Readings #1- Politics and Economics of the War 2024 PDF

Readings #1: Politics and Economics of the War; Balance of Forces; Fighting the War; Triumph of the Union; Emancipation To-Do Date: Dec 4 at 11:59pm Politics and Economics of the War In the North, the Republican-controlled Congress implemented the party's domestic progra...

Readings #1: Politics and Economics of the War; Balance of Forces; Fighting the War; Triumph of the Union; Emancipation To-Do Date: Dec 4 at 11:59pm Politics and Economics of the War In the North, the Republican-controlled Congress implemented the party's domestic program. The Pacific Railroad Act (1862) authorized the construction of the first transcontinental line from both Omaha, Nebraska, and Sacramento, California. The Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroad companies received more than sixty million acres of land at no cost and $20 million in very generous loans from the federal government, and together they completed the line in 1869. Republicans had always favored a liberal land policy, and the Homestead Act (1862) granted 160 acres free of charge (except for a small registration fee) to any farmer who worked the land for five years. The Morrill Land Grant Act (1862) was a boost to higher education in the country. States were given public lands for the purpose of establishing colleges for “agriculture and the mechanical arts.” Today's state university systems are based on these “land grant” colleges. Financing the war. The war was expensive for both sides. The Union raised money through higher tariffs, an excise tax that raised prices on most goods and services, and the imposition of the first federal income tax. The Bureau of Internal Revenue was established to collect taxes. Congress ordered paper money, known :  as greenbacks, to be printed as legal tender that could be used to pay debts but could not be redeemed for hard currency. Greenbacks and bonds issued by the federal government provided the main sources of revenue for the war effort. Bonds were sold through a network of agents and increase d the national debt to almost $3 billion by 1865. War created the opportunity for profiteering. The Union awarded millions of dollars in contracts to businesses for firearms, uniforms, and a broad range of military equipment and supplies. The contractors often took advantage of the federal government's largesse. One of the most notorious examples was manufacturers' use of shoddy, a cheap cloth made from compressed rag fiber, for making uniforms, which quickly fell apart. The word “shoddy” entered the English language as an adjective for anything of very poor quality. The Confederacy, which was unable to secure the loans it expected from overseas, faced far worse financial problems than the Union. While taxes were raised in the same manner as in the North, they were difficult to collect and provided less than five percent of the South's wartime revenue. Confederate paper money was not declared legal tender, so there was little to no public confidence in it. Inflation became a major problem as more and more paper money was put into circulation; the value of a Confederate dollar dropped to just over one and a half cents in gold by the end of the war. Prices in the South rose by more than nine thousand percent between 1861 and 1865 (compared to about 80% in the Union during a similar period). Civil liberties and the war. Some basic civil liberties were also casualties of the war. Lincoln, with the ultimate approval of Congress, suspended the writ of habeas corpus early in the conflict, and individuals suspected of disloyalty or active work against the Union were arrested without formal charges. While most of the nearly fourteen thousand who were detained were never brought to trial, those who were tried came under the jurisdiction of military courts. The reliance on military courts for trying civilians was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Ex parte Milligan in 1866. :  Balance of Forces At the beginning of the Civil War, the goal of the North was simply to restore the Union. In his first inaugural address (March 4, 1861), President Abraham Lincoln made it very clear that he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it already existed. This point was reiterated in resolutions adopted by Congress in July that stated the war was not waged against “the established institutions” of the southern states. As the conflict dragged on, however, the president realized that the slavery issue could not be avoided—for political, military, and moral reasons. By 1863, the purpose of the war had broadened into a crusade against slavery. Southern leaders fought the war under the dual banners of states' rights and preserving their way of life. Although the overwhelming majority of southerners did not own slaves, support for slavery was widespread, and southerners were deeply concerned about what would happen if it was abolished. The fact that almost all the fighting took place in the South meant that southerners def ended their homes against an invading army throughout the Civil War. The North had clear advantages over the South at the start of the war. While the South's population was just nine million (more than three million of which were slaves), more than twenty-two million people lived in the northern and border states. The North had the resources and manpower to equip and put many more men in the field than the South and was comparatively an industrial powerhouse, far outstripping the Confederacy in available raw materials, factory production, and railroads. Despite these strengths, the North did face problems, and the South was not as weak as it initially appeared. The problems of the North. That Lincoln won the presidency in 1860 with only forty percent of the popular vote indicated that he did not start his term with an overwhelming political mandate. His own party was divided into Moderates and Radicals; the latter favored immediate emancipation and tried to interfere with his :  method of conducting the war. The Democratic party in the North, while generally supportive of the administration, contained a peace faction known as the Copperheads their loyalty to the Union was doubted. Militarily, the North faced the difficult challenges of invading a large territory, maintaining long supply lines, and dealing with hostile southern civilians, all of which made its numerical superiority less effective. Northern generals proved less daring and innovative than their southern counterparts, particularly during the early stages of the war. Advantages and expectations in the South. The South intended to fight a mainly defensive war, which meant it needed fewer troops than the invading army. With slaves working either on the farms or in Confederate labor battalions, more white soldiers were available for combat duty than would have been without slavery. Southern strategy, formed from an assumption that support for the war in the North was weak, was to wear down the Union forces until Lincoln was ready to accept the independence of the Confederacy. The South also had a greater number of experienced military commanders than the North; many U.S. army officers, including veterans of the Mexican War, resigned their commissions to fight on the Confederate side when the hostilities broke out. Southerners knew that their economy was not self-sufficient, particularly in wartime, but they anticipated outside help. They fully expected the dependence of Great Britain and France on cotton imports to lead to diplomatic recognition and direct material aid. Fighting the War :  Everyone expected a short war. Indeed, Lincoln's first call for volunteers required just a ninety-day enlistment. After the First Battle of Bull Run (July 1861), the hope for a quick victory faded, and the Union implemented the Anaconda Plan. Named for the South American constrictor, it was intended to slowly crush the South with a naval blockade of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and an invasion along the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Mississippi rivers to slice the Confederacy in half. The defense of Washington, D.C., and pressure on the Confederate capital at Richmond were also part of the northern strategy. Jefferson Davis's defensive strategy took advantage of fighting on familiar territory and keeping his army close to the bases of supply. The South was prepared to go on the offensive and move into the North through Maryland and Pennsylvania, however, if opportunities presented themselves. The war in the East. The first major engagement of the war was a disaster for the North. At the First Battle of Bull Run in Virginia, thirty thousand Union troops were routed by a smaller :  Confederate force as politicians and their families from Washington picnicked on the hills above the battlefield. The defeat prompted Lincoln to put General George McClellan in command of the Army of the Potomac. McClellan spent the next nine months transforming his men into well trained and disciplined soldiers but then seemed reluctant to let them fight. The army suffered another defeat when it finally did go into the field during the Peninsula Campaign (March–July 1862), an attempt to take Richmond by sea. In September, the South went on the offensive. The Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee moved into Maryland and met the Union troops at the Battle of Antietam. The bloodiest confrontation of the war ended inconclusively but for the fact that Lee's retreat allowed McClellan to claim victory. Antietam was significant because the outcome finally gave Lincoln the opportunity to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which probably ended any chance the South had of getting Great Britain and France to intervene. Also significant was Lincoln's dismissal of McClellan following his failure to pursue Lee's retreating army; the commander in chief and the general became bitter political rivals. Lincoln first replaced McClellan with General Ambrose Burnside. Burnside's doubts about his own ability to lead a large army proved correct, and he lost a major battle against Lee and Lieutenant General “Stonewall” Jackson at Fredericksburg in December 1862. The president then turned to General “Fighting Joe” Hooker. Despite Hooker's overwhelming numerical superiority on the battlefield—about one hundred thirty thousand Union troops against sixty thousand southern troops under Lee and Jackson—he was unable to prevent a major Confederate victory at Chancellorsville (May 1863). The war in the West. The Union army had greater success in the West. After driving Confederate forces out of Kentucky, Ulysses S. Grant moved into Tennessee, where he :  narrowly averted defeat at Shiloh (April 1862), and then proceeded to the Mississippi River , where he captured Memphis (June 1862). Grant's troops moved downriver to lay siege to the important river town of Vicksburg, which held out until July 1863. The navy, under Admiral David Farragut, played an important role in the western campaign, taking New Orleans and then Baton Rouge in May 1862. During the siege of Vicksburg, however, fighting in the West became a stalemate. Farragut's successes on the Mississippi River were not the only significant naval engagements of the war. The Confederates salvaged the Merrimack, a scuttled Union warship in the Norfolk navy yard, reinforced it with iron sheathing, and renamed it the Virginia. The ironclad Virginia sailed the short distance to Hampton Roads, where it sank several wooden-sided Union ships on blockade duty. The North hastily built its own ironclad, the Monitor, an odd vessel that one observer said resembled a “cheese box on a raft.” The Monitor and the Virginia clashed on March 9, 1862. Cannon balls bounced off their iron sides, and neither ship could sink the other. The lesson was clear: future navies would turn to steam-powered, ironclad battleships. The war and diplomacy. The South recognized early that support from other countries could well be decisive in determining the outcome of the war. In Great Britain, public opinion was divided. Merchants and mill owners backed the Confederacy because it was the major supplier of cotton for British textiles mills, but there was also widespread opposition to slavery and the slave trade. Early in the