In May, the Constitutional Union party, which consisted of conservative former Whigs, Know Nothings, and pro-Union Democrats nominated John Bell of Tennessee for President.  This short-lived party denounced sectionalism and tried to rally support around a platform that supported the Constitution and Union.  Meanwhile, the Republican party nominated Abraham Lincoln on the third ballot.

     The 1860 election revealed how divided the country had become.  There were actually two separate sectional campaigns: one in the North, pitting Lincoln against Douglas, and one in the South between Breckinridge and Bell.  Only Stephen Douglas mounted a truly national campaign.  The Republicans did not campaign in the South and Lincoln's name did not appear on the ballot in ten states.

     In the final balloting, Lincoln won only 39.9 percent of the popular vote, but received 180 electoral college votes, 57 more than the combined total of his opponents.

     James L. Petigru (1789-1863), a staunch South Carolina unionist, reportedly responded to the Palmetto State's actions by saying that his state was too small for a country and too large for an insane asylum.

     In the Upper South, opposition to secession was even greater.  In Virginia, on February 4, opponents of immediate secession received twice as many votes as proponents, while Tennessee voters rejected a call for a secession convention.

     On February 1, a secession convention in Texas voted to leave the Union.  Three weeks later, a popular vote ratified the decision by a three-to-one margin.  Texas Governor Sam Houston (1793-1863), who owned a dozen slaves, repudiated secession and refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy.  As a result, he was forced from office.  Houston predicted: "Our people are going to war to perpetuate slavery, and the first gun fired in the war will be the [death] knell of slavery."

     In early February 1861, the states of the lower South established a new government, the Confederate States of America, in Montgomery, Alabama, and drafted a constitution.  Although modeled on the U.S. Constitution, this document specifically referred to slavery, state sovereignty, and God.  It explicitly guaranteed slavery in the states and territories, but prohibited the international slave trade.  It also limited the President to a single six-year term, gave the President a line-item veto, required a two-thirds vote of Congress to admit new states, and prohibited protective tariffs and government funding of internal improvements.

     As President, the Confederates selected former U.S. Senator and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis (1808-1889).  The Alabama secessionist William L. Yancey (1814-1863) introduced Davis as Confederate President by declaring:   "The man and the hour have met.  Prosperity, honor, and victory await his administration."

     At first glance, Davis seemed much more qualified to be President than Lincoln.  Unlike the new Republican President, who had no formal education, Davis was a West Point graduate.  And while Lincoln had only two weeks of military experience, as a militia captain, without combat experience in the Black Hawk War, Davis had served as a regimental commander during the Mexican War.  In office, however, Davis's rigid, humorless personality; his poor health; his inability to delegate authority; and, above all, his failure to inspire confidence in his people would make him a far less effective chief executive than Lincoln.  During the war, a southern critic described Davis as "false and hypocritical...miserable, stupid, one-eyed, dyspeptic, arrogant...cold, haughty, peevish, narrow-minded, pig-headed, [and] malignant."

     Threats of secession were nothing new.  Some Southerners had threatened to leave the Union during a Congressional debate over slavery in 1790, the Missouri Crisis of 1819 and 1820, the Nullification Crisis of 1831 and 1832, and the crisis over California statehood in 1850.  In each case, the crisis was resolved by compromise. Many expected the same pattern to prevail in 1861.

     Four months separated Lincoln's election to the presidency and his inauguration.  During this period, there were two major compromise efforts. John J. Crittenden (1787-1863) of Kentucky, who held Henry Clay's old Senate seat, proposed a series of Constitutional amendments, including one to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean, in defiance of the Compromise of 1850 and the Dred Scott decision.  The amendment would prohibit slavery north of the line but explicitly protect it south of the line.  On January 16, 1861, however, the Senate, which was controlled by Democrats, refused to consider the Crittenden compromise.  Every Republican Senator opposed the measure and six Democrats abstained.  On March 4, the Senate reconsidered Crittenden's compromise proposal and defeated it by a single vote.

