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Although radicals on
both sides had agitated the slavery and Southern
nationalism issues for years, most white Americans North
and South hoped for some peaceful way out of their
sectional dispute. Many hoped for a settlement even
after Lincoln’s election in November, 1860, and South
Carolina’s immediate move to secede from the Union in
December. During spring of 1861, Congress tried one
more time to broker a compromise, while several
well-meaning Americans organized a peace convention.
Ft. Sumter in April put an end to such efforts, and the
war was on.
It was a war of
gradually increasing intensity. When it began,
Confederates wanted only to protect their territory from
Union invasion, while Unionists wanted only to defeat
secessionist political radicalism. In keeping with
these limited aims, General of the Army, Winfield Scott,
developed what came to be known as the Anaconda Plan
that hinged almost entirely on a naval blockade (thereby
ensuring that most Southern civilians would never see a
soldier in blue). Other Unionists wanted the army to
take Richmond, VA, national capital of the Confederacy,
and thus take out the political apparatus of the new
nation, leaving everything else untouched. In 1861,
neither Union nor Confederacy wanted to make war against
civilians or property, or to end the institution of
slavery (much to the anger of abolitionists and African
Americans).
But such a light touch
was not to be. As time progressed, it became
increasingly clear that neither side really had the
ability to win, at least not without a long and brutal
war of attrition. This was true, first, because the
armies of the time lacked the capacity to produce a
decisive victory in battle. The Union and Confederate
forces could produce incredibly bloody combats like
Shiloh, Second Manassas, Chancellorsville, or Antietam.
The soldiers killed and maimed thousands, but even the
victorious armies in these battles found themselves as
butchered by winning as their opponents were by defeat.
No one could gain decisive advantage.
In addition to this,
victory was elusive because the two major theaters of
war—northern Virginia and the west—cancelled each other
out. In the east, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern
Virginia frustrated several attempts by its Northern
opponent to capture the Confederate capital and to bring
this main Southern army to bay. Lee, Stonewall Jackson,
James Longstreet, JEB Stuart and their men dominated the
contest in this theater until Ulysses S. Grant, in the
spring and summer of 1864, found a way to blunt
Confederate strength (a pure war of attrition).
Although Lee’s success was due in large part to his
tactical brilliance and the efficiency of his
subordinate commanders, geography helped immensely. The
Virginia theater was very compact, allowing Lee to
concentrate his men into one, large, hard-hitting
striking force. As well, the several major rivers in
northern Virginia ran west to east across any Union
army’s line of march, and rivers were a significant
barrier system for nineteenth-century armies (as they
are now).
Geography worked very
differently in the western theater. Because it was
bounded by the Appalachian mountains, the Mississippi
River, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Ohio, the area was
simply huge. It taxed Confederate resources beyond
their limits to defend it. Furthermore, unlike
Virginia, the major river systems (the Mississippi, the
Tennessee, and the Cumberland) were easily navigated
highways into the Confederate interior. They were
ready-made, easily secured avenues of invasion, which
railroads into the interior then supplemented. Although
sustaining thrusts into the deep South proved difficult
because of ever-lengthening supply lines, and because of
the efficiency of Confederate cavalry raiders like
Nathan Bedford Forrest, the overall situation in the
west produced a gradually building Union victory.
With the west thus
balanced against east, and battles between the armies
productive of little but heaps of bodies and body parts,
the Civil War deepened into a war of full-fledged
attrition. Whatever political leaders might say about
emancipation, the war process itself ground slavery to
death. Soldiers, in their frustration, turned more and
more into making war on the civilian sector. This
civilian sector itself produced an unregulated guerilla
war in the Confederacy, along with sabotage and riots in
the North. By 1865, the war had generated a level of
brutality and a willingness to experiment with social
revolution that were the stuff only of nightmares,
revolutionary fantasizing, or insane musings in
1861.
For more
information on the war years:
Timeline and
Resources
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