war, relations between the United States and Great :  Britain soured over the Trent Affair. The British steamer Trent was stopped by the U.S. navy, and two Confederate diplomats en route to England to seek recognition for the South were taken off. When the British demanded their release on grounds of diplomatic immunity, Lincoln ordered them set free. The British as well as the French built ships for the South, the most notoriously destructive of which was the English-built Alabama, but U.S. threats of war forced both countries to back off. Although the foreign-built ships were helpful to the Confederacy, they did not alter the outcome of the war. France took advantage of the Civil War to pursue its own agenda in the Western Hemisphere. Using alleged unpaid debts as a pretext for intervention, French troops invaded Mexico in 1863 and installed Maximilian of Austria as the “Emperor of Mexico.” The United States could do nothing about this blatant violation of the Monroe Doctrine during the war, but it came to the aid of Mexico's legitimate president, Benito Juárez, by moving fifty thousand troops to the border in 1866. France withdrew its forces, and Maximilian ended up in front of a Mexican firing squad. The war and manpower. Although the majority of soldiers on both sides during the Civil War were volunteers, the Confederacy and Union did resort to the draft as the fighting expanded. Conscription of men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five (the range was later extended to include men aged seventeen to fifty) for a three-year period became law in the South in April 1862. Planters with twenty or more slaves and men employed in what were considered to be essential civilian jobs were exempt. Military service could also be avoided by finding a substitute or simply paying five hundred dollars to the government. The draft in the North was instituted about a year later (March 1863) for men between the ages of twenty and forty-five, and it too included provisions for substitution and payment (three hundred dollars). In July 1863 in New York City, mobs made up largely of Irish immigrants rioted against the Union conscription law and took out their anger on African Americans, whom they blamed for the war. The exemptions and the ability of the wealthy to buy their way out of service caused dissension as troops began to see the conflict as “a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.” The percentage of draftees in the Confederate troops was considerably higher than the :  percentage in the Union army. Triumph of the Union Despite his victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, General Lee realized that the Confederacy's only hope of victory was to bring the war to the North. In June 1863, the Army of Northern Virginia moved into Pennsylvania and confronted the Union forces at Gettysburg on July 1. The three-day battle ended in the South's worst defeat. Half of the fifteen thousand men under the command of General George Pickett, who charged the entrenched Union positions, were either killed, wounded, or captured. Lee had little choice but to retreat. At the same time, the Confederate troops under siege at Vicksburg surrendered and gave the Union complete control of the Mississippi River. The two engagements were the key turning points of the war; the Confederacy was effectively split and its armies never penetrated the North again. Grant in command. In March 1864, following his victories in the West and his taking of Chattanooga (November 1863), Ulysses S. Grant was appointed commander of all Union forces. Lincoln had finally found his general after three years of war. The two main theaters of operation in 1864 were Virginia and Georgia. Grant fought a war of attrition, constantly attacking, regardless of the cost. Against Lee in the battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, and Cold Harbor and during the siege of Petersburg, the Union forces suffered extremely heavy casualties, but they continued to drive Lee's army deeper into :  Virginia. In May, Grant ordered General William T. Sherman from Tennessee into Georgia. Union troops occupied Atlanta on September 1 and staged their infamous “March to the Sea” in the late fall. Sherman had all possible war materiel in Atlanta confiscated or destroyed, and he set fire to a large part of the city in the process. As his army moved through the state, crops were burned, livestock killed, and plantations and factories destroyed. Sherman's campaign of “total war” continued after he took Savannah in December and moved north into South Carolina. The election of 1864. Despite a challenge from the Radical Republicans, the president was easily nominated for a second term with Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a Unionist War Democrat, as his running mate. The platform called for the Confederacy's unconditional surrender and a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. The Democrats chose General George McClellan as their candidate on an extreme peace platform that urged an immediate armistice, attacked Lincoln's handling of the war, and criticized emancipation. Public support for the war was uncertain as casualties mounted in 1864, but the president's campaign received a boost from Farragut's victory in Mobile (August 1864) and the fall of Atlanta. Lincoln won reelection with fifty-five percent of the vote and an overwhelming majority in the Electoral College. Most of the states allowed soldiers to vote in the field, and eighty percent of them cast their ballots for Lincoln. The end of the Confederacy. With about half the number of troops as the Army of the Potomac, Lee was unable to break the siege at Petersburg. He broke off the engagement :  and tried to swing west and south to link up with what was left of his troops in North Carolina under General Johnston. Jefferson Davis abandoned Richmond and was eventually captured in Georgia in May. With the Confederate capital in Union hands, Lee found himself penned in by Grant's troops and those of General Philip Sheridan, and he asked for surrender terms on April 7, 1865. The formal surrender took place two days later in the town of