Over half of all deaths were caused by disease.  As a result of poor sanitation, primitive medical practices, and contaminated water supplies, the average regiment lost half its fighting strength from disease during the first year.

     During the war, the Republican-controlled Congress enacted a series of measures that carried long-term consequences for the future.  The Homestead Act of 1862 provided public land free to pioneers who agreed to farm the land for five years.  The Morrill Act of 1862 helped states establish agricultural and technical colleges. Congress also authorized construction of the nation's first transcontinental railroad.

     The Civil War also brought vast changes to the nation's financial system.  Before the Civil War, the federal government did not issue paper money.  Instead, paper notes were issued by more than 1,500 state banks in 1860, which issued more than 10,000 different kinds of currency.

     To end this chaotic system and to impose federal regulation on the financial system, Congress enacted two important pieces of legislation.  The Legal Tender Act of 1862 authorized the federal government to issue paper money.  Because these notes were printed on green paper, they became known as greenbacks.  The National Bank Act of 1863 created the nation's first truly national banking system.

     The Confederacy also suffered rampant inflation.  Fearful of undermining support for the war effort, Confederate leaders refused to raise taxes to support the war.  Instead, the Confederacy raised funds by selling bonds and simply printing money without gold or silver to back it. The predictable result was skyrocketing prices.  In 1863, a pair of shoes cost $125 and a coat, $350. A chicken cost $15 and a barrel of flour $275.

     Defeatism and a loss of will began to spread across the Confederacy.  Military defeats suggested divine disfavor.  Hardships on the home front generated discontent within the ranks.

     In the South, the imposition of a military draft in April 1862 produced protests that this was "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight."  Although the law made all able-bodied men ages 18 through 35 liable for three years' service, the draft law allowed draftees to pay a substitute to serve for him (the North adopted a similar draft law in March 1863).  Further aggravating tension was enactment of the "Twenty Negro Law" in October 1862 which exempted one white man from the draft on every plantation with 20 or more slaves.

     Three-fifths of all black troops were former slaves.  The active participation of black troops in the fighting made it far less likely that African Americans would remain in slavery after the Civil War.

     While some white officers, like Robert Gould Shaw (1837-1863), who commanded the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, were proud to lead black troops in battle, others exhibited a deep resistance.

     In July 1863, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first black regiment raised in the North, led an assault against Fort Wagner, which guarded Charleston, South Carolina's harbor.  Two of Frederick Douglass's sons were members of the regiment.  Over forty percent of the regiment's members were killed or wounded in the unsuccessful attack, including Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a member of a prominent antislavery family, who was shot dead in the charge.

     Within the ranks, black troops faced repeated humiliations; most were employed in menial assignments and kept in rear-echelon, fatigue jobs.  They were punished by whipping or by being tied by their thumbs; if captured by the Confederates, they faced execution.  But despite these trials, African American soldiers won their fight for equal pay (in 1864) and in 1865 they were allowed to serve as line officers.  Drawing upon the education and training they received in the military, many former troops became community leaders during Reconstruction.

     One Union captain explained the significance of black military participation on the attitudes of many white soldiers.  "A great many [white people]," he wrote, "have the idea that the entire Negro race are vastly their inferiors.  A few weeks of calm unprejudiced life here would disabuse them, I think.  I have a more elevated opinion of their abilities than I ever had before.  I know that many of them are vastly the superiors of those...who would condemn them to a life of brutal degradation."

     After the defeat at Fredericksburg, Lincoln removed Burnside and replaced him with General Joseph Hooker (1814-1879).  In May 1863, Hooker tried to attack Lee's forces from a side or flanking position.  In just ten minutes, Confederate forces routed the Union army at the Battle of Chancellorsville.  But the Confederate victory came at a high cost.  Lee's ablest lieutenant, Stonewall Jackson, was accidentally shot by a Confederate sentry and died of a blood clot.

     Despite Confederate victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, the Union showed no signs of giving up.  In a bid to shatter northern morale and win European recognition, Lee's army launched a daring invasion of Pennsylvania.

