What was the American Civil War?
The American Civil War , or Civil War , was an armed conflict between the southern and northern states of the United States. The conflict began on April 12, 1861 and only ended on June 22, 1865. The war took place after the atmosphere of tension generated by the 1860 elections, which elected President Abraham Lincoln – representative of the North. But why was there such tension between the two regions of the country?
Polarization:North vs. south
With the Independence of the Thirteen Colonies , in 1776, the colonies became independent states, but united in a Federation, with republican and presidential political representation. The states in the North region focused on the development of the industry and, for that, they needed free and salaried labor to operate the work inside the factories. The formation of the working class and the industrial bourgeoisie in the North also produced a specific way of looking at political activity and civil rights.
The southern states, on the other hand, had an agrarian development based on large property and the model of the plantation, that is, large rural properties that practiced monoculture (cultivation of one or a few plant species for the market) of cotton . The plantation model it made use of black slave labor, since, in addition to not having the cost of wage labor, the transatlantic slave trade also generated a lot of profit.
Although the two models followed opposite paths, they complemented each other in at least one point:the textile industries (which produced fabric) in the North needed the cotton of the South, which, in turn, time, it returned to the South in the form of a product, such as clothes. Despite such economic complementarity, the existence of the slave regime in the Southern states bothered Northern leaders (who had a political perspective focused on individual liberties, the right to small property, etc.). It was not understandable that a country, a Federative Republic, was politically united by two completely antagonistic perspectives.
The southern states, on the other hand, also did not look favorably on the northern model, which each year established itself as the most effective (the population of the North was much higher and more developed than the South). Southerners, still in the year of the elections (1860), were already talking about secession , that is, in separation between the two regions and the creation of another country, the Confederated States of America , as opposed to the North.
In December 1860, Southerners conceived a new Constitution and made the Confederate States official, electing Jefferson Davis as president. , of Mississippi, and as capital the city of Montgomery, in Alabama.
Conflict development
With secession and the formation of the Confederate States, conflict became inevitable. Lincoln, as president of the Union, that is, of the United States as a whole, did not recognize the independence of the southern states and opted for their reincorporation. The Union army was more numerous and organized, but the South had experienced soldiers who left the Union and became loyal to the Confederates. It was the case of General Robert E. Lee , veteran of the war against Mexico.
General Lee was the Southerners' top commander in the Civil War. He had a strategic knowledge that few had at that time and that gave the South an advantage. However, Lincoln had technology on his side. Two technological weapons were decisive for the North:the telegraph and the steam locomotive .
Through the telegraph, Lincoln and his generals could integrate, in a matter of minutes, scattered information about southern troop movements. If this were done by messengers on horseback, the time would be seven days. Steam locomotives, instead of transporting goods, served to transport soldiers, weapons and ammunition from the North to the South. In a matter of hours, Union armies were supplied in the North, a fact that would have taken weeks if done on foot.
The confrontation in the open was terrible. The American Civil War, alongside the Paraguay War , was one of the bloodiest wars ever fought on the American continent. Both Southern and Northern soldiers used the bullets in their rifles. minié , a type of bullet capable of easily shattering arms and legs and shattering the bones of the human body. The rifle, in turn, had to be reloaded after each shot. Reloading was done manually, putting gunpowder in the barrel and then the bullet, which was pounded with a stick. In a single battle, 10 to 30 thousand men died, as historian Leandro Karnal says:
The battles became real stages of horror. In one, the Northerners, with about 30,000 more men than the Southerners, forced General Lee to take refuge in Virginia and about 12,000 men died on each side of the conflicts. In another, the Confederates launched themselves with more than 150,000 men into Union trenches near Gettysbury, Pennsylvania. The Confederates were eventually decimated by federal troops and about a thousand southern soldiers died in that conflict. [1]
One of Lincoln's most important strategies to win the war was the passage of the so-calledLand Act , in 1862, also known as the Homestead Act
End of conflict
By 1864, southern forces could no longer hold together. The situation was unfavorable for southerners, and their president, Jefferson Davis , was arrested by Union soldiers as he tried to flee. General Lee, in turn, surrendered on April 19, 1865 to General Ulysses Grant , putting an end to the war. The effects of the civil war to this day are the most devastating in the history of the United States, more than World War II and than the Vietnam War, as Karnal says again:
For a brief comparison:more than 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War; in the famous Vietnam War, the number of official casualties was 58,000 dead. The conflict also served to create the myth of Lincoln as a great statesman defending freedom, forging a certain sense of national identity based on the superiority of the "world" of the North, paving the way for the emergence of certain common laws and defining the historical path of a country unified from arms . [2]
NOTES
[1] KARNAL, Leandro [et al.]. American History:From Origins to the 21st Century . São Paulo:Context, 2007.
[2] Idem.
Take the opportunity to check out our video lesson related to the subject: