By July 4, 1865, vestiges of the savage battle that had wrecked Gettysburg two years earlier were beginning to fade. On this first Fourth of July since peace, thousands descended once more on the small town, but this time veterans of the Army of the Potomac joined state dignitaries to lay the cornerstone for a soldiers’ monument in the national cemetery. Speaking to the somber crowd, Major General Oliver Otis Howard, commander of the XI Corps during the battle and commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, declared that the memorial they now dedicated was raised to the Union soldier and his “unceasing herald of labor, suffering, union, liberty, and sacrifice.” “The maimed bodies, the multitude of graves, the historic fields, the monumental stones like this we are laying to-day,” he noted, “are only meager memorials of the soldiers’ work.”

Stand Watie outlasted them all. By the time the Cherokee chief and Confederate general finally laid down his arms on June 23, 1865, every other remnant of the rebellion had formally capitulated. Robert E. Lee surrendered the main Confederate army at Appomattox, Virginia in early April, while Joseph E. Johnston followed suit later that month at Bennet Place, North Carolina. Even Jefferson Davis, taking flight as president of a now nonexistent government, was finally captured by Union authorities in early May. By keeping his forces in the field for another month and a half, Watie had effectively become the very last Confederate general. Yet the story of Watie’s prolonged resistance belies a much more complicated history of Native American involvement in the Civil War. His Cherokee, Seminole, and Muscogee soldiers may have cleaved to the Confederacy until the very last days of the rebellion, but they were largely unrepresentative of the Indian experience during the war. Relatively few Native Americans professed an ideological commitment to either the Union or the Confederacy. The collective experience from centuries of dispossession at the hands of the federal government and individual settlers had imbued in Indian peoples a well-placed distrust of white Americans. If these Anglo-Americans were to destroy one another in a fratricidal bloodletting, let them do so – this was the grand strategy for much of Native America.

It was not accidental that in February 1861 Jefferson Davis, a prominent slaveholder from Mississippi, was inaugurated at Montgomery, Alabama, as the new president of the Confederate States of America. Both states had long been at the center of antebellum political power, wielding the stunning influence wrought by cotton and slavery. While South Carolina led the secessionist impulse, the emerging Confederate project would almost certainly have faltered without the crucial support of the Deep South. The Lower South states that seceded in the winter of 1860–1 commanded great political and sectional influence, shaping how and when the incipient slaveholding republic would be formed. But with the advent of war in April 1861, military thinkers considered Mississippi and Alabama the constituent states of the Deep South, judging other parts of the rebellious South in wholly different strategic terms. Mississippi and Alabama indeed played central roles in the formation of the world’s largest slaveholding republic; they would accordingly feel the hard hand of war in response to that decision. Although both states did not incur the same kind of invasions and wartime scarring endured by Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia, the Deep South functioned as a testing ground for some of the Civil War’s most transformative events, rooted almost entirely in the tense nature of civilian–military relations.

From the outset of the Civil War, the importance of the Mississippi River as a line of supply and communications and a military operations corridor was apparent to all on both sides of the Mason–Dixon line. Although “too thick to drink and too thin to plow,” the Mississippi River was regarded as the “spinal column of America.” For more than 2,000 miles the river flows silently on its course to the sea providing a natural artery of commerce. The Mississippi River and its tributaries were the interstate highways of the nineteenth century. These streams drain half the continent and gliding gracefully along their waters steamers, flatboats, and vessels of all descriptions heavily laden with the rich agricultural produce of the land moved downstream to New Orleans en route to world markets. Indeed, the sheer volume of traffic on the Mississippi and tonnage of goods it carried evidenced that the silent water of the mighty river was the single most important economic feature of the continent, the very lifeblood of America. One contemporary wrote emphatically that “The Valley of the Mississippi is America.”

