With his Confederate army outnumbered and exhausted, General Robert E Lee finally surrendered to General Grant. Four years of bitter civil war came to an end in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on 9 April 1865. Lee offered a succinct explanation for why the South had lost: “The Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.” In the years after the civil war, white southerners followed Lee’s cue, telling an emotionally powerful story of a heroic and noble struggle against overwhelming odds. If Lee was right, historians need not look south of the Mason-Dixon line to explain the war’s outcome: the answer is simply the old story of the biggest battalions winning. That was certainly how things looked in the bitter final year of the war, when Union armies vastly outnumbered and outgunned ragbag Confederate forces. But Lee’s explanation is too simple. After all, when the war broke out, most seasoned military observers in Europe gave the Union, a government with a tiny standing army, scant chance of militarily subduing the Confederacy, a territory the size of the whole of western Europe. Like their Revolution-era forebears, the Confederates could have won against superior forces because they had compensating advantages: a resilient population, talented military leaders, the advantage of fighting a defensive war in country they knew and, above all, a cause for which most white southerners were prepared to make great sacrifices.
George W Randolph, a Confederate general, expressed a common view in the south when he predicted in 1861 that: “They [the Federates] may overrun our frontier states and plunder our coast, but, as for conquering us, the thing is an impossibility… History offers no instance of a people as numerous as we are, inhabiting a country so extensive as ours, being subjected if true to ourselves.” If Randolph was right (and Lee was wrong), then the causes of Confederate defeat were internal rather than external. One set of possible internal explanations focuses on political divisions. According to this view, the Confederacy was hindered because its devotion to decentralised government, endless checks on executive power and obsession with individual liberty (for whites) undermined the capacity to fight. Perhaps, in the striking phrase of the late historian David Donald, the South “died of democracy”. Yet what is striking about the Confederacy is how much power the government in Richmond had, taking control of munitions manufacturing, and impounding property. From nothing, the South created what was for a while one of the most effective and disciplined armies the world had seen. Perhaps, then, the underlying failure of the Confederacy can be found in fault lines in southern society. Did class tensions undermine the war effort? Were women on the home front insufficiently committed to the cause? In fact, only in the final months of conflict did a failure of morale tangibly affect the ability of Confederate armies to resist. This was a tough society. The most convincing ‘internal’ factor behind southern defeat was the very institution that prompted secession: slavery. Enslaved people fled to join the Union army, depriving the South of labour and strengthening the North by more than 100,000 soldiers. Even so, slavery was not in itself the cause of defeat. In the end, slavery was destroyed because the North won, rather than the other way around. If weaknesses in southern society don’t in themselves explain Confederate defeat, does that return us to Lee’s explanation at Appomattox? In a sense it does, but with a crucial caveat: so long as the North remained determined to crush the rebellion by force, it was always likely that its superiority in manpower and resources would tell in the end. But the North had to be prepared to pay the high price of victory. Morale dimensionThe Confederates certainly understood this. The only way the South could win the war was for the North to give up. And so, from the outset, the driving purpose of the military strategy of the South was to undermine northern morale – not just in its armies, but on the home front. That was one reason for Lee’s ‘invasions’ of northern soil in 1862 and 1863. It was also why Lincoln’s re-election was so important, because it represented a continued willingness to fight on the part of the Union. In the end, perhaps the truth is that the North won the war because the idea of maintaining the Union was powerful enough to overcome setbacks. The North could very well have lost, but only if it had lost the will to win – and, despite occasional wavering, it never did. Adam IP Smith is professor of US history at University College London (UCL). This article first appeared in BBC History Magazine's 'American Civil War' special edition
What year was the civil war fought? How long was the civil war? When did the civil war begin? Where did the civil war begin? When did the civil war end? Where did the civil war end? How did the civil war end? How many people died in the civil war? Who fought in the civil war? Who won the civil war? What caused the civil war? What started the civil war? The Civil War remains the bloodiest war in American history with over 620,000 deaths. The war began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate soldiers attacked Union bases at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. It was fought for four years, three weeks and six days until Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. General Joseph E. Johnston subsequently surrendered on April 26, 1865, while Kirby Smith surrendered on June 2, 1865. Cherokee General Stand Watie was the last Confederate general to surrender on June 23, 1865. There are still ongoing debates on the ultimate cause of the war, but it is generally believed that it was triggered by the disagreement on the treatment of slaves. The southern states differed with the rest of the country over the powers of the federal government on the abolition of slavery. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election and vowed to free all slaves and prohibit slavery in the United States. After the declaration, states of the Deep South: Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and South Carolina declared secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America. The economy of the southern states was heavily dependent on agriculture especially cotton and plantation systems that relied on slave laborers. The Confederates quickly formed a government and an army from militia units to protect against possible invasion from the Union. Soon after the war began, the states of the Upper South: North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Virginia declared secession from and joined the Confederacy. Kentucky and Missouri were accepted as states of the Confederacy although neither declared official cessation or was in control of Confederate forces. The cessation was not illegal since no clause in the constitution barred states from seceding, but the Union feared that allowing states to secede would break up the United States into smaller countries and lead to constant wars. Three years after the secession attempt, the Supreme Court of the United States declared the secession illegal in the Texas v. White, 74 U.S. 700 (1868) case. The war was largely fought in the territories claimed by the secessionists especially in New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, and the Coast of Florida. It was also fought on the ocean as far as the Gulf of Mexico, the coast of France, and in the Mississippi River. Prior to the war, the Union states had a population of about 22 million while the secession states had a population of nine million. The disparity in population meant that the Union Army was significantly larger than the Confederate Army. It is believed that about 620,000 soldiers died in the civil war, but recent studies show that the figure may be as high as 850,000. |
How long exactly did the Civil War last?
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