The war that ravaged the United States in 1861 preserved the nation created in 1776, but it also transformed it. It created a national army and a central bank; it established a military school and an internal revenue service; and it enacted new laws extending the federal courts’ powers, imposing direct taxes on individuals, and allowing women to vote. It was the first time that the United States fought on its home soil and the first major war where many people, including a significant percentage of whites, took up arms.
The events that precipitated the conflict started with the publication of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in 1852, and continued with the abolitionist raid on a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859 and the Supreme Court decision in the case of Dred Scott. The final straw was Abraham Lincoln’s election as the presidential candidate of a party explicitly opposed to slavery, which jolted white Southerners into action. On April 12, 1861, the Confederate forces at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor fired on a Union garrison, forcing it to lower the American flag. Lincoln called out militia to suppress the insurrection; four more slave states joined the rebellion and formed the Confederate States of America.
The war lasted four years, and both sides mobilized their armies on an unprecedented scale. The Union mustered about 2.1 million military-age men, more than half its 1860 population; the Confederacy fielded around 800,000 to 900,000 men. The Union’s strategy, outlined by general Winfield Scott, involved a naval blockade of southern ports and a combined Army-Navy operation to split the Confederacy by taking control of the Mississippi River. The Confederate strategy centered on defensive-offensive campaigns, and in 1864-1865 General William Tecumseh Sherman destroyed the South’s economic infrastructure.
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