Course Evaluation

Internet Required: (A), (B), (C), (D)
(E) is for extra credit.

Instructor's Introduction:

Why did this war happen? The origins of the Civil War run deep, going back to the founding of this nation after the American Revolution. They should be traced to a conflict between two noble, but mutually exclusive American ideas: the older, traditional (and largely southern) belief in personal "liberty" - the pride in working and improving one's life without government interference; vs. "equality", the newer, largely northern idea that all men were created equal, including black men. The conflict between these two ideas is stark: Southerner's, believing in their right as free-born individuals, had the right by law to own human beings. Any government attempt to usurp that right was met with resistence, including force. Quoting the Declaration of Independence, some northerner's, seeing the practice of slavery in this country as a direct contradiction of the nation's noblest ideals, were willing to confront the practice - and the South - head-on.

When he he took office as president in March of 1861, Abraham Lincoln was faced with a divided country. He received only 39% of the popular vote in the election. Southern states were seceding from the union; death threats haunted both Lincoln and his wife, Mary. Secession was on the lips of more southerners, including leaders in Virginia, just across the river from the capital. Lincoln was powerless to stop it. Most southerners had little use for the unschooled "log cabin" president from Illinois, for his stand on slavery was clear: It was wrong. And any real or perceived threat to their "peculiar institution" sent the "fire-eaters" in the South into a frenzy. War loomed dead ahead. Most Americans doubted their new president was up to the challenge.

According to Civil War historian James McPherson, the war started out as one kind of conflict and ended up as something quite different. Lincoln's goal at the beginning was simple: to keep the union together. He believed that if secession were allowed to succeed, the United States "would fragment into a dozen pitiful, squabbling countries, the laughing stock of the world." And if the confederacy triumphed, the idea of inequality would live, perhaps even spread. Abraham Lincoln prosecuted the war to preserve the union, not to save or destroy slavery. Not in the beginning, anyway...

The South saw the conflict in entirely different terms, naturally. They left the nation in the name of their own liberties - of property rights and state sovereignty - in the name of their right proclaimed by the same Declaration of Independence to "alter or abolish" the form of government, if it became destructive of the purpose of protecting their property." To the South, Abraham Lincoln, though a moderate on the issue of slavery, posed such a threat. One Texan who enlisted in the Confederate army said that, like their forefathers of 1776, he and his brothers "are now enlisted in the Holy Cause of Liberty and Independence." Both sides, in their own way, were fighting for liberty.

By 1863, President Lincoln's ideas about the war, and slavery had changed. Never believing the war would be as long or as bloody as it became, the president was forced to conceed changes in his policies. First, Lincoln grudgingly supported the idea of arming black soldiers - sending them into the fight. Previously, most northerners had seen the war as a "white man's war", unwilling to let blacks fight. But by the fall of 1862, Lincoln had made a fateful decision: the time had come to uproot the southern slave system, and to free the black slaves forever. The recruitment of blacks to fight as soldiers in the northern army made sense. With that decision, and the announcement of his Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln had raised the ante on the South. The war was no longer just about preserving the union; the war was also about uprooting the southern slave system. It was now all or nothing for the South.

In the end the South would lose the war, and its way of life in the process. To James McPherson, the destruction of the southern way of live was as revolutionary as anything in this nation's history that came before it. The Civil War destroyed the institution of slavery. The War for Independence from Great Britain had left slavery intact. The Civil War also destroyed the social structure of the old South and radically altered the balance of power between North and South. Mark Twain later wrote that the war "uprooted institutions that were centuries old...transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character." Historian Charles Beard called the war a "social cataclysm...making vast changes in the arrangement of classes, in the distribution of wealth, in the course of industrial development." * The Civil War changed us. Some believe the "union" was replaced - by a nation. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln had laid out our national political agenda with his House Divided speech. With that speech, Lincoln asserted his belief that this "nation could not survive half slave and half free." And in his Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln proclaimed "a new birth of freedom." That phrase would soon join hands with "all men are created equal" to form the essential core of our uniquely American Creed.

Quotes from James McPherson's, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution.