The service of more than 200,000 African American men under arms helped tip the balance decisively in favor of the Union’s victory in the Civil War. In sheer numbers alone, they helped to resolve the potential need for soldiers that federal strategists foresaw as early as 1862. But numbers tell only part of the story. Most of these men entered the ranks after the Emancipation Proclamation signaled the Union’s emerging war against slavery. Their staunch support for the new policy and its chief spokesperson – President Abraham Lincoln – helped to bolster popular acceptance of abolition; even more important, their steadfast service both in camp and on the battlefield helped to recreate the nation, to envision and enact more inclusive notions of citizenship and suffrage after the war. Some present-day observers might see these outcomes as a logical outgrowth of ideals present since the founding of the country and of the decades-long struggle against slavery, but few who witnessed events during the 1850s would have considered such a result inevitable. Black people in the North and South viewed the war as an opportunity to advance the causes of freedom and equality but held no illusions that ending slavery – no small feat in itself – would resolve the challenges freedpeople faced to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves.

On March 4, 1865, in his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln called the country’s 4 million slaves “a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.” Lincoln’s use of “somehow” suggests not uncertainty about the importance of slavery, but an awareness that the institution meant different things to different people. To Southern whites, it was a way of life to be defended, but their levels of dependence or even support for slavery varied by individual and by and within regions. To Northern whites, it might be minimally important, or a threat to the white man’s labor, or the South’s means of controlling America’s politics, economy, and society, or central to their own prosperity. To say that slavery caused the war oversimplifies the issue; to say it played a minimal or limited role in Southerners’ decision to secede from the Union, and the Northern and Southern decisions to fight, ignores reality.

In the second week of June, 1864, at the end of Ulysses Grant’s Overland campaign from the Rapidan River, the Union and Confederate armies of the eastern theater occupied the same ground they had contested two years previously. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia defended the northeastern approaches to Richmond from the spot where he had launched his ferocious attacks on George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac in 1862. This time Lee lacked the strength to repeat his offensive. Ulysses Grant, meanwhile, enjoyed the unlimited War Department support that McClellan had been denied, so he was not to be discouraged or recalled. Grant would clearly make another stab at Richmond, probably by trying to skirt Lee’s front as he had so many times since crossing the Rapidan. Lee anticipated that the next attack would come from one side of the Chickahominy River or the other. Rather than face the maze of swamps and streams north and east of Richmond, Grant decided to transport his army across the James River and strike rapidly for Petersburg, the crucial rail hub 25 miles below the Confederate capital. The army that controlled Petersburg controlled Richmond.

Unlike most traditional arenas of the American Civil War, no single trait of the Appalachian experience fully captures its true nature. When reading the vast majority of Civil War texts, the conventional warfare of Gettysburg, the struggle between emancipation and slavery, and Lincoln’s presidential war powers are the story’s central elements. In Appalachia, however, that story was very different. While the region can lay claim to battles in the conventional sense, a well-defended system of slavery, and its own ambitious politicians, Appalachia’s Civil War also witnessed more guerrilla warfare and civil unrest than most other sections could imagine. Moreover, Appalachian residents endured these hardships in a region whose topography offered transgressors the privacy they needed and deprived their victims of the publicity that might have saved them their suffering. The region, too, was a comparative backwater to the political and military hotspots that have defined the conventional conflict. It would be easy to judge the region a hinterland and assume its insignificance, but the deterministic terrain, community instability, and pervasive fear combined to create a very dangerous environment over the long term. Simply put, while the citizens of Gettysburg endured the Civil War for six days and five nights, the mountaineers of Appalachia were exposed to direct threat for the full four years of war and nearly a year of postwar uncertainty.

Secession was supposed to express solidarity rooted in a shared dream of Southern independence, but something was amiss. When Georgia legislators gathered in November 1860 to consider calling a state secession convention, debate in the quiet capital of Milledgeville turned cacophonous. At issue was whether Abraham Lincoln’s election was, as Thomas R. R. Cobb put it, “sufficient ground for the dissolution of the Union.” Cobb, an ardent secessionist later killed in action at Fredericksburg, answered emphatically in the affirmative. For years, he said, Northerners had attacked slavery by opposing its westward expansion, refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law, admiring John Brown, and allowing abolitionists to preach their heresies. Things would only get worse under a Republican president. Lincoln could appoint antislavery zealots to federal offices in the South. He could withhold military aid during a slave revolt. He could plant abolitionists in the Supreme Court. Given these past crimes and future threats, who could counsel delay? Cobb conceded that if the issues were fleeting or superficial, like tariff rates, he would wait for Lincoln to make an overtly aggressive move. But safeguarding slavery was too important. “My friends,” exhorted Cobb, “there is danger in delay.” He urged “immediate, unconditional secession.”