     When his forces drove northward into Pennsylvania, Lee assumed, mistakenly, that Union forces were still in Virginia.  When he suddenly realized that Union forces were in close pursuit, he ordered his forces, which were strung out from Maryland to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to converge at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a central location where a number of roads met.  Lee, who did not want to risk a battle until he had gathered all his troops together, ordered his men not to engage the enemy.  But on July 1, 1863, a Confederate brigade ran into Union cavalry near Gettysburg and the largest battle ever fought in the West Hemisphere broke out before anyone realized what was happening.

     After the defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, southern morale began to sag.  Yet despite military defeats, inflation, shortages, desertions, the flight of thousands of slaves, and flagging resolve, the Confederacy continued to fight for another 22 months.

     In April 1864, the Senate passed the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery in the United States. Opposition from Democratic Representatives prevented the amendment from receiving the required two-thirds majority.  If McClellan and the Democrats had won the election of 1864, as Lincoln and most Northerners expected in the summer, the amendment would almost certainly have been defeated and slave emancipation repudiated as a war aim.  Only after Lincoln was reelected did Congress approve the amendment.  Ratification by the states was completed in December 1865.

     Initially, Lincoln and his generals anticipated a conventional war in which Union soldiers would respect civilians' property.  Convinced that there was residual unionist support in the South, they expected to preserve the South's economic base, including its factories and rail lines.  But as the war dragged on, the Civil War became history's first total war, a war in which the Union sought the Confederacy's total defeat and unconditional surrender.  To achieve success, Union officers such as Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman believed that it was necessary to break the South's will to fight.  Sherman summed up the idea of total war in blunt terms: "We are not only fighting hostile armies," he declared in 1864, "but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war."

     The 1864 presidential election was one of the most critical in American history.  At stake was whether the war would end in unconditional surrender or a negotiated settlement, which might result in the preservation of slavery as a legal institution.  Even though hundreds of thousands of slaves deserted to Union lines during the war, it is not at all inconceivable that slavery could have survived if the President had not been committed to emancipation.  During the American Revolution a third of Georgia's slaves had been freed by the British, and tens of thousands of Virginia's slaves had escaped bondage.  Nevertheless, slavery survived the revolutionary upheavals in the South, and soon began to flourish and expand.  Similarly, slavery was temporarily reinstituted by the French in St. Domingue and greatly expanded in Guadeloupe, Martinique and other colonies despite the Haitian Revolution and the French emancipation decree of 1794.

     In August 1864, Lincoln expressed his view in moving words.  Observing that over 130,000 blacks were fighting to preserve the Union, he said that they were motivated by the "strongest motive...the promise of freedom.  There have been men who proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors.  I would be damned in time & in eternity for so doing.  The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends and enemies, come what will."

     Deeply anxious about the election's outcome, Republicans and pro-war Democrats formed the National Union Party, which re-nominated Lincoln and selected Andrew Johnson (1808-1875), a former Democratic Senator from Tennessee, for Vice President. Johnson replaced Lincoln's first Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin (1809-1891), a former U.S. Senator from Maine.

     As their presidential nominee, the Democrats chose General George B. McClellan, who opposed the Emancipation Proclamation and who ran on a platform which condemned Lincoln for "four years of failure" and called for a negotiated end to the war.

     Some Radical Republicans also opposed Lincoln's reelection. Lincoln had asked Congress to seat representatives from three recently conquered Confederate states--Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee--and also announced that when 10 percent of the voters in the rebel states (excluding high Confederate officials) pledged loyalty to the Union (including government actions concerning slavery) they would be readmitted to the Union.  Radicals denounced the "10 Percent Plan" as too lenient.  Congress in July 1864 adopted a much more radical measure, the Wade-Davis Bill, which required rebel states to abolish slavery, repudiate the Confederate war debt, disfranchise Confederate leaders, and require fifty percent of the citizens to pledge loyalty to the Union.  The radicals nominated General John C. Fremont for President, but he withdrew a month before the election.

     Lincoln feared that northern battlefield victories might be lost at the polls. During the summer of 1864, he confessed, "it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be reelected."  There seems little doubt that a McClellan victory would have resulted in an agreement to maintain slavery in the United States.

