Civil War

• Many of the Irish immigrants settled in New York City, and more to the point, New York's Five Points neighborhood
• For the most part, they lived in slums where diseases ran rampant, unemployment was the growing norm, and infant mortality rates were among the worst in the country
• Some of the German immigrants settled in urban locations on the coast, but a greater proportion of them moved west in search of land to farm
• Nativism


  A policy of protecting the interests of native-born people against the interests of immigrants
• A group of folks even organized a political party around opposition to immigration, called the Know-Nothing Party
• The nativist sentiment was essentially concerned with limiting immigrants' cultural and political influence
• The economies of the north and the south were moving in dramatically different directions during this time period
• In the North, the economic engines were turned by free wage laborers largely working manufacturing jobs in factories
• The southern economy was largely fueled by enslaved labor working agricultural plantations
• The North was growing much more rapidly than the south in population
• Lincoln won the presidency without a single electoral vote from southern states
• Lincoln promised that the expansion of slavery was effectively over
• In December of 1860, even before Lincoln was inaugurated, South Carolina seceded from the Union, and within six weeks six more states had followed the cascade of secession
• Confederate States of America


  The new confederacy created a Constitution which was similar in form and language to the United States Constitution but with severely limited federal power, and more to the point, provisions that enshrined slavery as a perpetual institution never to be abolished
• The secession of the Southern states would cause the American Civil War
• Reasons given by the Confederate states for secession

  • Texas - The country had become controlled by "a great sectional party...proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race and color—a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law". They further charged the Republicans with the nefarious agenda of "the abolition of negro slavery" and "the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races".
  • South Carolina - Their constitutional rights had been violated by northern sympathies with antislavery principles and the oppressive designs of the newly ascendant Republican Party. The Republicans would "take possession of the government…, the South shall be excluded from the common territory…, and a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States".
  • Mississippi - "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery".
• Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederacy, said precisely nothing about slavery in his inauguration speech
• Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, argued in his Cornerstone Speech that the foundation of the Confederacy lay in the triumph of the white race over the black race and that such a triumph would always be perpetuated in the everlasting institution of slavery
• The Union won the Civil War
• Factors that contributed to the Union victory in the Civil War


  • Improvements in Union leadership and strategy
  • Key Union battle victories
  • Wartime destruction of the South's infrastructure
• Both the Union and Confederacy had advantages at the start of the Civil War
• Advantages of the South


  • Defensive war
  • More experienced military leaders like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson
• Advantages of the North


  • Larger population
  • Command of a robust navy
  • Economic advantage with more banks, manufacturing, and railroads
  • Well-established central government
• Victory for either side would cost both an awful lot of money and blood
• How the Union and Confederacy mobilized their economies for the war


  1. North: Manufacturers rapidly modernized productive capacity

  2. South: Relied on tariffs and taxes on exports, but this plan faltered with Union naval blockades
• There was substantial opposition to the war on the homefront in both the Union and Confederacy
• Opposition in the North

  • New York City Draft Riots in 1863
• Lincoln was clear he would not stand for southern secession, but did not want to start a war over it
• The Confederate attack on Fort Sumter gave Lincoln the permission he needed to start the war
• The Confederacy had the advantage in the early part of the war
• Early Union defeat


  • First Battle of Bull Run
• Anaconda Plan


  Union strategy to blockade Southern ports and control the Mississippi River to split the Confederacy in half
• Southern strategy


  Relied on foreign help, especially from Britain and France, due to their reliance on southern cotton
• Britain and France did not end up providing significant aid to the Confederacy
• Reasons for the Union victory


  • Improvements in Union leadership and strategy
  • Key Union battle victories
  • Wartime destruction of the South's infrastructure
• Emancipation Proclamation


  Lincoln's 1862 document that freed enslaved people in the Confederacy, but not in the Union's Border States
• The Emancipation Proclamation was more a military strategy than a document of freedom
• Emancipation Proclamation


  Changed the scope of the war from saving the Union to eradicating slavery
• Key Union battle victories

  • Battle of Vicksburg
• Sherman's March to the Sea devastated the South's infrastructure