The year 1864 opened to a mixed military picture. In the American Civil War’s western theater, Union forces had won a string of victories, securing the Mississippi River and much of Tennessee. In the east, the Army of the Potomac, led by Major General George G. Meade, had rebuffed General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg but had achieved little of significance since then. Profound war weariness gripped the Northern populace. It was an election year, and President Abraham Lincoln rightfully questioned whether voters would give him a second term. Unless Federal armies won victories, the presidential race seemed destined to favor an opposition candidate willing to negotiate with the South, enabling the Rebels to achieve through political means the ends that had eluded them by force of arms.

Stationed in the Shenandoah Valley in spring 1862 2nd Massachusetts Infantry captain Henry N. Comey marveled at “the most fertile land I have ever seen … It is no wonder that the rebels are defending [it] so well.” Yet the landscape was as intimidating as it was bucolic: “We were fenced in by huge walls on both sides of us and cut off from communication except from the north.”

In June 1862 three white women in occupied Alabama got into a dispute with a Union officer over a Confederate flag. Described as a “baby flag” by one of the women, that small textile had great significance to all parties. The incident happened in Huntsville, which the Northern army had taken over in April of that year. From the beginning of the occupation, civilians and soldiers had been in conflict over many issues, tangible and intangible. The display of the flag was highly controversial, perceived as a defiant gesture toward the occupiers. Rowena Webster, one of the three women, was evidently carrying the flag in her hand; when an officer tried to take it from her, she resisted. Showing that he took the dispute very seriously, he threatened to put the smallpox virus into the houses nearby if she refused to give up the flag. Then Yankee troops arrested all three women and took them to US Major General Ormsby Mitchel of the Army of the Ohio. Their conversation was an anticlimax. Even though Mitchel was strongly pro Union, as well as an abolitionist, he seemed reluctant to punish these women, mainly because of their gender. He decided to warn them to behave better in the future, and they were released. The incident was a standoff, as were so many disputes that took place during occupation.

On Monday, February 18, 1861, on a cold, cloudy day in Montgomery, Alabama, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as the first and only president of the Confederate States of America. Davis recognized the difficult task ahead of him. The South was building a new country, and while he hoped for peace, he acknowledged that the Confederacy could be embarking on this experiment while fighting a war for its existence. As he concluded his address, the 52-year-old Davis offered a prophetic self-analysis. Speaking directly to an audience that numbered in the thousands – and indirectly to the entire Confederacy – he admitted that “you will see [in me] many errors to forgive [and] many deficiencies to tolerate.” At the same time, however, “you shall not see in me either a want of zeal or fidelity [to] the cause.” Three weeks earlier, in a private letter, he had conceded the enormity of the challenge facing whoever held the office.

For decades historians of the Civil War Era have agreed that the causes of the war lay in issues related to slavery rather than sectional disagreements over economics and state rights. Northern criticism of the slave labor system, Southern proslavery defensiveness, Southern efforts to expand slavery into US territories, Northern fear of proslavery domination of the federal government, and a Northern free-labor ideology all had roles. While recognizing the importance of these slavery-related factors, this chapter emphasizes the role of physical conflict over slavery itself in pushing the two sections toward war. Slave escapes, Southern attempts to recapture escapees and kidnap free African Americans into slavery, Northern aid to the escapees and kidnap victims, and aggressive physical abolitionist interference with slavery in the South shaped this long conflict.

Ulysses S. Grant’s successful campaign against Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862 left the western Confederacy reeling. The capture of the Tennessee and Cumberland river forts placed nearly a third of available Confederate troop strength in the theater into Federal custody. Flanked by Grant and facing Don Carlos Buell’s approaching Army of the Ohio as well, Confederate department commander Albert Sidney Johnston led a ragged, dismal, rain and sleet soaked retreat out of southern Kentucky. Plagued by desertions and stragglers, his army stumbled across Tennessee until it reached northern Mississippi. Nashville, one of the Confederacy’s most industrialized cities, fell without a fight in Johnston’s wake before the month ended, and soon with it most of Middle Tennessee’s rich farmlands. Simultaneously, John Pope’s Army of the Mississippi and Andrew Foote’s fleet of Union gunboats pursued Confederates fleeing their Mississippi River “Gibraltar” at Columbus, Kentucky. They drove down the flooded river valley until encountering the Confederate bastion at Island No. 10 opposite New Madrid, Missouri. Farther west across the river, Federal troops under Samuel Curtis already were in the act of shoving Sterling Price’s secessionist Missourians out of southwestern Missouri into Arkansas during a brutal winter campaign. Reuniting the separated Confederate forces including Price’s that had won a victory at Wilson’s Creek the previous summer, new Confederate commander Earl Van Dorn launched an ill-fated attack at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, that left his defeated army staggering southward in the cold. Not surprisingly, given the collapse of the Confederacy’s western line of defenses and its apparent implosion, many Federal soldiers gleefully anticipated a prompt end to the war after an additional season of mopping up.