Appomattox Court House. In the meantime, Sherman's army was moving into North Carolina to confront Johnston. Although Davis urged the general to fight on, Johnston surrendered his thirty-seven thousand men on April 26. By the end of May, all Confederate resistance throughout the South had come to an end. President Lincoln did not live to see the end of the war. He was assassinated by the actor John Wilkes Booth while watching a play in Washington's Ford's Theater on April 14,1865. Between 1861 and 1865, nearly three million men served in the Union and Confederate armies; more than 600,000 were killed, and an additional 275,000 were seriously wounded. Civil War casualties were almost as many as the combined losses in all other American wars through the Vietnam War. Although the fighting ended in the spring of 1865, the sectional divisions that led to the conflict continued to fester for generations. The immediate question was how the defeated states of the Confederacy would be treated. Although Lincoln had sounded a conciliatory note in his Second Inaugural Address a few days before :  his death, many others felt that the South must pay dearly for the war. Emancipation Early in the war, to keep the border states in the Union, Lincoln resisted the demands of the Radical Republicans to free the slaves. Military commanders, though, sometimes took action counter to Lincoln's policy during actual fighting. For example, faced with slaves who had run away to Union lines, General B. F. Butler treated them as contraband and did not return them to their owners (May 1861). General John C. Frémont, in charge of the Department of the West, which included Missouri and Kansas, confiscated the property of rebels and declared their slaves emancipated (August 1861). Lincoln effectively countermanded Frémont's order. Congress, meanwhile, enacted measures that whittled away at slavery. The Confiscation Act of 1861 allowed captured or runaway slaves who had been in use by the Confederacy to support the Union effort instead. Slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia with compensation in April 1862 and in the territories in June 1862. The Second Confiscation Act (July 1862) gave real freedom to slaves belonging to anyone actively participating in the war against the Union. Lincoln and gradual emancipation. Lincoln proposed a plan for gradual emancipation that was by definition a long-term solution to the slavery problem. The plan was aimed at :  pacifying the slave states that remained in the Union. Lincoln outlined his ideas on several occasions between 1861 and 1862, the fullest statement coming in his Second Message to Congress in December 1862. He urged the House and Senate to adopt a constitutional amendment under which states that abolished slavery by 1900 would be compensated by the federal government. Runaway- slave owners who remained loyal to the United States would also be compensated for their losses. The amendment authorized Congress to appropriate funds to resettle free blacks, if they consented, outside of the country. Although Lincoln himself did not think resettlement was necessary, the idea addressed the deep racial prejudice existing in the country as a whole and particularly white fears about competing for jobs with millions of former slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation. Despite his support for gradual emancipation, Lincoln soon realized that immediate action was necessary, both on military and moral grounds. Slaves were an asset to the Confederate war effort, and public opinion in the North was shifting in favor of emancipation. Following the Union “victory” at Antietam, the president issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (September 22, 1862), which granted freedom to all slaves in the Confederate states and in other areas of active rebellion as of :  January 1, 1863. The proclamation did not apply to the slaveholding border states, nor would it apply to any Confederate states that rejoined the Union before the deadline. The formal Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, specifically delineated the Confederate territory where slaves were freed, urged the slaves not to resort to violence except in self-defense, and confirmed that African Americans could serve in the Union army and navy. Despite its limited scope, the Emancipation Proclamation redefined the purpose of the war. Southerners as well as northern Copperheads recognized this fact, and they condemned Lincoln's actions as tantamount to promoting a slave insurrection throughout the Confederacy. The slaves themselves responded with jubilation, not rebellion, and those who could fled to the Union lines, where their symbolic freedom could become a reality. Blacks in the Civil War. Almost two hundred thousand African Americans fought in the Civil War, the majority of them former slaves. Organized into segregated units under white officers, they received less pay than white soldiers until Congress remedied the inequity in June 1864. At first, black troops were used only for menial jobs behind the lines. When finally allowed into combat, they distinguished themselves and earned grudging respect for their courage under fire. Black soldiers knew quite well that they faced summary execution or reenslavement if captured. Around thirty-seven thousand were killed during the war, a number that represents a significantly higher casualty rate than that of white soldiers. The Confederacy used slaves as laborers to construct trenches and earthworks and as cooks and teamsters in military camps. With the South's manpower reserves dwindling in late 1864, Jefferson Davis proposed putting slaves into the army. The idea of slaves defending a government committed to the preservation of slavery while the opposing side was pledged to end it was one of the great ironies of the war. The Confederate Congress in fact passed legislation in March 1865 for the call-up of three hundred thousand slaves for the army, but the fighting stopped before the law went into effect. :  Emancipation Day celebration, June 19, 1900 held in "East Woods" on East 24th Street in Austin. Credit: Austin History Center. :