    Grant started his offensive with 118,000 men; by early June, half of his men were casualties.  But Lee's army had been reduced by a third to 40,000 men. In a month of fighting in northern and eastern Virginia, Grant lost almost 40,000 men, leading Peace Democrats to call him a "butcher."  But Confederate losses were also heavy--and southern troops could not be replaced.  At the Battle of the Wilderness, in northern Virginia, Lee's army suffered 11,000 casualties; at Spotsylvania Court House, Lee lost another 10,000 men.  After suffering terrible casualties at Cold Harbor--12,000 men killed or wounded--Grant advanced to Petersburg, a rail center south of Richmond, and began a nine-month siege of the city.

     At the same time that Grant was pursuing Lee's army, Sherman, with a force of 100,000 men, marched toward Atlanta from Chattanooga, and captured the rail center on September 2, 1864.  After leaving Atlanta in flames, Sherman's men marched across Georgia toward Savannah.  In order to break the South's will to fight, Sherman had his men destroy railroad tracks, loot houses, and burn factories.  Sherman seized Savannah December 21, and then drove northward, capturing Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina, then heading through North Carolina to Virginia.  Sherman summed up the goal of his military maneuvers in grim terms: "We cannot change the hearts of those people, but we can make war so terrible...[and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it."

     The next day, in a final message to his troops, Robert E. Lee acknowledged that he was "compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources."  Three-quarters of the Confederate white male population of military age had fought in the war, but by 1865, the North had four times as many troops as the Confederacy.  At the time he surrendered, Lee's entire army had shrunk to just 35,000 men, compared to Grant's total of 113,000.  Lee's decision to surrender, however, probably helped to prevent large-scale guerrilla warfare.

     At noon on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Major General Robert Anderson raised the U.S. flag over Fort Sumter.  It was the same flag that he had surrendered four years before.

     That evening, a few minutes after 10 o'clock, John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865), a young actor and Confederate sympathizer (who had spied for Richmond and been part of a plot to kidnap Lincoln), entered the presidential box at Ford's Theater in Washington and shot the President in the back of the head.  Booth then leaped to the stage, but he caught a spur in a flag draped in front of the box.  He fell and broke his leg. As he fled the theater he is said to have cried out: "Sic temper tyrannis"--thus always to tyrants, the motto of the State of Virginia.

     Simultaneously, a Booth accomplice, Lewis Paine, brutally attacked Secretary of State William Seward (1801-1872) at his home with a knife.  Seward survived because Paine's knife was deflected by a metal collar he wore from a severe accident.  Seward slowly recovered from his wounds and continued to serve as Secretary of State under Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson.

     Lincoln was carried unconscious to a neighboring house. He was pronounced dead at 7:22 a.m., April 15.  A few minutes later, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton (1814-1869) stepped outside and announced to the assembled crowd, "he belongs to the ages."

     Following the shooting, Booth fled to Maryland on horseback.  A friend then helped him escape to Virginia. On April 26, two weeks after he had shot Lincoln, the army and Secret Service tracked Booth down and trapped him in a barn near Port Royal, Virginia.  When Booth refused to surrender, his pursuers set the barn on fire. Booth was found dead, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

     Lincoln's assassination was part of a larger plot to murder other government officials, including Vice President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of State William H. Seward, and General Ulysses S. Grant.  Only Lincoln was killed.  Following the assassination, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton ordered War Department agents to apprehend the conspirators.  Despite wild rumors of involvement by top Confederate officials, the actual conspirators included, apart from Booth, an ex-Confederate soldier, a carriage maker, and a druggist's clerk. Eight individuals were arrested; a military commission found all of them guilty.  Four were hanged.  Of the remaining four, one died in prison in 1867 and three others received presidential pardons in 1869.

     Many Northerners blamed the Confederate leadership for the President's death.  Anger and a thirst for vengeance against "traitors" were surely widespread.  This makes it all the more remarkable that the North's victory was not followed by a massive and bloody extermination of Confederate leaders and their northern sympathizers.