Lecture: The Civil War
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 14
Opening
Think about a nurse who sees how a crisis reaches families far from where it started, or a business student watching prices climb faster than wages. Both of them would recognize the people in this lecture. In the Civil War, a war that began over the Union reached into every kitchen, every field, and every camp. And while the shooting went on, the country had to decide what the war was for.
You've built the tools for this. In Week 12 you read Dred Scott v. Sandford, the decision of 1857 that said Black Americans were not citizens. In Week 13 you followed secession, Lincoln's First Inaugural Address of 1861, and the attack on Fort Sumter that began the war.
In this lecture I'll follow the war from 1861 to 1865. We'll read two documents: the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address. The question I want you to carry is this one. How did a war for union become a war for freedom? This is heavy material, with war deaths and people who drowned seeking freedom, and I'll say those things plainly. Take it at your own pace.
1. Two sides, and the scale of the war
Imagine two teams before a long season. One has more players, a bigger budget, and better buses. The other plays every game at home, and it only needs the first team to give up.
That's close to the shape of the war. The Union is the United States government and the states that stayed loyal to it, including the four slave states that did not secede. The Confederacy is the government the seceding slave states formed. The Union had more of what we call resources: the people, factories, farms, and railroads a side in a war can turn into fighting power. It had more people, most of the factories, and most of the railroads.
The Confederacy had a different advantage. It fought on the defensive, on its own ground. Its strategy, its overall plan for winning, could be to hold out until the North gave up. The Union had to march in and conquer.
Now the scale, said plainly. The Civil War killed more Americans than any other war in the nation's history. Historians count the dead in the hundreds of thousands, and their estimates have been revised upward over time. Because the count keeps changing, this course says the scale in words and asks you to memorize no figure.
Pause and try this. In 1861, was the Union fighting to end slavery?
Think back to the speech Lincoln gave when he took office.
Here's the answer. No, it was fighting to restore the Union, because in his First Inaugural of 1861 Lincoln said he had no purpose to interfere with slavery in the states where it existed.
2. The people who freed themselves
Picture the edge of a Union army camp at night, early in the war. A family walks out of the dark. They've left a plantation behind, and they ask the soldiers one thing: don't send us back.
That happened again and again from 1861 on. Many Union commanders refused to return the people who reached their lines. They used a legal label, contraband of war, meaning enemy property they wouldn't hand back. It's an ugly label, because it still treats people as property. But it opened a door. Congress followed with the Confiscation Acts. The 1861 act let the Union seize property used to support the rebellion, and that law counted enslaved people as property. The 1862 act went further. It let the government free enslaved people in rebel territory the Union army took, and it barred sending back people who'd escaped.
Settlements grew up around Union posts. A contraband camp was a settlement near a Union army post where people who had escaped slavery lived and worked. The camp at Corinth, Mississippi, built a school, a church, and a hospital. In 1862 Congress also ended slavery in the federal territories and in Washington, DC.
Historians have a name for what these families did. Self-emancipation is the name for the ways enslaved people freed themselves during the war, above all by fleeing to Union lines. According to the Smithsonian's museum of African American history, enslaved people forced the issue, fleeing to Union camps by the tens of thousands.
Pause and try this. Which came first: enslaved people fleeing to Union lines, or the Emancipation Proclamation?
Put the two in order before you answer.
Here's the answer. The flight came first, from 1861 on, and it pushed commanders and Congress to act before the Proclamation of 1863.
3. Two proclamations in one document
Here's a puzzle I love. You open one document in an archive and find a second, older document folded inside it.
That's the Emancipation Proclamation, and it's this week's Primary Source Workshop document. Let's source it. The Emancipation Proclamation is the presidential proclamation Abraham Lincoln issued as commander in chief in 1863, which declared free the enslaved people in the areas then in rebellion and opened the armed service to Black men. Its own text dates it the first day of January 1863. The National Archives keeps it.
Why did he issue it? Lincoln acted as commander in chief, the President's role as head of the army and navy. He called the order a war measure, an action a government takes to weaken an enemy in wartime. That's a paraphrase, not a quotation.