The Civil War, Frederick Douglass knew, began “in the interests of slavery on both sides. The South was fighting to take slavery out of the Union, and the North fighting to keep it in the Union; the South fighting to get it beyond the limits of the United States Constitution, and the North fighting for the old guarantees;– both despising the Negro, both insulting the Negro.” Nearly all African American political activists of the Civil War era would have agreed with Douglass, not only for his analysis of the terms on which the war began, but also for the way his words captured these activists’ twin and inseparable struggles: the battle to abolish slavery, and the struggle to overcome white hostility and transform the United States into a nonracial republic.

Among the voluminous writing on the American Civil War, the role of the trans-Mississippi theater continues to be misunderstood by many scholars. Usually dismissed as distant and minor, the importance of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas to the overall history of the war has been relegated to the status of sidelight or interesting footnote. Instead, historians need to appreciate the war experience of a region of the Confederacy that contained 1.7 million people, the largest city in the South, and key natural resources. Of all of the states west of the Mississippi, the military campaigns, foreign policy, and national politics playing out in Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana had a significant impact in the history of the war and in the national trajectory that followed.

Prior to the Civil War, the US War Department, and particularly the navy, concentrated on fighting a European foe in foreign and home waters. Britain was the most commonly conceived enemy. Great coastal forts were built at major river mouths or a short distance upstream. There was no need to protect the vast network of inland rivers and smaller streams. The Civil War created unforeseen problems for both the North and the Confederacy.

The Civil War brought unprecedented challenges to military and political officials on both sides. One of the key questions was how to instill discipline upon largely volunteer troops. Confederate and Union armies were primarily made up of amateurs, men who proudly believed in the ideal of the citizen soldier, but who often defiantly pushed back against conventional army regulations. This chapter narrates the efforts of the Union and the Confederacy to instill discipline and training, especially when faced with varying degrees of demoralization and disaffection. It further explores how and why commanders and soldiers adapted (or failed to adapt) to these codes of conduct, punishments, and the wider repercussions for Americans largely unused to the strict demands of wartime service.

Throughout American history, policy toward prisoners of war has been improvised rather than carefully planned. The same held true during the Civil War. Although neither the Union nor the Confederacy prioritized the creation of an efficient prison system, prisoners of war became important tools that each side used to negotiate the major points of contention that developed during the war. The shared belief in the practice of retaliation led to an escalating cycle of mistreatment and contributed to the mental and physical misery of captives held by both sides. The suffering of prisoners did more to inhibit postwar reconciliation than any other episode of the war.

In the war’s early weeks, War Department officials in the Union and the Confederacy assumed that practices developed during the War of 1812 and the Mexican–American War would continue.

In 1892, Union veteran John Palmer addressed a gathering of thousands of fellow veterans. He was the commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), America’s largest Civil War veterans’ organization. “We were citizens before we became soldiers and volunteered at the call of an imperiled Nation, that we might fulfill the highest duties of citizenship,” Palmer explained, “and the lessons we learned amidst the storm of battle have made us more mindful of our duties as citizens.” Palmer’s address captured Americans’ long cultural attachment to the concept of citizens’ obligations to the nation when it was threatened. This tradition dated back to colonial militias and the republican principles of the American Revolution that emphasized service to the community before service to oneself. Wedded to this concept was Americans’ preference for citizen soldiers, rather than professionals due to the nation’s deeply rooted prejudices against standing armies and the historic threat they posed to republics.

Winning wars requires having the men and resources necessary to defeat the enemy as well as the political will to use them. The procurement of the first of these and the preservation of the last led the Union and the Confederacy to open fronts far removed from the armies and battlefields traditionally defining American Civil War scholarship. In 1861 the continent of Europe – in some reductive sense the political and economic “center” of a world system – quickly transformed into a unique conflict zone. Agents and officers fought with words, lawyers, rumors, and money, knowing that developments on the European front would materially affect the war’s outcome. This chapter examines the nature of the Confederate and Union offensives in Europe, particularly as men and a few women sought desperately needed supplies, funds, and political encouragement from European governments and their publics.

When one visits a national cemetery and sees the row upon row of headstones, one might imagine that it has always been this way, American veterans who served in war and peace lying side by side in a sacred burial space – a privilege reflecting a grateful nation’s thanks. In reality, the benefit of burial at a national cemetery represents a recent development. During and after the Civil War, men and women killed in action or who died in service merited a place in the hallowed ground at battlefield cemeteries; later, veterans who died after their wars joined the wartime dead.

