5.8 Military Conflict in the Civil War

The Confederacy's hope of European help, 'King Cotton diplomacy', failed. Britain had stockpiled cotton, found new suppliers in Egypt and India, and after the Emancipation Proclamation was unwilling to side with a slaveholding nation.

General Winfield Scott's Anaconda Plan proposed to squeeze the Confederacy like a snake: a naval blockade of Southern ports and control of the Mississippi River to split it in two. Many Northerners wanted a quick march on Richmond instead.

The Confederates won the First Battle of Bull Run (July 1861), ending hopes of a short war. In the West, Ulysses S. Grant captured key river forts and survived the bloody Battle of Shiloh (April 1862), and the Union Navy took New Orleans. In the East, Union general George McClellan moved slowly, and Lee drove him back from Richmond in 1862.

At Antietam in Maryland (September 17, 1862), the bloodiest single day of the war with about 23,000 casualties, McClellan stopped Lee's first invasion of the North. It was not a clear victory, but it was enough for Lincoln to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation five days later (5.9).

Lee invaded the North again and was defeated at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (July 1–3, 1863), after the failed assault known as Pickett's Charge. With about 50,000 casualties on both sides, it was the war's largest battle, and Lee never again invaded the North.

On July 4, 1863, Grant captured Vicksburg, Mississippi, after a long siege. Soon the Union controlled the entire Mississippi River, splitting off Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana from the rest of the Confederacy.

Lincoln made Grant commander of all Union armies in 1864. Grant attacked Lee relentlessly in Virginia, accepting enormous casualties, and pinned him down in a siege at Petersburg. William Tecumseh Sherman captured Atlanta in September 1864, which helped Lincoln win reelection, then led his March to the Sea from Atlanta to Savannah, destroying railroads, crops and property. This was total war: attacking the enemy's economy and civilian support, not just its armies.

Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865. Five days later, John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln, who died the next morning. Roughly 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers died in the war, more than in any other American war.

From the war's first months, enslaved people fled to Union lines, forcing the question of emancipation; Union officers began treating them as 'contraband of war' rather than returning them. After the Emancipation Proclamation, about 180,000 Black men served in the Union Army, roughly a tenth of its soldiers, and thousands more served in the navy. They served in segregated units under white officers and at first received lower pay. The 54th Massachusetts Infantry's assault on Fort Wagner (1863) showed their courage to the Northern public. Black soldiers' service strengthened the case for citizenship after the war.