     Meanwhile, Virginia had proposed a peace convention to be held in Washington, D.C., February 4, 1861, the very day that the new Confederate government was to be set up in Alabama.  Delegates, who represented 21 of the 34 states, voted narrowly to recommend extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific.  The delegates also would have required a four-fifths vote of the Senate to acquire new territory.  The Senate rejected the convention's proposals 28 to 7.

     Compromise failed in early 1861 because it would have required the Republican Party to repudiate its guiding principle: no extension of slavery into the western territories.  President-elect Lincoln made the point bluntly in a message to a Republican in Congress:  "Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery. The instant you do, they have us under again; all our labor is lost, and sooner or later must be done over.... The tug has to come and better now than later."

     In his inaugural address, Lincoln attempted to be both firm and conciliatory.  He declared secession to be wrong; but he also promised that he would "not interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists."  He announced that he would use "the power confided to me...to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government."  But he assured Southerners that "there would be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere."

    When he delivered his inaugural address, the new President assumed that there was time for southern pro-union sentiment, which he greatly overestimated, to reassert itself, making a peaceful resolution to the crisis possible.  The next morning, however, he received a letter from Robert Anderson informing him that Fort Sumter's supplies would be exhausted in four to six weeks and that it would take a 20,000-man force to reinforce the fort.

     Lincoln received conflicting advice about what to do.  Winfield Scott, his commanding general, saw "no alternative to surrender," convinced that it would take eight months to prepare naval and ground forces to relieve Fort Sumter.  Secretary of State William H. Seward also favored abandoning the fort to avoid provoking a civil war, but also considered the possibility of inciting a foreign war (probably with France or Spain) as a way to reunite the country.  Lincoln's Postmaster General Montgomery Blair and Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase favored dispatching a force of warships and transports to relieve the fort and assert federal authority, since "every hour of acquiescence ... strengthens [the rebels'] hands at home and their claims to recognition as an independent people abroad."

     In the end, Lincoln decided to try to peacefully re-supply the fort with provisions and to inform the Confederate government of his decision beforehand.  Unarmed ships with supplies would try to relieve the fort. Only if the South Carolinians used force to stop the mission would warships, positioned outside Charleston harbor, go into action.  In this way, Lincoln hoped to make the Confederacy responsible for starting a war.

     Upon learning of Lincoln's plan, Jefferson Davis ordered General Pierre G.T. Beauregard (1818-1893) to force Fort Sumter's surrender before the supply mission could arrive.  At 4:30 a.m. April 12, Confederate guns began firing on Fort Sumter.  Thirty-three hours later, the installation surrendered. Incredibly, there were no fatalities on their side.

     Ironically, the only fatalities at Fort Sumter occurred just after the battle ended.  During the surrender ceremony, a pile of cartridges ignited, killing one soldier, fatally wounding another, and injuring four.

     Lincoln was convinced that the Confederate states had seceded from the Union for the sole purpose of maintaining slavery.  Like President Jackson before him, he considered the Union to be permanent, an agreement by the people and not just of the states.  Further, he strongly agreed with the sentiments voiced by Daniel Webster (1782-1852), when that Whig Senator declared in 1830, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable."  Lincoln, too, believed that a strong Union provided the only firm safeguard for American liberties and republican institutions.  By attacking Fort Sumter, the Confederacy had directly challenged federal authority. And so the war came.

     Lincoln responded to the attack on Fort Sumter by calling on the states to provide 75,000 militiamen for 90 days service.  Twice that number volunteered.  But the eight slave states still in the Union refused to furnish troops, and four--Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia--seceded.

     But Confederates also felt confident.  For one thing, the Confederacy had only to wage a defensive war and wait for northern morale to erode.  In contrast, the Union had to conquer and control the Confederacy's 750,000 square miles of territory.  Further, the Confederate army seemed superior to that of the Union.  More Southerners had attended West Point or other military academies, had served as army officers, and had experience using firearms and horses.  At the beginning of 1861, the U.S. army consisted of only 16,000 men, most of whom served on the frontier fighting Indians.  History, too, seemed to be on the South's side.  Before the Civil War, most nations that had fought for independence, including, of course, the United States, had won their struggle.  A school textbook epitomized southern confidence: "If one Confederate soldier can whip seven Yankees," it asked, "how many soldiers can whip 49 Yanks?"

