Battles of the Civil War

In 1864 a Union soldier said, "We should never have wars like this again." He was right. The American Civil War started in 1861 and lasted until 1865. Two percent of the country’s men were involved and more than 600,000 died.

The causes of the war had been brewing for many years before the fighting broke out. The North was more industrialised, the South was overwhelmingly farming land with manual workers. The coexistence of a slave-owning South with an increasingly anti-slavery North, made conflict inevitable.

Fundamentally it was a war between the United States of America, also known as the Union, and the Confederate States, also known as the Confederacy. The Union elected Abraham Lincoln on March 4^th, 1861 when his Republican party won the presidential election. Lincoln immediately faced the reality of Civil War. He dived into the issue of slavery at his inaugural address when he called the seven Southern states who had recently declared their secessation from the Union as “rebels” and their act of secession as "legally void". The stage was set.

The Confederacy believed that the individual States had the right to make their own rules but Northerners believed that “all men are created equal” and at his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln again emphasized this point; Slavery should be ended.

Each side employed different tactics. The South wanted to keep the fighting in familiar territory, thinking that the North would ultimately lose its will to fight. The North wanted to attack broad areas, cutting off all supply routes to the South. With both sides employing different techniques there were few clear victories or defeats for many years. The battles went both ways and the conflict was slow in ending; more than 10,000 military engagements are recorded.

Hostilities began on April 12, 1861 when Confederate forces attacked a U.S. military installation at Ford Sumter, South Carolina. In the war's first year, the Union assumed control of the border states and Union troop numbers were far higher than their Southern counterparts. But this wasn’t enough.

The Confederate forces who gathered at Manassas, Virginia in July 1861 were fierce and succesful and, a march by Union troops was halted in the First Battle of Bull Run when they were forced back to Washington DC by strong Confederate troops under the command of Generals Johnston and Beauregard.

Concerned that the Union was losing the War, the US Congress took measures to prevent more slave states from leaving the Union. The Crittenden-Johnson Resolution was signed on July 25^th, 1861, which stated that the war was being fought to preserve the Union and not to end slavery. This was not wholly true.

Meanwhile, emboldened by the Second Bull Run, the Confederacy made its first invasion into the North. General Lee led 45,000 men across the Potomac River into Maryland on September 5^th. Lee thought he had been succesful but the ensuing battles at Antietam, near Sharpsburg, Maryland on September 17^th, 1862 was a disaster and more than 23,000 soldiers lost their lives. Lee was outnumbered two-to-one but he reorganized his depleted brigades during the night and was able to retreat to Virginia.

Antietam was a major Union victory because it halted Lee's invasion of the North and provided an opportunity for Lincoln to announce his Emancipation Proclamation whereby all slaves were announced as free men in the Confederate States. Perhaps this could have been the battle to end the War, but the new General McClellan failed to follow up on Antietam.

His replacement, Maj. Gen Burnside, was also defeated at the Battle of Fredericksburg on December 13^th 1862. The Fredericksburg strategy was disastrous with repeated frontal assaults and over twelve thousand Union soldiers were killed or wounded. Lee’s army, despite its small size, was strong and after Burnside was replaced by Maj Gen Hooker, the Union was still unable to defeat Lee's army at many skirmishes and at the larger Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863.

Meanwhile,Winfield Scott, the commanding general of the Union Army, devised the Anaconda Plan beleiveing that a blockade of the main ports would weaken the Confederate economy and that a capture of the Mississippi River would split the South. Lincoln adopted the plan in May 1861. Blocking all Southern ports, Scott succesfully damaged international shipments to the Confederacy by late 1861. The blockade weakened the enormous cotton industry and ruined the economy.

This might have put the Union in a winning position but on March 8, 1862, the Confederate Navy waged a fight against the Union’s CSS Virginia and was succesful in regaining some control. Lacking the technology to build effective warships, the Confederacy tried to obtain warships from Britain and were able to keep the ports working for some years. It was not until the Union victory at the Second Battle of Fort Fisher in January 1865 that the last useful Southern port was closed and for all intense purposes, the sea battle was over.

Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle of the war, is considered by many historians as the turning point. Lee had again led his army into the North and was fighting against Maj Gen Meade. July 1 to 3, 1863 saw two days of intense fighting. The main event saw a dramatic infantry assault by 12,500 Confederates against the center of the Union line. It failed. The Charge was repulsed by Union rifle and artillery fire at great losses to the Confederate army.

Finally, Lee had no alternative but to lead the remains of his army on a torturous retreat back to Virginia. About 50,000 Americans were casualties in the three-day battle and the following November, President Lincoln dedicated the Gettysburg National Cemetary to honor the fallen.

At the beginning of 1864, Lincoln made Gen.Ulysses Grant commander of all Union armies. Following from Gettysburg, Grant went on to capture Vicksburg and Port Hudson, thus completing Union control of the important Mississipi River. He continued to fight bloody battles of attrition with Lee and succesfully put William Sherman in command of most of the western armies.

Lee was now retreating. Sherman succesfully captured Atlanta, Georgia and began his famous March-to-the-Sea, devastating a hundred-mile-wide swath of Georgia and twenty percent of the States’ farms. Sherman's army was followed by thousands of freed slaves and there was no more fighting as he reached the Confederate Virginia lines from the south. The Confederate resistance finally collapsed when he reached the Atlantic Ocean at Savannah, Georgia in December 1864.

Lee's army, thinned by desertion and casualties, surrendered in Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. In an untraditional gesture, and as a sign of Grant's respect and anticipation of folding the Confederacy back into the Union with dignity and peace, Lee was permitted to keep his officer's saber and his horse.

For all intents, the War had come to an end. Gen Grant was exhausted saying, "I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and who had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse."

Andy Lipps - It's About Clocks