- Also called:
- War Between the States
- Date:
- April 12, 1861 - April 26, 1865
- Location:
- United States
- Participants:
- Confederate States of America
- United States
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Comparison of North and South
At first glance it seemed that the 23 states that remained in the Union after secession were more than a match for the 11 Southern states. Approximately 21 million people lived in the North, compared with some nine million in the South of whom about four million were slaves. In addition, the North was the site of more than 100,000 manufacturing plants, against 18,000 south of the Potomac River, and more than 70 percent of the railroads were in the Union. Furthermore, the Federals had at their command a 30-to-1 superiority in arms production, a 2-to-1 edge in available manpower, and a great preponderance of commercial and financial resources. The Union also had a functioning government and a small but efficient regular army and navy.
The Confederacy was not predestined to defeat, however. The Southern armies had the advantage of fighting on interior lines, and their military tradition had bulked large in the history of the United States before 1860. Moreover, the long Confederate coastline of 3,500 miles (5,600 km) seemed to defy blockade, and the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, hoped to receive decisive foreign aid and intervention. Confederate soldiers were fighting to achieve a separate and independent country based on what they called “Southern institutions,” the chief of which was the institution of slavery. So the Southern cause was not a lost one; indeed, other countries—most notably the United States itself in the American Revolution against Britain—had won independence against equally heavy odds.
The high commands
Command problems plagued both sides. Of the two rival commanders in chief, most people in 1861 thought Davis to be abler than Lincoln. Davis was a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, a hero of the Mexican-American War, a capable secretary of war under Pres. Franklin Pierce, and a U.S. representative and senator from Mississippi. Lincoln—who had served in the Illinois state legislature and as an undistinguished one-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives—could boast of only a brief period of military service in the Black Hawk War, in which he saw no action.
As president and commander in chief of the Confederate forces, Davis revealed many fine qualities, including dignity, firmness, determination, and honesty, but he was flawed by his excessive pride, hypersensitivity to criticism, poor political skills, and tendency to micromanage. He engaged in extended petty quarrels with generals and cabinet members. He also suffered from ill health throughout the conflict. Davis’s effectiveness was further hampered by a political system that limited him to a single six-year term—thereby making him a lame duck immediately upon his election—and that frowned on organized political parties, which Southerners accused of having been at least partly responsible for the coming of the Civil War. The lack of political parties meant that Davis could command no loyalty from a broad group of people such as governors or political appointees when he came under heavy criticism.
To a large extent and by his own preference, Davis was his own secretary of war, although five different men served in that post during the lifetime of the Confederacy. Davis himself also filled the position of general in chief of the Confederate armies until he named Robert E. Lee to that position on February 6, 1865, when the Confederacy was near collapse. In naval affairs—an area about which he knew little—the Confederate president seldom intervened directly, allowing the competent secretary of the navy, Stephen Mallory, to handle the Southern naval buildup and operations on the water. Although his position was onerous and quite likely could not have been filled as well by any other Southern political leader—most of them having come to prominence in a period of growing disinclination to compromise—Davis’s overall performance in office left something to be desired.
To the astonishment of many, Lincoln grew in stature with time and experience, and by 1864 he had become a consummate politician and war director. Lincoln matured into a remarkably effective president because of his great intelligence, communication skills, humility, sense of purpose, sense of humour, fundamentally moderate nature, and ability to remain focused on the big picture. But he had much to learn at first, especially in strategic and tactical matters and in his choices of army commanders. With an ineffective first secretary of war—Simon Cameron—Lincoln unhesitatingly insinuated himself directly into the planning of military movements. Edwin M. Stanton, a well-known lawyer appointed to the secretaryship on January 20, 1862, was equally untutored in military affairs, but he was fully as active a participant as his superior.
Winfield Scott was the Federal general in chief when Lincoln took office. The 75-year-old Scott—a hero of the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War—was a magnificent and distinguished soldier whose mind was still keen, but he was physically incapacitated and had to be retired from the service on November 1, 1861. Scott was replaced by young George B. McClellan, who was an excellent organizer. McClellan, however, lacked tenacity, persistently overestimated the Confederates’ strength (and therefore stalled his attacks), and was openly disdainful of the president. Because he wanted McClellan to focus his attentions on the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln relieved McClellan as general in chief on March 11, 1862. Henry W. Halleck, who proved to be a strong administrator but did little in the way of strategic planning, succeeded McClellan on July 11 and held the position until he was replaced by Ulysses S. Grant on March 9, 1864. Halleck then became chief of staff under Grant in a long-needed streamlining of the Federal high command. Grant served efficaciously as general in chief throughout the remainder of the war.
After the initial call by Lincoln and Davis for troops, and as the war lengthened indeterminately, both sides turned to raising massive armies of volunteers. Local citizens of prominence and means would organize regiments that were uniformed and accoutred at first under the aegis of the states and then mustered into the service of the Union and Confederate governments. On each side, the presidents appointed so-called “political generals,” men who had little or no military training or experience but had important political connections (for example, Northern Democrats) or had ties to immigrant communities. Although successful politically, most of these appointments did not yield happy military results. As the war dragged on, the two governments had to resort to conscription to fill the ranks being so swiftly thinned by battle casualties.
Strategic plans
In the area of grand strategy, Davis persistently adhered to the defensive, permitting only occasional “spoiling” forays into Northern territory. Perhaps the Confederates’ best chance of winning would have been an early grand offensive into the Union states before the Lincoln administration could find its ablest generals and bring the preponderant resources of the North to bear against the South. On the other hand, protecting the territory the Confederacy already controlled was of paramount importance, and a defensive position allowed the rebels to husband their resources somewhat better. To crush the rebellion and reestablish the authority of the Federal government, Lincoln had to direct his blue-clad armies to invade, capture, and hold most of the vital areas of the Confederacy. His grand strategy was based on Scott’s so-called Anaconda Plan, a design that evolved from strategic ideas discussed in messages between Scott and McClellan on April 27, May 3, and May 21, 1861. It called for a Union blockade of the Confederacy’s coastline as well as a decisive thrust down the Mississippi River and an ensuing strangulation of the South by Federal land and naval forces. But it was to take four years of grim, unrelenting warfare and enormous casualties and devastation before the Confederates could be defeated and the Union preserved.