That almost half the Northern electorate continued to vote for Democrats is one of the worst understood aspects of the Civil War experience. In too many accounts of the war, Northern Democrats either do not figure at all, or do so only as morally blind obstructionists on the wrong side of history. Yet there is a case for saying that rather than being peripheral to the narrative of the war, Northern Democrats should be center stage. Because the route to Confederate victory lay in convincing the North that the cost of coercion was too high to be worth paying, the views and actions of that large and fluctuating group of white Northerners who had never joined the Republican bandwagon was crucial.

In the days that followed his first fight, having seen bodies ripped apart by bullets and shells, Virginian Cornelius Bell prayed every night for God to keep him from returning to the battlefield. “No never again do I wish to pass through what I did last Monday evening and night.” Wherever he turned, he saw men “suffering the agonies of death.” That night, when the musketry turned to desultory skirmishing, Bell felt great sympathy for the “dead & dying enemy,” “Each & every one of whom” he wrote to his wife, “was some ones darling son, brother or husband. And there they lay cold in death, their bodies stripped of the few old clothes they had on & every indignity that could be heaped upon them was.” Some of the wounded were still clinging to life, their naked bodies shaking in the final spasms of life as Bell watched in horror. When the Shenandoah Valley farmer turned Confederate soldier thought about the desecration of the dead, he was sickened by the hypocrisy of his comrades whom “I suppose in the estimation of some [think] this was all right.” Bell could just imagine his fellow soldiers saying the following words as if memorized in their youth. “The Yanks are a God forsaken people & we are his delight.

The Battle of Gettysburg has inspired a more voluminous literature than any single event in American military history for at least three major reasons. First, after three days of fighting on July 1–3, 1863, General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and Major General George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac lost more than 51,000 dead, wounded, captured, and missing, making Gettysburg the costliest military engagement in North American history. Second, President Abraham Lincoln endowed Gettysburg with special distinction when he visited in November 1863 to dedicate the soldiers’ cemetery and delivered his immortal Gettysburg Address. Finally, Gettysburg gave the Union its first significant victory over General Lee; the subsequent euphoria helped to fix in popular memory – if not in objective history – an enduring image of Gettysburg as the turning point of the Civil War.

The Civil War was America’s great national trauma. Like the Napoleonic Wars in nineteenth-century Europe and World War II in the twentieth, the Civil War birthed a new civic order. Politics, economic and social life, and cultural expression all assumed a new cast for the war’s participants and their children. Even a century and a half later, after industrialization, urbanization, the dramatic expansion of America’s military and political power in the world, and generations of cultural change, the war’s impact is plain to see. The structure of the national government and the nature of American federalism took their modern shape as a result of the war. Americans’ sense of sectional identity emerged more clearly defined after the conflict and continues to shape politics and cultural life. The only genuine American philosophical tradition, pragmatism, emerged among postwar thinkers as a response to the horrors of the conflict. The war ended the long-standing system of racial bondage even as white Americans met the efforts of black Americans to achieve full and meaningful freedom with apathy, intransigence, and, in some cases, violent resistance.

Dr. Brown-Séquard lectured about various forms of wound trauma, injuries to the nerves, spinal cord trauma and fracture, heart disease, tetanus, and epilepsy – a range of conditions that were afflicting the Union troops. He discussed the challenges of diagnosing and treating these conditions, the possibilities of experimental medicine and blood transfusions as a cure, and the groundbreaking research of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a leading researcher and physician at the newly formed Turner’s Lane Hospital – all of which would hopefully provide answers on better managing the conditions of war trauma. This 1864 lecture, one of many during the war, which was attended by more than 100 physicians in the DC area, highlights the unique training and learning environment that was created to manage the quantity, variety, and impact of the diseases encountered during the Civil War.

The naval history of the American Civil War is often reduced to a discussion of the blockade, the clash between ironclads at the Battle of Hampton Roads, and a vague sense that gunboats and transports played an important role in the riverine campaigns of the western theater. The Union and Confederate navies certainly participated in those aspects of the larger conflict, but they also clashed on the high seas, made sophisticated combined arms operations possible on the coast, and influenced the strategic and diplomatic direction of the larger struggle between the North and the South. The naval war also defined the Civil War military experience for more than 90,000 combatants, a relatively small but not insignificant number. Although the war was ultimately won and lost on land, naval operations affected the pace, tempo, and outcome of the conflict.