While actual clashes between Union and Confederate forces occurred in the American West, residents of that enormous region’s landscapes during the war years can be forgiven for using America’s internecine conflict to advance other interests and agendas. Although there can be little doubt of the intimate connection between westward expansion and the politics of slavery as well as the centrality of the West to the futures imagined by both Northern and Southern statesmen, the military conflict that dominated the country east of the Mississippi River barely touched the region. Little wonder that both scholars and ordinary Americans interested in the Civil War have traditionally spoken of the “western theater” in a manner that might confuse uninitiated readers. Yet one should not think that the American Civil War was irrelevant to westerners or that the West had no impact on the struggle between North and South. In fact, the American Civil War sharpened existing divisions within western states and territories, and provided the larger context for quickening transformations in the region’s politics, culture, economy, and society. At the same time, the West, though peripheral to the main theaters of war, loomed large in the strategic thinking of Union and Confederate leaders. Thus, an examination of the American West during the war years exposes tensions and outright contradictions: simultaneously committed and disengaged, westerners found that the conflict provided the perfect cover to address their perennial interest in controlling the pace and extent of Euro-American expansion. They could do so, moreover, wearing the uniforms of a federal government that before the war had sought to check or soften their expansionistic tendencies, an irony that was not lost upon contemporary observers.

Robert E. Lee’s surrender to U. S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865 marked the effective end of the Civil War, as it symbolized the downfall of the Confederacy’s most powerful institution and spelled the doom of Southern independence. But the mythical Appomattox – a sweet and swift reconciliation that closed the book on the war – was not the one Americans chose in the spring of 1865 or in the months that followed. As soon as Lee and Grant left the stage, the nature and terms of surrender immediately became sources of contention. Grant’s magnanimity and Lee’s stoic resignation were politicized: Northerners generally saw the surrender as a vindication of the way the Union had waged the war and of the superiority of the free labor system, while former Confederates saw it as a promise of restoration – of their political voice and of the racial caste system. African Americans saw Appomattox, together with subsequent Confederate surrenders, especially in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, as a crucial phase in the long, ongoing process of emancipation.

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.

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 expected the contentious, disruptive politics that dominated the Confederacy. In the first exciting days of independence, Southern leaders looked forward to a purified, harmonious government. Liberated at last, they said, from unconstitutional aggressions and the pollution of Northern parties and demagogues, the Confederate government had a bright future. Even Jefferson Davis, the newly chosen president, who was more realistic than most, proclaimed a new era based on the ties uniting all whites in a slaveholding society. “It is joyous to look around upon a people united in heart,” he declared as he took up his duties.

Anger, suspicion, and recrimination characterized American politics in the 1850s. One major party wound up on history’s proverbial ash heap. Another, this one explicitly antislavery, rose in its stead. The eastern part of Kansas Territory turned into an armed camp as proslavery and antislavery guerrillas crisscrossed it; Charles Sumner’s blood stained the floor of the United States Senate; a former slaveowner serving as chief justice of the United States ruled that blacks were not American citizens regardless of where they were born; and a terrorist who happened to be on the right side of history tried to initiate a slave uprising in Virginia with his small band of fantasists and fanatics. After more than a decade of increasing tension over the question of bondage, the nation could no longer resolve its political differences either legislatively or at the ballot box. Abraham Lincoln, who represented the new Republican party, won the presidency without earning a single Southern vote in the electoral college. In the months after, seven Southern states pulled out the Union.

On his way to his inauguration in Washington, DC, in February 1861, Abraham Lincoln stopped at Independence Hall in Philadelphia to raise a flag. “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” he told the assembled crowd. The president-elect went on to say that the Declaration was not written merely to justify the separation of the colonies from Great Britain, but to give “liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is a sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.” Lincoln continued that if the nation could not be saved on the basis of the Declaration, it would be “truly awful.” And, as he was speaking off the cuff, he said, “I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.”