150 years ago, our nation amidst of tension between the northern and southern United States exploded into the American Civil War over issues involving states’ rights versus federal authority, westward expansion, and slavery. With Abraham Lincoln elected as president in 1860, seven southern states decided to secede from the Union to form the Confederate States of America, because Lincoln was an anti-slavery Republican. After the first shots of the Civil War were fired, four more states seceded. The Civil War quickly became known as the “war between states,” with neighbor against neighbor. Four years of fighting historic battles, ended in Confederate surrender in 1865. To this day, it is the costliest war ever fought on American soil, with 620,000 of 2.4 million soldiers killed, millions injured, and the South devastated.
In the mid-19th century, while the United States was experiencing an era of tremendous growth, an economic difference existed between the country’s northern and southern regions. While in the North, manufacturing and industry was well established, and agriculture was mostly limited to small-scale farms, the South’s economy was based on a system of large-scale farming that depended on the labor of black slaves to grow certain crops, especially cotton and tobacco. Growing abolitionist sentiment in the North after the 1830’s and northern opposition to slavery’s extension into the new western territories led many southerners to fear that the existence of slavery in America was in danger.
In 1854, the U.S. Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened all new territories to slavery by allowing the rule of popular sovereignty over the state. Opposition to the act in the North led to the formation of the Republican Party, a new political party based on the principle of opposing slavery’s extension into the western territories. After the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott case confirmed the legality of slavery in the territories, the abolitionist John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry in 1859 convinced more and more southerners that their northern neighbors were bent on the destruction of the practice that sustained them. Lincoln’s election in November 1860 was the final straw, and within three months seven southern states–South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas–had seceded from the United States.
Even as Lincoln took office in March 1861, Confederate forces threatened the federal-held Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. On April 12, after Lincoln ordered a fleet to resupply Sumter, Confederate artillery fired the first shots of the Civil War. Sumter’s commander, Major Robert Anderson, surrendered after less than two days of bombardment, leaving the fort in the hands of Confederate forces under Pierre G.T. Beauregard. Four more southern states–Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee–joined the Confederacy after Fort Sumter. Border slave states like Missouri, Kentucky and Maryland did not secede, but there was much Confederate sympathy among their citizens.
Though on the surface the Civil War may have seemed an easy win for the noth, with the 23 states of the Union’s advantage in population, manufacturing (including arms production), and railroad construction, the Confederates also had a strong military tradition, along with some of the best soldiers and commanders in the nation. They also had a cause they believed in: preserving their long-held traditions and institutions, chief among these being slavery. In the First Battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861, 35,000 Confederate soldiers under the command of Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson forced a greater number of Union forces to retreat towards Washington, D.C., dashing any hopes of a quick Union victory and leading Lincoln to call for 500,000 more recruits. In fact, both sides’ initial call for troops had to be widened after it became clear that the war would not be a limited or short conflict.
