Lee was from a well respected First Family of Virginia, with ties to the Continental Army and the founding fathers of the nation. While Grant was from a middle-class family with no martial or family political ties.
Lee was offered command of the federal army amassing in Washington, in , but he declined the command and threw his hat in with the Confederacy. Lee's early war career got off to a rocky start, but he found his stride in June of after he assumed command of what he dubbed the Army of Northern Virginia.
Grant, on the other hand, found early success in the war but was haunted by rumors of alcoholism. By , the two men were by far the best generals on their respective sides.
In March of , Grant was promoted to lieutenant general and brought to the Eastern Theater of the war, where he and Lee engaged in a relentless campaign from May of to Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House eleven months later.
The war bankrupted much of the South, left its roads, farms, and factories in ruins, and all but wiped out an entire generation of men who wore the blue and the gray. More than , men died in the Civil War, more than any other war in American history.
The southern states were occupied by Union soldiers, rebuilt, and gradually re-admitted to the United States over the course of twenty difficult years known as the Reconstruction Era. It was clear to many that it was only a matter of time before slavery would be fully abolished. As the war drew to a close, but before the southern states were re-admitted to the United States, the northern states added the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution. The amendments are also known as the "Civil War Amendments.
The 14th Amendment has played an ongoing role in American society as different groups of citizens continue to lobby for equal treatment by the government. The United States government has identified battles that had a significant impact on the larger war.
Many of these battlefields have been developed—turned into shopping malls, pizza parlors, housing developments, etc. Since the end of the Civil War, veterans and other citizens have struggled to preserve the fields on which Americans fought and died.
The American Battlefield Trust and its partners have preserved tens of thousands of acres of battlefield land. Civil War Article. The Civil War profoundly shaped the United States as we know it today. Nevertheless, the war remains one of the most misunderstood events in American history. Here are ten basic facts you need to know about America's defining struggle. Abraham Lincoln in Fact 3: The issues of slavery and central power divided the United States.
Fact 8: The North won the Civil War. A battle-scarred house in Atlanta, Georgia. Fact Many Civil War battlefields are threatened by development. Topic s :. But in recent years, historians have rubbed much of the luster from the Civil War and questioned its sanctification. Should we consecrate a war that killed and maimed over a million Americans? Or should we question, as many have in recent conflicts, whether this was really a war of necessity that justified its appalling costs?
Similar reservations were voiced by an earlier generation of historians known as revisionists. From the s to 40s, they argued that the war was not an inevitable clash over irreconcilable issues.
Rather, it was a "needless" bloodbath, the fault of "blundering" statesmen and "pious cranks," mainly abolitionists. Some revisionists, haunted by World War I, cast all war as irrational, even "psychopathic. World War II undercut this anti-war stance.
Nazism was an evil that had to be fought. So, too, was slavery, which revisionists--many of them white Southerners--had cast as a relatively benign institution, and dismissed it as a genuine source of sectional conflict.
Historians who came of age during the Civil Rights Movement placed slavery and emancipation at the center of the Civil War. This trend is now reflected in textbooks and popular culture.
The Civil War today is generally seen as a necessary and ennobling sacrifice, redeemed by the liberation of four million slaves. But cracks in this consensus are appearing with growing frequency, for example in studies like America Aflame , by historian David Goldfield. Goldfield states on the first page that the war was "America's greatest failure. Unlike the revisionists of old, Goldfield sees slavery as the bedrock of the Southern cause and abolition as the war's great achievement.
But he argues that white supremacy was so entrenched, North and South, that war and Reconstruction could never deliver true racial justice to freed slaves, who soon became subject to economic peonage, Black Codes, Jim Crow, and rampant lynching. Few contemporary scholars go as far as Goldfield, but others are challenging key tenets of the current orthodoxy.
Gary Gallagher, a leading Civil War historian at the University of Virginia, argues that the long-reigning emphasis on slavery and liberation distorts our understanding of the war and of how Americans thought in the s. Very few Northerners went to war seeking or anticipating the destruction of slavery. They fought for Union, and the Emancipation Proclamation was a means to that end: a desperate measure to undermine the South and save a democratic nation that Lincoln called "the last best, hope of earth.
Gallagher also feels that hindsight has dimmed recognition of how close the Confederacy came to achieving its aims. It needed to inflict enough pain to convince a divided Northern public that defeating the South wasn't worth the cost.
This nearly happened at several points, when rebel armies won repeated battles in and As late as the summer of , staggering casualties and the stalling of Union armies brought a collapse in Northern morale, cries for a negotiated peace, and the expectation that anti-war and anti-black Democrats would take the White House.
The fall of Atlanta that September narrowly saved Lincoln and sealed the South's eventual surrender. Allen Guelzo, director of Civil War studies at Gettysburg College, adds the Pennsylvania battle to the roster of near-misses for the South.
In his new book, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion , he identifies points when Lee's army came within minutes of breaking the Union line. If it had, he believes the already demoralized Army of the Potomac "would have gone to pieces. Imagining these and other scenarios isn't simply an exercise in "what if" history, or the fulfillment of Confederate fantasy fiction. It raises the very real possibility that many thousands of Americans might have died only to entrench secession and slavery.
Below, in chronological order, are five of the most significant battles that took place. Approximately 42 kilometers 25 miles into the march, his path was blocked by the Confederate Army under the command of General P. At first, it seemed as if the Union Army would prevail, but as the battle raged throughout the morning, the Confederates held their ground.
Once the Confederate army received reinforcements early that afternoon, their counteroffensive defeated the Union troops. The retreating Union troops left the route to Washington, D. Even though combined casualties were relatively few around 4, as a result of the battle, the North realized they were in for a long, bitter war. The army planned to move south and capture an important Confederate east-west railway hub in northern Mississippi.
The Union planned to unite two armies—under Ulysses S. Grant and Don Carlos Buell—and then take Corinth. Beauregard—the new Confederate general after Johnston was mortally wounded—withdrew.
The battle resulted in combined casualties of more than 23, people. Lee had decided to take the war to the North. He devised a plan to split his army and take supplies to Maryland, move into Pennsylvania, and threaten Washington, D.
His plans fell into Union hands, and the Union Army marched to confront the force he commanded at Antietam Creek, in northern Maryland. However, the Union General McClellan, known for his cautious approach to engaging in battle, responded tentatively, waiting 18 hours before moving his troops. This gave the Confederates time to bring in reinforcements. Although Lincoln was furious that McClellan allowed Lee to escape, he used the occasion to announce the Emancipation Proclamation.
Lincoln replaced McClellan, but his new generals lost decisively at Fredericksburg, Virginia December 13, , and Chancellorsville, Virginia April 30, —May 4, These Confederate victories encouraged Lee to renew his plan to invade the North.
The forces met at the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the morning of the first of July. Despite early successes, the Confederate forces were not able to drive the Union Army off their ground. The following day, as reinforcements arrived for both sides, Lee again failed to dislodge the Union Army. The thrid of July saw one last push from the Confederates. Although the charge broke through Union lines, the Confederates were unable to consolidate their gains, and retreated.
Lee prepared for the counterattack he expected the next day, but it never came. He withdrew his forces on the fourth of July, and the Union Army did not pursue. Union casualties numbered around 23, people, while Confederate casualties numbered around 28, people. Lincoln delivered the famous Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the military cemetery later that fall.
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