Too small to be a republic and too large to be an insane asylum?
Curses! They’re on to us!
:eek:
JCHeckler’s point is good. I can see the United States government taking the position that because it had never recognized the Confederate government, it didn’t need a formal surrender.
As for other issue raised here:
I’ll admit that despite a general love of history, I’m almost totally ignorant of Australian history. I guess I have a typical American’s knowledge of Australia: we know it’s out there, we’re generally in favor of it, and you’ve got a lot of funny animals. Based on this, I’m certainly in no position to criticize any Australian’s gaps in knowledge of America’s domestic history.
On the subject of British or European intervention, I side with those who think that this wouldn’t have changed the overall Union superiority. I once engaged in an extended debate on this subject on another board with a number of people who felt that British intervention would have almost automatically led to a Confederate victory. I disagreed; Britain wouldn’t have been willing or able to commit the number of troops necessary to overcome the Union’s existing numerical superiority; the vulnerability of Canada would have been a critical weakness in the British position; emerging ironclad technology would have weakened the strength of a Royal Navy blockade; the domestic economic strength of the United States would have made a British blockade relatively ineffective; the loss of American shipping (which was already a significant portion of world shipping) would have hurt the British economy; and there would have been strong domestic opposition in Britain to any intervention on the Confederate side.
Back to the OP, the Federal government of course never recognized the legitimacy of the Confederacy’s existence. Accepting or demanding a formal surrender would have implied such a recognition and was therefore not possible.
For anyone looking for a good history of the USCW, I’d recommend The Compact History of the Civil War by Col. Ernest Dupuy and Col. Trevor Dupuy ISBN 0446994327. It’s about 450 pages and gives IMO a reasonable mix of detail and overview.
Like Elvis1Lives said, the government of the confederacy never officially surrendered - the Federal government regarded the Confederacy as parts of the US in rebellion, not as a soverign government that could surrender. The closest thing to a general surrender was the attempt at one worked out between Sherman and Johnston on May 18 1865, which would have had all of the armies of the Confederacy surrender. The Union government, however, didn’t accept this (apparently mostly over bitterness from Lincoln’s assasination) and Secretary of War Stanton actually accused Sherman of treason (though Grant smoothed things over), and Johnston surrendered on the 26th with terms pretty much identical to Lee’s, followed by the rest of the Confederate armies. The Civil War was officially over when President Johnson issued a general proclamation of amnesty for anyone but senior leaders who took part in the rebellion, and there was no surrender by the Confederate government.
BTW, smiling bandit, the old southern term for the war is ‘The War of Northern Aggression’, ‘The War Between the States’ is a lot milder and is typically used at historical sites I’ve been to (more for amusement than anything else, IMO).
I have read numerous accounts that said when Union troops took over towns in North Carolina, they demanded to meet with whoever was mayor at the time of the outbreak of the war, and refused to recognize any mayoral elections that had taken place under the Confederacy.
The objection to Sherman’s original terms was that it went beyond a military surrender and negotiatated political issues as well. The original proposal would have allowed the Confederates to surrender their arms to state arsenals; promised an immediate restoration of civilian government; and promised a general amnesty for most Confederate officials. Sherman felt he was acting on the basis of platforms Lincoln had espoused. However, Lincoln had never made these promises official policy and had in fact ordered his generals not to negotiate anything more than a field surrender. In addition, at the time Sherman made his offer, Lincoln was no longer alive.
I suppose one way to look at it might be to include the period of Reconstruction. Most of the Southern states were held in occupation for at least a year, and were prevented from sending Representatives to Congress.
One might consider readmission to the Union as a sort of date of surrender, an acknowledgment that those individual states were no longer considered to be in rebellion. Georgia was the last to send Representatives, on June 25, 1870.
However, there was still the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in 1868 and its brief reign of terror, which was ended by the highly antagonistic force bills. On October 17, 1871, President Grant actually suspended habeas corpus in nine counties in South Carolina. Federal troops were occasionally employed in breaking up Klan cells. I don’t know if they actually fought one another.
And then there was the continuing occupation of some states. Occupation of course seems to imply some sort of resistance, although it’s usually just resistance to occupation (ahem, thank you Yogi for that inspiration). In the 1876 Hayes-Tilden election, three of the disputed states just happened to be the three southern states which were still occupied in part by federal troops. Part of the deal that Hayes’ handlers worked out was that the troops would be removed from those states, and Reconstruction was ended in 1877. After that, the white South was basically allowed to return to being assholes, and “resistance” formally ceased.
Hence the oft-used term, “Civil War and Reconstruction.”