     One reason why the Civil War was so lethal was the introduction of improved weaponry.  Cone-shaped bullets replaced musket balls, and beginning in 1862, smooth-bore muskets were replaced with rifles with grooved barrels, which imparted spin on a bullet and allowed a soldier to hit a target a quarter of a mile away.  The new weapons had appeared so suddenly that commanders did not immediately realize that they needed to compensate for the increased range and accuracy of rifles.

     The Civil War was the first war in which soldiers used repeating rifles (which could fire several shots without reloading), breech loading arms (which were loaded from behind the barrel instead of through the muzzle), and automated weapons like the Gatling gun.  The Civil War also marked the first use by Americans of shrapnel, booby traps, and land mines.

     Outdated strategy also contributed to the high number of casualties.  Massive frontal assaults and massed formations resulted in large numbers of deaths.  In addition, far larger numbers of soldiers were involved in battles than in the past.  In the Mexican War, no more than 15,000 soldiers opposed each other in a single battle, but some Civil War battles involved as many as 100,000 soldiers.

     McDowell hoped to destroy Beauregard's forces while Patterson tied up Johnston's men; in fact, Johnston's troops eluded McDowall and joined Beauregard. At Bull Run in northern Virginia 25 miles southwest of Washington, the armies clashed.  While residents of Washington ate picnic lunches and looked on, Union troops launched several assaults.  When Beauregard counterattacked, Union forces retreated in panic (getting entangled with the retreating picnickers in the process), but Confederate forces failed to take up pursuit.

     In its analysis of the Civil War's causes, the London Times rejected the notion that this was a war about slavery.  It argued that the conflict had the same roots as most wars:  territorial aggrandizement, political power, and economic supremacy.  But few Northerners or Southerners saw the war in such simple terms.  To many white southern soldiers, it was a war to preserve their liberty and their way of life, to prevent abolition and its consequences--race war, racial amalgamation, and, according to one militant Southerner's words, "the Africanization of the South."  To many northern soldiers, it was a war to preserve the Union, uphold the Constitution, and defeat a ruthless slave power, which had threatened to subvert republican ideals of liberty and equality.

     The pressure came from a handful of field commanders, Republicans in Congress, abolitionists, and slaves themselves.  In May 1861, General Benjamin Butler (1818-1893), who had been a lawyer and a politician before the war, had declared slaves who escaped to Union lines "contraband of war," not returnable to their masters.  In August, Major General John C. Fremont, commander of Union forces in Missouri, had issued an order freeing the slaves of Confederate sympathizers in Missouri.  Lincoln, incensed by Fremont's assumption of authority and fearful that the measure would "alarm our Southern Union friends, and turn them against us," revoked the order, but allowed Union generals discretion in providing refuge to fugitive slaves.

     Congress, too, adopted a series of antislavery measures.  In August 1861, it passed a Confiscation Act, authorizing the seizure of all property, including slaves, used for Confederate military purposes.  Then in the Spring and Summer of 1862, Congress abolished slavery in the District of Columbia and the territories; prohibited Union officers from returning fugitive slaves; allowed the President to enlist African Americans in the army; and called for the seizure of the Confederate property.

     The border states' intransigence on the issue of slave emancipation also pushed the President in a more active direction.  In the spring of 1862, Lincoln persuaded Congress to pass a resolution offering financial compensation to states that abolished slavery voluntarily.  Three times, Lincoln met with border state members of Congress to discuss the offer, and even discussed the possibility of emancipation over a 30-year period.  In July, however, the Congressmen rejected Lincoln's offer.

     The Union officer responsible for capturing these forts was Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), a West Point graduate who had resigned from the army because of a drinking problem and who was working in his father's tanning shop when the war began.  In February 1862, gunboats under Grant's command took Fort Henry and ten days later, Grant's men took Fort Donelson, forcing 13,000 Confederates to surrender.

