Slavery and the Civil War

Almost everyone in America knows that slavery was at the root of the Civil war. Yet it is difficult to know how many Americans lived with the conflict in their daily lives or even how much it touched them. It made heroes of citizen soldiers, altered the roles of women, and changed the way Americans looked at their nation.

The Civil war pitted one state against another, resulting in the deaths of nearly four million Americans. The victory of the Union preserved the nation that had emerged from the revolution that began in 1776, but it did so at a cost. The conflict divided the country between North and South, polarized white northerners from the rest of the nation, and made blacks the dominant force in American life.

The war started in 1860 when an electoral college vote gave the presidency to a candidate who opposed the spread of slavery into western territories. This jolted white Southerners into action, and they soon voted to secede from the United States.

Both sides mobilized on a scale unprecedented in the country’s history. The Confederacy put a large percentage of its military-age male population into uniform, while the Union mustered more than 2.1 million men.

The most revolutionary development of the Civil war was emancipation. Abolitionists and Radical Republicans pushed for it at the outset, but the mass of white northerners always regarded the war as a crusade to save the Union and punish slaveholding aristocrats. With the war dragging on and casualties mounting, however, Lincoln presented emancipation as a tool to undermine the Confederacy and to help shift Northern perceptions from “restoring the Union” to building a new Union without slavery.