Civil War soldiers marched home in 1865 as changed men. No longer holiday soldiers, they were now seasoned veterans. In “The Return of the Heroes,” poet Walt Whitman celebrated the “worn, swart, handsome, strong” men who had been made from the “stock of homestead and workshop,” hardened by the “long campaign and sweaty march,” and inured to the “hard-fought, bloody field.” Disease or marching had enervated all; shot and shell had maimed some and shaken others. Whitman nevertheless projected a vision of regenerative masculinity. The immortal ranks tramping through the poem’s stanzas displayed a manliness grounded in the work of the antebellum era, transformed by the experiences in war, and redeemed by the agricultural pursuits of the postwar years. Whitman’s poem serves as a reminder that nineteenth-century Americans thought deeply about what made a man and recognized masculinity’s mutability.

The Civil War generated mass migrations across the Confederacy and the Border South. Called by many names – refugees, contrabands, fugitives, buffaloes – civilians took to the road, hoping variously to find sanctuary, escape persecution, or secure freedom. The panoply of terms used to describe dislocated civilians reflected the diversity of their experiences: refugee planters and runaway slaves both fled the plantation but for radically different reasons and under different conditions. For the most part, historians have replicated this linguistic segmentation of Civil War refugees in their scholarship. Mary Elizabeth Massey’s 1964 Refugee Life in the Confederacy, for instance, focused almost exclusively on pro-Confederate white civilians who left home to find refuge within the shrinking bounds of the Confederacy. More recently, a number of historians have examined the approximately 500,000 African Americans who fled slavery during the Civil War. Since 1976, the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland has published a series of volumes drawn from National Archives collections documenting the black refugee experience.

Levin Smith Joynes, a Richmond physician, professor, and superintendent of the Medical College of Virginia, kept a scrapbook he entitled “The War: – 1861–65.” In it, he pasted newspaper columns labeled “Financial and Commercial,” Confederate government lists of fixed prices for agricultural produce, restaurant bills of fare, and advertisements for the sale of blockade goods and slaves. He included examples of the means of exchange people used throughout the war: Confederate treasury notes, Southern state currencies, and municipal and corporate notes called shinplasters that served as crucial means of exchange in hard times when other currencies had lost value. He also made handwritten notes and drew pictures: at the end of 1863, he recorded that a dry goods store on Main Street was selling a “large doll” and a tiny mahogany chair for it to sit in for $1,000; in January 1865, he sketched the dimensions of a 3½ ounce, $1 loaf of bread.

In spring 1862, Major General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac floated down the Chesapeake Bay, landed at Fort Monroe, and marched up the Virginia Peninsula toward the Confederate capital. This campaign was the largest amphibious operation of the war and saw perhaps Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s best chance to destroy an entire Union army. Arriving outside Richmond, Federal troops enjoyed superior numbers, yet during a week of almost continuous fighting Lee used aggressive attacks to drive McClellan away. No Union army would get as close to Richmond for two more bloody years, and Southerners discovered the leader whose subsequent victories helped build and sustain Confederate nationalism. Most important, the campaign led to using emancipation as a means of saving the Union.

After the devastating Union defeat at Fredericksburg in December 1862, both the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia repaired to seasonal camps, licked their wounds, and remained wary of their enemy. Major General Ambrose Burnside, still in command, decided to locate the Federal corps around Falmouth, Virginia (just north of Fredericksburg), in a large cluster, guarded to the west by the cavalry. The Confederate camps, hugging the southern bank of the Rappahannock, stretched from Port Royal to the south up to Banks and US fords to the north, with Major General J. E. B. Stuart’s cavalry guarding the westernmost approaches to the Fredericksburg area and posting videttes above the river. As the troops of both armies settled into winter quarters, they were treated to unusually pleasant weather. Christmas Day, 1862, dawned mild and bright. At his headquarters at Moss Neck, on the Corbin Estate grounds, Lieutenant General Stonewall Jackson entertained General Robert E. Lee, Brigadier General William Nelson Pendleton, Stuart, and their staffs, in a rare display of conviviality that underlay his stern, Presbyterian scruples. The turkeys, homemade biscuits, and other culinary delicacies the Rebel high command enjoyed that day belied the gnawing problem of adequate supply for the rank and file, who, as the winter wore onward, would find themselves reduced to half-rations. Two railroads, both only partially reliable and prone to breakdowns, supplied the Confederate army, ensuring that Lee would be vexed by logistical problems in the months leading up to the spring campaign. They grew so chronic that he was obliged to detach most of his artillery to pastures close to Guiney’s Station, about 20 miles distant, and send Lieutenant General James Longstreet with George Pickett’s and John Hood’s divisions on a supply-gathering mission to south-side Virginia and eastern North Carolina in February. Once there, they also became involved in a siege of Suffolk and could not be extracted in time to return to the main army at Fredericksburg, ensuring Lee would engage his Federal opponent with only three-quarters of his effective numbers.