notes, documents, and dates from a lifetime of reading about the United States
Covering 1850 to 1877. The documents quoted here are excerpted on the documents page; my longer argument about the 1850s is on the essays page. Last touched April 2021.
I will start with the sentence I put on the board every first day of this unit, and I will die on this hill: the Civil War was not about tariffs, and it was not about "states' rights" in the abstract. It was about slavery. You do not have to take my word for it, because the seceding states said so themselves, in print, at the time. South Carolina's declaration of the causes of secession names "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery" in its first paragraph and does not get friendlier from there. Mississippi's declaration said the thing outright: "our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery." The people who started the war were proud of the reason. It took later generations to get embarrassed about it.
By 1850 the country had been papering over slavery with compromises for thirty years, and the paper was wearing thin. The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state and, in exchange, strengthened the machinery for returning escaped slaves to their owners. The Fugitive Slave Act of that year is the single most underrated cause of the war: it required Northern officials and ordinary Northern citizens to participate in catching people, and it meant the problem could no longer stay "down there." A man in Boston could be arrested for refusing to help grab his neighbor. The North had been able to ignore slavery while it stayed a Southern institution; after 1850, it was a national one, and that was the fuse.
Then the fuse burned faster. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise line and left slavery in the territories to "popular sovereignty," which in practice meant two governments in Kansas and a small shooting war ("Bleeding Kansas," 1855-56). In May 1856 a South Carolina congressman named Preston Brooks beat Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner unconscious with a cane on the floor of the Senate, over a speech Sumner had made about Kansas, and Southern admirers sent Brooks replacement canes, engraved. I own a reproduction of one of the canes. Students always want to hold it; this is a teaching technique. The Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of March 1857 held that Congress could not bar slavery from a territory at all, which turned a political argument into a constitutional one and took compromise off the table entirely. Then John Brown raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October 1859, was hanged, and became both a martyr and a prophecy depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon line you were standing.
The numbers matter here, so here they are, and let me note that the table is the reason this page exists in the first place; students kept asking for the numbers in one place.
| Candidate | Party | Popular votes | Share | Electoral votes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Abraham Lincoln | Republican | ~1,866,000 | 39.8% | 180 |
| Stephen A. Douglas | Northern Democrat | ~1,376,000 | 29.5% | 12 |
| John C. Breckinridge | Southern Democrat | ~849,000 | 18.1% | 72 |
| John Bell | Constitutional Union | ~589,000 | 12.6% | 39 |
Turnout was about 81 percent, the second highest of the century. Lincoln was not on the ballot in ten Southern states and still won. He carried every free state except New Jersey. Sixty percent of the country voted against him, and the country still holds together better than the 1860 Democratic Party did: the Democrats split North and South at their own convention, which is how you end up with two Democrats in the table.
| State | Date of secession |
|---|---|
| South Carolina | December 20, 1860 |
| Mississippi | January 9, 1861 |
| Florida | January 10, 1861 |
| Alabama | January 11, 1861 |
| Georgia | January 19, 1861 |
| Louisiana | January 26, 1861 |
| Texas | February 1, 1861 |
| Virginia | April 17, 1861 (after Fort Sumter) |
| Arkansas | May 6, 1861 |
| North Carolina | May 20, 1861 |
| Tennessee | June 8, 1861 |
Note the gap. Seven states left before Fort Sumter; four more left only after Lincoln called for troops to put down the rebellion. The Virginians had been arguing about it for months; the shooting decided them. Also note the odd case of West Virginia, which seceded from the secession in 1863 and became its own state, which is the kind of detail that makes students look up from their phones.
Fort Sumter was fired on April 12, 1861, and surrendered the next day, with no one killed in the bombardment (two Union soldiers died firing the surrender salute; the war's ironies started early). Bull Run in July taught everyone that it would not be a ninety-day adventure. Antietam, September 17, 1862, remains the bloodiest single day in American history, about 23,000 casualties, and it was enough of a Union victory that Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation five days later. The proclamation took effect January 1, 1863, and did not free a single slave in the border states still in the Union, because it was a war measure aimed at the states in rebellion: a lawyer's document, doing a saint's work by lawyer's means.[1]
Gettysburg and Vicksburg fell in the same week of July 1863 (the surrender at Vicksburg came on July 4, which the town did not celebrate again until 1945, and I would not either). In November, at the cemetery dedication in Gettysburg, Lincoln spoke for about two minutes after Edward Everett spoke for about two hours, and the two minutes are the ones on the wall in every school I ever visited (full text on the documents page; it is shorter than this paragraph). In 1864 Grant took command of all the armies and fought without letup; Sherman took Atlanta in September and marched to the sea; and on April 9, 1865, at a farmhouse in Appomattox Court House, Lee surrendered to Grant. Grant's terms were famously generous. Lincoln was shot five days later, on Good Friday.
The numbers, when I first wrote them here, came to about 620,000 dead from the traditional count; the 2011-12 demographic work puts it nearer to 750,000.[2] Either way: more American dead than every other American war combined, in a country of 31 million, and the point of stating it that way is not morbid. It is that the people who started it had no idea what they were starting, which is usually true of people who start wars.
The peace was harder than the war, and it is the part that gets skipped, so I give it real room. The Thirteenth Amendment (ratified December 1865) ended slavery; the Fourteenth (1868) defined citizenship and put equal protection into the Constitution; the Fifteenth (1870) barred denying the vote on account of race. For a few years, Black men voted in the South in real numbers, served in state legislatures and in Congress, and the Freedmen's Bureau built schools that former enslaved people walked miles to attend, because they understood exactly what literacy was worth in the country they were now citizens of. This is the part of the story I would keep if I could only keep one.
But the North's will ran out before the South's did. The election of 1876 was disputed and settled by the Compromise of 1877: the Republican got the White House, the last federal troops came out of the South, and Reconstruction ended. What followed was named, by the people doing it, "Redemption": a system of poll taxes, grandfather clauses, terror, and eventually Jim Crow segregation that undid the constitutional amendments in practice while keeping them on paper. That world lasted from the 1870s to the 1960s, which is to say: it outlived the people who built it, and it is closer in time to us than the Civil War was to the people who ended segregation. The war ended in 1865. The argument did not, and pretending otherwise was the mistake the country made from 1877 to about 1954.
James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution (1988); Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (1953); David Blight, Race and Reunion (2001). Election returns: Historical Statistics of the United States, and the National Archives for the documents quoted above.