Now the folded document. In September 1862 Lincoln had issued a preliminary proclamation, which warned the states in rebellion that enslaved people there would be declared free if those states did not return to the Union. The 1863 text recites it at its opening. So two pinned phrases sit inside one document. The preliminary proclamation promised that those people would be "thenceforward, and forever free". The order of 1863 declared that they "are, and henceforward shall be free".
Pause and try this. The phrase "thenceforward, and forever free" appears in the 1863 document. Which proclamation does it belong to?
Find where the recited text begins.
Here's the answer. It belongs to the preliminary proclamation of 1862, because the 1863 text quotes that earlier order at its opening.
4. What the Proclamation did and did not free
Picture two plantations a few miles apart in 1863. One sits in a county the Proclamation names. The other sits in a county it leaves out. On paper, the people on the first are declared free, and the order says nothing about the second.
That line on paper is the key to this section. The Proclamation applied only to the areas then in rebellion. It did not apply to the loyal border states. Its own text also left out the counties that became West Virginia, named parishes of Louisiana including New Orleans, and named counties of Virginia. Where it did apply, Confederate officials didn't obey it, so freedom became real as Union armies advanced and as enslaved people reached them.
So what ended slavery everywhere? The 13th Amendment, passed by Congress in January 1865 and ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, throughout the United States. An amendment is part of the Constitution. A commander's order is a war measure. The gap between them is 2 years.
Here's the reading in one plain sentence. The Emancipation Proclamation shows that Lincoln, as commander in chief in 1863, declared free the enslaved people in the areas then in rebellion and opened the armed service to Black men. It doesn't by itself show that every enslaved person went free, or how enslaved people won freedom for themselves.
Pause and try this. Did the Emancipation Proclamation free the enslaved people of the border states?
Remember which areas the order names.
Here's the answer. No, because it applied only to the areas in rebellion, and the 13th Amendment of 1865 ended slavery everywhere.
5. Black military service
Picture a recruiting notice on a church door in a Northern city in 1863. It calls on Black men to enlist. Two years earlier, men who answered a call like that would have been sent home.
A federal law dating back to 1792 barred Black men from bearing arms in the U.S. Army. When the war began in 1861, Black volunteers came forward and were turned away. The Proclamation of 1863 opened the door. After it, Black soldiers and sailors served in large numbers, and most of them had been enslaved. The soldiers served in the United States Colored Troops, the Union army regiments of Black soldiers, most of them formerly enslaved, raised in large numbers after 1863 and led mostly by white officers.
Here's one thread that ties the war together. Men from the contraband camp at Corinth, Mississippi, formed the 1st Alabama Infantry of African Descent, later renamed the 55th United States Colored Troops. People who had freed themselves went on to fight. Frederick Douglass, whom you read in Week 12, worked to recruit Black soldiers. The museum and the video on this week's resources page give their own counts. This course says the scale in words, large numbers, and asks you to memorize no count.
Pause and try this. Put these in order: Black volunteers turned away, and Black soldiers serving in large numbers.
Use the year of the Proclamation as your hinge.
Here's the answer. The volunteers were turned away in 1861, and Black soldiers served in large numbers after the Proclamation of 1863.
6. The Gettysburg Address
Picture a hillside in Pennsylvania in November 1863, with rows of fresh graves across it. Thousands of people stand in the cold to hear two speeches.
The graves had a cause. After three days of fighting at Gettysburg in July 1863, a Soldiers' National Cemetery was laid out for the Union dead. I name the battle only as the reason for the cemetery, because our subject is the speech. At the dedication, Edward Everett spoke for two hours. Then Lincoln spoke for about two minutes.
That short speech is the Gettysburg Address: Lincoln's short speech at the dedication of the cemetery, which asked listeners to finish the dead soldiers' work and give the nation a new birth of freedom. The Library of Congress dates it 19 November 1863. The Avalon Project prints the text with no date and names no copy, so we take the date from the Library's record. The speech opens by reaching back to the Declaration of Independence and its claim that all men are created equal. It ends with our pinned fragment: "government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth".
Here's what a close reader notices. The speech never names slavery. It never describes the fighting either. It talks about the dead, and about what the living owe them.
Pause and try this. Does the Gettysburg Address celebrate the battle?