Grant and some 42,000 men then proceeded south along the Tennessee River. A Confederate force of 40,000 men, under the command of Beauregard and General Joe Johnston (who was killed on the first day of battle) tried to surprise Grant before other Union forces could join him at the Battle of Shiloh.  In two days of heavy fighting during which there were 13,000 Union casualties and over 10,000 Confederate casualties, Grant successfully pushed back the southern forces.  By early June, Union forces controlled the Mississippi River as far south as Memphis, Tennessee.

     For many, Shiloh provided a rude awakening as to the nature of the war now underway.  The bloodiness of these two days (the bloodiest two days of the war) shocked many.  There were more casualties at Shiloh than there had been at Waterloo, but as historian Shelby Foote noted, there were a dozen more such "Waterloos" to come. 

     The reasons for the casualties have already been covered, but these reasons were not readily apparent to Americans at the time.  Many blamed Grant for the casualties, and in response, Lincoln temporarily relieved Grant of his command of the Army of the West.  Later, however, Lincoln reinstated him, saying:  "He fights."  (That was certainly true in comparison to the practically inert McClellan and the Army of the Potomac.)

     During the Battle of Shiloh, both Grant and his subordinate, William Tecumseh Sherman, realized that this war would be one of conquest--that the South would never give up or give in.  Yet many in the North still hoped for some compromise that would end the war.

     While Grant was driving toward the Mississippi from the north, northern naval forces under Captain David G. Farragut (1801-1870) attacked from the south.  In April 1862, Farragut steamed past weak Confederate defenses and captured New Orleans . In New Orleans, Union forces met repeated insults from the city's women. Major General Benjamin F. Butler ordered that any woman who behaved disrespectfully should be treated as a prostitutes.  Reaction in the North was mixed.  Southern reaction to "Beast" Butler was predictably harsh.  New Orleans merchants did a brisk business selling chamber pots with General Butler's portrait stamped in the bottom!

     The Confederacy was in desperate straits.  The Confederate government had packed up its official records and was prepared to evacuate its capital. It had already lost most of Tennessee, much of the Mississippi Valley, and New Orleans, its largest city and most important port.  Between March and June, Confederate forces suffered serious military defeats in Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

     In June, however, Robert E. Lee assumed command of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.  As a diversionary move to prevent Union forces from concentrating on Richmond, Lee relied on General Thomas J. ("Stonewall") Jackson to launch lightning-like raids from Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.  Then in a series of encounters between June 26 and July 2, 1862, known as the Seven Days' Battles, Lee and Jackson forced McClellan, who mistakenly believed he was hopelessly outnumbered, to withdraw back to the James River.

     Union forces still hoped to capture Richmond and bring the war to a quick end.  But ten days after President Davis offered the following assessment of the conflict, Lee again repulsed a northern advance.  At the Second Battle of Bull Run, Union General John Pope (who'd replaced McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac when Lincoln fired McClellan after the latter's retreat from Richmond) found his army almost surrounded and retreated, giving the Confederacy almost total control of Virginia.  Following this defeat, Lincoln fired Pope and reinstated McClellan as head of the Army of the Potomac.

     The United States achieved independence in part because foreign countries such as France and Spain, entered the war against Britain on the American side.  The Confederacy, too, hoped for foreign aid.  In a bold bid to win European support, the Confederacy sought to win a major victory on northern soil.

     In September 1862, Lee launched a daring offensive into Maryland.  Lee wanted to take the fighting out of Virginia, allowing the farmers there time to complete their fall harvest (which would help supply his army).  Moreover, by taking the fighting out of the South, he hoped to further anti-war sentiment in the North. 

     No one on the Union side was sure exactly what Lee planned to do.  But in an incredible stroke of luck, a copy of Lee's battle plan (which had been wrapped around three cigars) fell into the hands of Union General George B. McClellan.  McClellan, however, delayed for sixteen hours before acting on the new intelligence, giving Lee time to discover the fact that his original plans had fallen into enemy hands and make revisions.  Only when Confederate troops literally ran into McClellan's scouts did a battle take place.  Thus, on September 17, 1862, McClellan's forces attacked Lee's at Antietam Creek, near Sharpsburg, Maryland.

