one blind eye” who told him horrific stories of his wife and children having been sold, of whippings and being hunted by bloodhounds when he tried to escape. The stories, Cooke wrote, were “just like the ones in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and I believe them”.

Some Union troops were convinced by evangelical preachers and antislavery propaganda that expunging the sin of slavery would redeem their country in God’s eyes. Some simply wanted black troops to be placed in the front line instead of them. Most were probably convinced by the much more pragmatic case that if the rebels hated emancipation, then it must be a good thing, a weapon to strike at the heart of southern society.