Emancipation is the Civil War’s hallmark achievement and most enduring legacy. In many ways, it is the conflict’s distinguishing mark, the silver lining that elevates it from another pointless bloodbath to a just war. Yet while it was taking place, the destruction of Southern slavery was a long-winded, haphazard process, fraught with inconsistencies and suffused with tragedy. At any given moment and at any given place, the fate of emancipation rested on a combination of factors: the particular configuration of slavery in the area, the geographical lay of the land, the balance of power between Union and Confederate forces, the policies of both governments, the individual attitudes of local commanders, and the ability of enslaved people to seize opportunity from these shifting circumstances. On the ground, the war never was a steady march towards freedom, and the collapse of the slave system was marked by great variation across time and space. In some locales, it was quick and sudden, marked by wholesale departures of the enslaved population or by spurts of violence against masters and their property. In others, slavery died a slow and gradual death, with acts of resistance so subtle they were barely visible to the naked eye.

The American Civil War was not a total war. Although the conflict occasioned immense carnage, Union and Confederate armies never systematically disregarded distinctions between combatant and noncombatant, the definitive feature of the total wars of the twentieth century. Nor was the Civil War the first “modern” war, at least if defined by revolutionary innovations in military technologies and tactics, or by a dramatic expansion in the scope and scale of the conflict’s destruction.

Scholarly debates over whether the Civil War was a total or modern war were, at their best, meant to provide a better understanding of the character of the Civil War as a military conflict. If Civil War historians now generally agree that the conflict was neither “total” nor “modern,” the larger task of more precisely comprehending the nature and limits of the war’s violence still remains.

On April 20, 1861, the New York Irish American, dedicated to telling news about and looking after the interests of the growing Irish population in the United States, acknowledged the news coming from South Carolina about the nascent Confederacy’s firing upon Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Founded and operated by Patrick Lynch, who had left Ireland in 1847, the paper was one of the Irish “community’s leading voices” in the antebellum era. Lynch’s editorial noted that this news would “be read with regret by every true patriot.” The paper had hoped for compromise because war would bring delight to “the despotic governments of the Old World” because the government that was “a perpetual reproach to their own narrow and tyrannical systems” was now self-destructing. They would be able to boast that “the grand experiment of man’s capacity for self-government had come to naught.

Georgia Lee Tatum explained that she was not a “Republican Yankee” when she sent the manuscript of Disloyalty in the Confederacy (1934) to the University of North Carolina Press. To the contrary, her Missouri grandparents came from Virginian roots, were slaveholders, and had supported the Confederacy. Tatum was acutely aware that her topic of Southern dissent was highly controversial, if not taboo, in the Jim Crow South. The press shared her concern and required a $500 subsidy before publication. Nonetheless, Tatum’s important monograph contributed to a revisionist historiography that stressed internal opposition toward the Confederacy, strongest among those who did not own slaves, which challenged the dominant Lost Cause myth of Southern white unity.

During the Civil War and in its aftermath, Americans experienced and undertook the most comprehensive reconsideration of their government, society, and laws since the constitutional convention in 1787. As Republican Representative Daniel Morris of New York announced to his fellow congressmen in May 1864, urging them to vote for a resolution to send to the states for ratification an amendment to abolish slavery, they faced a “moment of greater responsibility than has devolved upon a like body since the year 1776.” By the time Morris said these words, the United States had endured over three years of bloody Civil War during which time President Abraham Lincoln had declared free millions of slaves pursuant to the Emancipation Proclamation, thousands of black men filled the Union army’s ranks, and Congress had been considering how to make freedom national. The federal government had suspended the writ of habeas corpus, conscripted men into the armed forces, and imposed the first national income tax to help pay for the conflict. And, Republicans in Congress passed wide-ranging domestic and economic measures ranging from bank and currency reform to the chartering of the first transcontinental railroad as well as programs designed to foster higher education and promote development of land in the western states.

The current method of differentiating levels of war did not exist during the Civil War. Most Civil War leaders only looked at the prospective battle (tactical issues), not at how each individual engagement fitted into a campaign (the operational level of war), and how this related to the nation’s military strategy (the methods for prosecuting it). Some tout a supposed awareness of the teachings of Baron Antoine-Henri Jomini’s Art of War among Civil War leaders, but all that can be proven is this work’s influence upon certain generals such as the Union’s Henry Wager Halleck and the Confederacy’s Pierre G. T. Beauregard.

Few campaigns and battles of the Civil War better reflect the complicated relationship between the military and the political, war policy and practice, and the incessant quest to find balance between them all than Second Manassas. The Second Manassas campaign of the late summer of 1862 resulted in the largest battle fought on North American soil until that time. It came at a time of growing urgency – even anxiety – for the Confederacy. The still-new commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee (just thirteen weeks in command at the time of the battle), took to the field seeking an antidote to Confederate defeats elsewhere in the South and the turgid warfare of earthworks and siege fortifications that had characterized campaigns in both Virginia and the western theater that summer.