     The Battle of Antietam (which is sometimes referred to as the Battle of Sharpsburg) produced the bloodiest single day of the Civil War.  Lee suffered 11,000 casualties; McClellan, 13,000.  Lee was forced to retreat, allowing the North to declare the battle a Union victory.  But Union forces failed to follow up on their surprise success and decisively defeat Lee's army.

     In July 1862, about two months before President Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Congress adopted a second confiscation act calling for the seizure of the property of slaveholders who were actively engaged in the rebellion.  It seems unlikely that this act would have freed any slaves, since the federal government would have to prove that individual slaveholders were traitors.  (In fact, one of the largest slaveholders in South Carolina was a Baltimore Unionist).  Lincoln felt that Congress lacked the legal authority to emancipate slaves; he believed that only the President acting as commander-in-chief had the authority to abolish slavery.

     On September 22, 1862, less than a week after the Battle of Antietam, President Lincoln met with his cabinet. As one cabinet member, Samuel P. Chase, recorded in his diary, the President told them that he had "thought a great deal about the relation of this war to Slavery":

You all remember that, several weeks ago, I read to you an Order I had prepared on this subject, which, since then, my mind has been much occupied with this subject, and I have thought all along that the time for acting on it might very probably come. I think the time has come now. I wish it were a better time. I wish that we were in a better condition. The action of the army against the rebels has not been quite what I should have best liked. But they have been driven out of Maryland, and Pennsylvania is no longer in danger of invasion. When the rebel army was at Frederick, I determined, as soon as it should be driven out of Maryland, to issue a Proclamation of Emancipation such as I thought most likely to be useful. I said nothing to any one; but I made the promise to myself, and (hesitating a little)--to my Maker. The rebel army is now driven out, and I am going to fulfill that promise.

     The preliminary emancipation proclamation that President Lincoln issued on September 22 stated that all slaves in designated parts of the South on January 1, 1863, would be freed.  The President hoped that slave emancipation would undermine the Confederacy from within.  Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles reported that the President told him that freeing the slaves was "a military necessity, absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union....The slaves [are] undeniably an element of strength to those who [have] their service, and we must decide whether that element should be with us or against us."

     Fear of foreign intervention in the war also influenced Lincoln to consider emancipation.  The Confederacy had assumed, mistakenly, that demand for cotton from textile mills would lead Britain to break the Union naval blockade.  Nevertheless, there was a real danger of European involvement in the war.  By redefining the war as a war against slavery, Lincoln hoped to generate support from European liberals.

     Even before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair (1813-1883), a former Democrat from Maryland, had warned the President that this decision might stimulate antiwar protests among northern Democrats and cost the administration the fall 1862 elections.  In fact, Peace Democrats did protest against the proclamation and Lincoln's assumption of powers not specifically granted by the Constitution.  Among the "abuses" they denounced were his unilateral decision to call out the militia to suppress the "insurrection," impose a blockade of southern ports, expand the army beyond the limits set by law, spend federal funds without prior congressional authorization, and suspend the writ of habeas corpus (the right of persons under arrest to have their case heard in court).  The Lincoln administration imprisoned about 13,000 people without trial during the war, and shut Democratic newspapers in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago for varying amounts of time.

     In October 1862, the London Times dismissed the preliminary emancipation proclamation as an empty gesture.  "Where he has no power Mr. Lincoln will set the Negroes free," the newspaper commented; "where he retains power he will consider them as slaves.  This is more like a Chinaman beating his two swords together to frighten his enemy than like an earnest man pressing forward his cause."

     In recent years, it has sometimes been charged that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves, since it applied only to areas that were in a state of rebellion, and explicitly exempted the border states, Tennessee, and portions of Louisiana and Virginia.  This view is incorrect.  The proclamation did officially and immediately free slaves in South Carolina's sea islands, Florida, and some other locations occupied by Union troops.  Certainly, the Emancipation Proclamation was only a crucial first step toward complete emancipation, but in effect it transformed the Union forces into an army of liberation.

     At the time he issued the preliminary proclamation, Lincoln defended it as a war measure necessary to defeat the Confederacy and preserve the Union.  But it seems clear that Lincoln regarded this argument as necessary on tactical grounds.  When he issued the final proclamation on January 1, 1863, he described it not only as "a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion," but an "act of justice."