I often wonder why the civil war is so called. In the usual meaning a civil war is war fought between two, occasionally more, factions for the control of a nation.
But in 18612 the Confederate states were not fighting to take over the entire Union. They just wanted to become an independent nation. So it was a war of independence or a war of secession.
In the British Empire we didn’t call the Boer war the South African Civil War. Nor The third Anglo-Afghan war the Afghan civil war. Nor the Indian Rebellion the Indian Civil war. They were wars of independence - parts of the Empire wanting to leave. Just as the American so called civil war was part of the Union wanting to leave
It is only not a civil war if you accept that the Confederacy was ever a separate state. It does not matter what the losers said they were fighting for; officially it was a rebellion.
To elaborate, a civil war (non-international armed conflict) need not be to take control of an entire region. Trying to break away still qualifies. A war to break away from an empire could still be of an international nature, though, like the American Revolution or the Algerian War or the Indian Rebellion. Nobody says the Algerian Revolution was a French civil war, especially since they won.
Depending on your perspective, the Civil War was the War of the Rebellion, The Great Rebellion, the War for the Union, the War Between The States, the War for Southern Independence, the War of Northern Aggression, or the Late Unpleasantness.
At the time of the war and shortly thereafter, northern writers and historians tended to use the War of the Rebellion or The Great Rebellion, where southern historians tended to use the War of Southern Independence. The War of Northern Aggression became poplar in the south during the 20th century.
Abolitionists called it the Slaveholder’s Rebellion.
As per the OP, the Confederacy went out of their way to avoid using the term “Civil War” and instead referred to it as “War between the Confederate States of America and the United States of America” in official documents. The War of Separation or the War of Secession were also used by the Confederacy.
The winner gets to write the history books, and the North won, so they mandated the term Civil War to emphasize that it was an illegal war (from their perspective) and not a war of independence. If you prefer to call it the War of Yankee Aggression instead, there are some folks in the South who even to this day will still agree with you.
Officially, there is no one single name of the war in government documents. The War of the Rebellion appears in a lot of government documents in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Civil War and The War Between The States are both in use throughout the 1900s and both are still used today.
I’ll suggest that had the Confederacy been successful in seceding and today was an independent nation viewed internationally as co-equal with e.g., the USA, Mexico, or Canada, both the rump USA and the CSA would have different names other than “Civil War” for the conflict.
As kinda noted by others above, “Civil War” is a circumlocution carefully designed to minimize the shame and blame. It treats both carefully unnamed parties as morally and politically equal actors. Call it a (mostly failed?) effort at reconciliation.
I think the fact that Algeria was a French possession, and not classically part of France makes the war a rebellion, but maybe not a civil war. Now if Brittany had tried to break away, that would be a civil war.
Find a civil war that isn’t some sort of insurrection, rebellion, secession, or something along those lines.
That’s what a civil war is; a catch-all term for a intranational war fought between factions within a country.
I think it gets a bit specific when we’re talking about possessions/colonies of another country rebelling/demanding independence vs. a war within a country for the control of a country, or to keep a nation together, a-la the US Civil War.
At the time that it began, it was a civil war, and it ended as still one. It was still contained within the overall United States apparatus.
Of course, though, then this makes one wonder if things like the American Revolutionary War were technically a civil war, too, within the overall British Empire. It depends on one’s view I guess.
Yea, I think “American Revolutionary War” is misnamed. Afterall, the colonists who supported the war didn’t want to overthrow King George III - they simply wanted nothing to do with him. Hence it’s better to call it The American War of Independence, IMO.
“Civil War” is also commonly applied to conflicts involving breakaway states striving for independence, for instance the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-70 in which Biafra attempted independence, and to wars involving newly independent nations and the Soviets after the Russian empire crumbled at the end of WWI.
You answered your own question right there without realizing it. India, South Africa and Afghanistan were all imperial possessions of Britain rebelling against their imperial masters. None of them were ever part of Britain, they were part of the British Empire. The CSA wasn’t an imperial possession of the USA populated by non-Americans. It had always been an integral part of the USA, and from the position of the US, were never an independent nation but rather states in rebellion.
Well, and also - Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863
So that’s twice. Thereby- it is official- the war was indeed a "Civil War’.
The term “War Between the States” was rarely used during the war but became prevalent afterward among proponents of the “Lost Cause” interpretation of the war.[10]
The Confederate government avoided the term “civil war”,
So the traitors did not like the term, but Lincoln did. Thus- Civil War.
Yeah, and he also apparently used rebellion quite frequently. We discussed this in AP history, so more than 45 years ago, so I could be completely mistaken.
What do Americans call the conflict that tore their nation apart from 1861 to 1865? And what difference does it make what name they use? Today most call it the Civil War, but as I discuss in my recent article in the September issue of the journal, Americans have not always agreed on that name.[1] It became the common usage in the early twentieth century as part of sectional reunion and reconciliation. But by obscuring the meaning of the war, the choice of Civil War played a role in perpetuating a division over the war’s meaning and thereby contributed to today’s debates over Confederate symbols.
and
In the twentieth century, northerners, too, most often used Civil War, as surveys in New England and the upper Midwest showed. They had not always favored that name, however. President Abraham Lincoln most often used Rebellion. During and immediately after the war, most northerners also referred to the Rebellion rather than to the Civil War. That usage persisted into the late nineteenth century, illustrated in the title on the volumes of the government’s official history, The War of the Rebellion. Beginning in the late 1880s, many northerners abandoned Rebellion for Civil War. After 1900 in newspapers, book titles, and government documents Civil War became the war’s most common and all but official name; on three occasions between 1905 and 1911, Congress ratified the use of Civil War.
Neither Afghanistan nor the Dutch Republics were part of the British Empire.
The English Civil War wasn’t the first Civil war in England, and wasn’t confined to England either. The War of The Three Kingdoms has been used for it.
Indeed there have been three civil wars in England since the conquest.
The Anarchy 1135 - 1153 between King Stephen and Empress Matilda about succession after the death of Henry I son in the White Ship
The War of the Roses 1455 -1487 between the House of York and the House of Lancaster precipitated by the weakness of HentyVI
The three Civil Wars 1642 - 1651 fought between the stuart Monarch and the English Parliament the latter disputing the divine right of Charles I to riule
And I suspect a fourth one if the Extreme right wins the next general election :-(#
