Indeed. Lincoln repeatedly tried to convince his War Department to send a large army to Eastern Tennessee, in the not-unreasonable hope that the majority-Unionist region would break away from Tennessee and organize a separate state government. It had worked in West Virginia, after all. And a certain number of Southerners fought in the Union Army, most notably General George “The Rock of Chickamauga” Thomas, who was born in Virginia. Conversely, the Confederate commander at Vicksburg, John Pemberton, was a Pennsylvanian.
Reading this thread, it occurs to me to wonder if anti-slavery sentiment didn’t rise in the North over the course of the war, as Northerners went south and were exposed to the reality of it. I imagine a lot of boys from small towns in Maine or Wisconsin or Michigan had never even seen a black person before putting on the blue coat.
And yet, for all this talk about Nothern “industrialists” vs. the “agrarian” South, as Little_Nemo points out Europe (more specifically Britain) was importing large quantities of American grain to help feed its population.
There is really no fundamental or inherent conflict between areas with a more industrially-based economy and areas with a more agriculturally-based economy. To the contrary, they’re complementary: “Industrialists” still gotta eat; and on the other hand, farmers tend to want manufactured goods. (Not least of which are things like plows.) Of course the “agrarian” economy of the Deep South wasn’t based on a food crop; but even there, cotton is a valuable raw material for some industries–the first factories of the Industrial Revolution were textile factories.
There is a potential conflict between areas with export-driven economies and areas more dependent on foreign imports, or especially areas that are trying to develop their own economic enterprises in competition with foreign imports. (Which is not inherently an “industrial” vs. “agrarian” thing at all–farmers can be quite protectionist.) Fundamentally, though, that’s the sort of conflict that can be haggled over and worked out. And, after all, a booming industrial economy in one part of the country can ultimately mean cheaper manufactured goods for the more agrarian parts of the country, and can also serve as a domestic market for the raw materials produced in areas of the country with economies more based on agriculture or forestry or mining.
Slavery vs. not having slavery, on the other hand, is not something you can fundamentally “compromise” very well.
General Meade once said “We’ve driven the Confederates after Gettysburg back into their territory.” Lincoln replied “It’s all our territory. It’s all the United States.”
Lincoln was a pragmatist and above all a politician. Time and myth have made him something else but his primary goal was to preserve the Union of the United States. He was not necessarily against slavery.
If he could have preserved the Union and it meant keeping slavery he would have. His letter from Abe to Horace Greely (already linked to above) is short but it says it all. Preserving the Union was his goal. And he clearly states that if he could do so without freeing any slave, he would do so.
yeah but was it? virtually every northern state had abolished slavery before 1860 either via state constitutions, state Supreme court cases or legislation. slavery has been abolished all over the north voluntarily decades before the Civil War.
You know, one hears that a lot, but the part that always leaves me scratching my head is the part where they lost the war in the end. So, yet another thing I’m loathe to meet the Confederate fanbase halfway on, is the quality of their leadership. Yes, they won some early battles, but then they also had the advantage of operating defensively.
Perhaps this notion of “better” Confederate generals is just more Lost Cause mythos seeping into our history books?
In January 1862, George McClellan took advantage of the US Navy’s command of the seas and waterways of the Virginia coast to bring his 122,000 men to the James River to march to Richmond, flanking Joseph Johnston’s Confederate troops dug in around Washington. The only troops opposing his were 11,000 under Joseph Magruder. Using trickery (marching a single company in a loop through a glen in sight of Union scouts, making it appear that he had thousands more men), he held off McClellan for 10 days, allowing Johnston to move his troops south and reinforce the lines around Richmond.
McClellan was able to finally move to the outskirts of Richmond when Johnston was wounded and Robert E. Lee took command of the Rebel army. Though outnumbered by roughly 10,000 men, Lee took the offensive, splitting his army at times, and drove McClellan back to the James River. During one of the Seven Days battles, Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart reconnoitered McClellan’s northern flank, and returned to Rebel lines by riding around the entire Union Army.
The Rebels lost the war because they had a small population base, a tiny industrial base, an undeveloped economy, and an unwieldy government. And they certainly had some generals who weren’t good at what they did. But there’s no question that, from a purely military perspective, Lee, Jackson, and (to a lesser extent) Stuart, were much better tacticians and battlefield commanders than their Federal counterparts; at least, until Grant and Sherman took arrived.
It wasn’t as one-sided as people think. Both sides had competent generals from early on. It’s just the Lee happened to be fighting in the east (where people were paying more attention) against McClellan and that was a very imbalanced fight.
But if you look at places like Tennessee and the Mississippi Valley, you’d see American generals beating Confederate ones.
People talk about Gettysburg being the high water mark of the Confederate military effort. Lee was fighting a battle fifty miles inside American territory. That same week, Grant was capturing Vicksburg and closing off the Mississippi. He was three hundred miles inside Confederate territory.
One factor that helped the Confederates in the early months of the war was that they were building a new army, which paradoxically was an advantage.
The United States had an existing regular army, the units of which were kept intact when the war started. To expand the army, the United States created a bunch of new units, which they filled with new recruits. So overall you had a small number of units filled with experienced soldiers and a large number of units filled with recent civilians.
When the southern states seceded, a lot of southerners left the American military to join the Confederate military. But they were joining as individuals not as existing units. The Confederates were able to take this pool of experienced soldiers and spread them throughout all of the new units they were created. So every Confederate unit had a group of experienced soldiers in it who could show the new recruits what to do. This meant the average Confederate unit was better in quality than most of the American units.
This was, obviously, a temporary advantage. After a year or so of fighting, both armies were made up of soldiers who were now veterans and could fight on equal terms.
Yes, that was a frequent theme in the letters and other statements made by American soldiers during the war. They would often say they had mostly ignored the existence of slavery before the war. But seeing it up close turned them into opponents of slavery.
DID the European powers despise slavery though? I constantly see people claim this but the fact they had African colonies well into the 1950s which still had what was basically slavery going on in them (ironically similar to what happened to African-Americans in the South after the Civil War).
Well, most European countries had banned the Atlantic slave trade by 1836, albeit still using slaves in some areas. And the British Empire ended slavery in most of it’s colonies in 1833 with the Slavery Abolition Act (the East India Company in Ceylon got a pass). So they (at least their governments) would consider the South and it’s slave culture something whose time had passed and would not be favorable to supporting it. IMHO as always.
Concur. The movement by the Confederacy in establishing it’s capital in Richmond, about 100 miles from Washington, narrowed the focus of the war for many people, and for the Governments. And because of political pressures (Congress being right there at the front, so to speak), Generals could easily politic for prime commands–Hooker for one was quite good at it.
And since they were facing Robert E. Lee and others that made up the Confederate “first team”, they were often woefully out-generaled and on the occasions that they weren’t or got a break (finding Lee’s plans before Antietam and Hooker’s flanking manuever), they were unable or unwilling to take advantage of it. And Lincoln, until he found a general he could trust fully (Grant), was very cautious about ‘uncovering’ Washington DC to possible Confederate raids/capture.
Meanwhile, along a 400-500 mile front to the West, where Federal numbers could be moved with more freedom, Grant and Sherman and Thomas and Rosecrans used that
to pressure the Confederates on a variety of fronts and take advantage of the fact that, as Grant said, “the enemy has not army enough.” So while not perfect (Henry Halleck did his level best to screw things up), in general the North was cutting the heart out of the Confederacy while Lee was getting all the press for his actions on a very small area of the war.
I don’t think it was just a coincidence that there was a concentration of bad American generals in the eastern theater. McClellan quickly became the dominant general in that theater. And he had serious ego problems. A competent subordinate would have questioned some of the decisions McClellan made and he couldn’t accept criticism. So he would have driven any competent subordinates away.
This is simply untrue, and is part of the Lost Cause myth.
The Union had lots of excellent generals, and the Confederacy had many terrible ones. The greatest general in the history of American arms was Ulysses S. Grant, and his Vicksburg campaign was maybe the greatest military campaign an American general ever fought. The Union also had Sherman, Thomas, Sheridan, and Hancock.
The Union had Winfield Scott, who understood that the war would not be short, and laid out a long-term plan for victory, which was more or less what happened Anaconda Plan - Wikipedia
And another part that isn’t taught enough in American history class (at least it wasn’t for me) is that these were largely political positions. We have this idea that bad generals just get fired immediately or replaced by competent ones (perhaps in the way it worked in WWI when some huge number of French and German generals were replaced in the first month).
But McClellan could basically not be fired until it was politically viable to do so, or his failures so manifest that Lincoln felt he had no choice. So, basically after McClellan failed to pursue Lee’s army at Antietam. Also McClellan was loved by his troops, and it wasn’t obvious yet that there was a good replacement for McClellan (Burnside was terrible, and Hooker seemed too obviously angling for the job). Grant was still working on the Vicksburg problem.
It all comes back to how the North wasn’t really unified in the way we tend to think of it. McClellan and the Democrats (both Peace Democrats and War Democrats) had significant sway, as did the more staunch abolitionist wing of the Republican party. Lincoln was ultimately a politician.
None of this is support for the claim that Lincoln was “not necessarily against slavery.” He explicitly spoke in speeches regarding his moral and legal objections to slavery. He might have been less clear regarding exactly how to go about ending it, but it is false to say that Lincoln was not clearly opposed to slavery.
Right. Lincoln was anti-slavery . Full stop. He believed slavery was a moral wrong, and incompatible with the founding documents of the United States.
He was willing to compromise this belief in order to preserve the Union. But the very creation of his party was built on the idea that slavery would not expand into the territories, and would eventually be ended in the entire nation.