Chapter 20

When Abraham Lincoln took office in March 1861, seven southern states had already seceded. He pledged not to interfere with slavery where it existed but vowed to preserve the Union and hold federal property in the South, including Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

When Lincoln attempted only to resupply the fort with food (not reinforcements), Confederate forces opened fire on April 12, 1861, and the garrison surrendered after 34 hours. No one died in the bombardment itself, but the attack rallied the North behind the war and prompted Lincoln to call for 75,000 volunteers.

Lincoln's call for troops pushed four more states — Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina — to secede and join the Confederacy, which had elected Jefferson Davis as its president.

Crucially, the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri — all slave states — remained in the Union, often through delicate political maneuvering and, in Maryland's case, martial law. Their loyalty preserved vital resources, population, and protected the capital at Washington, D.C.

The North held enormous material advantages: more than twice the population, the vast majority of the nation's factories and railroads, and a strong navy and merchant marine.

The South's advantages were less tangible but real: it fought largely on the defensive, on familiar terrain, with a strong military tradition and, initially, superior generalship. Southerners also believed their cause — defending home and self-government — would inspire greater fighting spirit than the North's more abstract goal of preserving the Union.

The Confederacy pinned its hopes for foreign recognition on "King Cotton" diplomacy — the belief that Britain and France, dependent on southern cotton for their textile industries, would intervene on the South's behalf to keep the trade flowing.

The strategy failed. Europe had stockpiled surplus cotton before the war, found new suppliers in Egypt and India, and — crucially — European public opinion increasingly opposed a Confederacy built on slavery. Neither Britain nor France ever formally recognized the Confederate government.

Aging general Winfield Scott devised the Union's overall strategy, nicknamed the "Anaconda Plan" by critics: blockade southern ports to strangle Confederate trade, and seize control of the Mississippi River to split the Confederacy in two.

The plan was mocked at first as too slow and passive for a public expecting a quick victory, but its core elements — naval blockade and control of the Mississippi — ultimately became central to the Union's successful long-term strategy.

Eager for a quick, decisive victory, Union forces marched on Confederate positions near Manassas, Virginia, in July 1861. Crowds of spectators, including congressmen and their families, came out from Washington expecting to watch an easy Union win.

Instead, Confederate reinforcements arrived by rail and routed the inexperienced Union army at the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas), sending panicked soldiers and civilians fleeing back toward Washington. The stunning defeat shattered illusions of a short war on both sides.

After Bull Run, both sides recognized they faced a long, costly conflict and began mobilizing accordingly — raising larger armies, ramping up industrial production, and increasing government control over the economy.

Political dissent complicated the war effort on both sides: in the North, "Copperhead" Democrats opposed the war and favored a negotiated peace, while the Confederacy struggled to balance its states'-rights ideology against the centralizing demands of fighting a modern war, including an unpopular draft (conscription) beginning in 1862.