Ask what the speech tells its listeners to do.
Here's the answer. No, because it asks the living to finish the work the dead began, and it never describes the fighting.
7. A speech without one fixed text
Imagine someone asks you to quote the Gettysburg Address exactly. You open two archives and find two versions, and one has words the other lacks. Which one is the speech?
A manuscript copy is a copy of a text written out by hand. There are 5 known manuscript copies of the Gettysburg Address. The Library of Congress holds 2 of them, the copies Lincoln gave his secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay. So 3 are held elsewhere, and Lincoln wrote those three later, for charitable causes.
The copies don't match. The Library says the Nicolay and Hay drafts differ in many words and in punctuation. Its specialist notes that the Nicolay copy lacks the words naming God that appear in the text Avalon prints. So what do you do as a careful reader? You name the text you quote. This course quotes the one the Avalon Project prints, and it takes the speech's date from the Library's record.
Pause and try this. How many known manuscript copies of the Gettysburg Address are held outside the Library of Congress?
Take the Library's two away from the total.
Here's the answer. Three, because 5 copies are known and the Library holds 2 of them.
8. Total war and the home fronts
Go back to a market in a Confederate city in 1863. A woman holds out her money for flour, and the price has climbed again. The battles are far away, but the war is at her table.
That's the home front: life away from the fighting during a war, where civilians grow food, work in factories, pay taxes, and bear shortages and high prices. In the South, food prices in 1863 were almost ten times those of 1861. That spring, women workers in Richmond, the Confederate capital, marched to demand food at the prices the army paid. When they were turned away, the march became the Richmond Bread Riot, as women broke into shops and warehouses.
The North had its own strain. A draft is a law requiring men of fighting age to serve in the army if their names were called. The Union's draft law of 1863 let a man escape service by paying 300 dollars or sending a substitute. To many workers, that made the war look like a rich man's war.
By late 1864 the Union was waging total war: war waged against an enemy's food supply, railroads, and will to fight, as well as against its armies. William T. Sherman's army marched across Georgia to the sea, destroying food stores and railroads. It had a grave cost. At Ebenezer Creek, a Union general had the army's bridge taken up before the self-emancipated people following the army could cross, and many drowned.
Pause and try this. Was the home front safe from the war?
Think about the woman at the market.
Here's the answer. No, because runaway prices, hunger, a marching army, and the draft all brought the war's cost to civilians.
9. The end of the war, and the week's record
Picture a small Virginia village in April 1865. Two generals meet in a house, and one army stops fighting.
Confederate surrenders began with Robert E. Lee's surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in April 1865. That same month, John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, and Lincoln died the next morning. The theatre's own account says Booth decided to kill him after Lincoln spoke in favor of the vote for some Black men.
Now let's order the week. The war began in 1861, the year of Lincoln's First Inaugural. The Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address came in 1863. The 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865. That's 2 years, then 2 more, for a span of 4. And from Dred Scott in 1857 to the Proclamation in 1863 is 6 years.
One more habit. Think of three sources about the war. A soldier's 1862 letter home from a camp in Virginia is primary. A 1903 memoir by a veteran recalling that camp decades later is primary for its author's own experience, read with the gap in time in mind. A documentary film made in 2015 about the war is secondary.
Pause and try this. Is the veteran's 1903 memoir a primary or a secondary source?
Ask whether the writer lived what the memoir describes.
Here's the answer. It's primary for its author's own experience, because he lived it, though you read it with the gap in time in mind.
Closing
Let me pull it together. The Union had more people, factories, and railroads, and the Confederacy fought on the defensive, in the deadliest war in the nation's history. In 1861 the war was for the Union. Enslaved people fled to Union lines from the start and pushed commanders and Congress to act. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 carries two proclamations inside it, and it freed people only in the areas in rebellion; the 13th Amendment of 1865 ended slavery everywhere. Black soldiers and sailors served in large numbers after 1863. The Gettysburg Address survives in 5 handwritten copies, so you name the text you quote. Total war and runaway prices reached both home fronts. And in April 1865 came Appomattox, and Lincoln's death.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. Next week, in Reconstruction, you'll ask what freedom and citizenship meant once the war was over.
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