The Commission is deeply indebted to the Editorial Advisory Board members, each of whom rendered valuable assistance toward the final draft of the narrative.
James I. Robertson, Jr., Executive Director U. S. Civil War Centennial Commission
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE [I. Causes of the Civil War] 5 [II. Advantages of North and South] 7 [III. Summary of Military Campaigns] 11 [1861] 11 [1862 in the West] 13 [1862 in the East] 17 [1863 in the West] 21 [1863 in the East] 23 [1864] 25 [1865] 30 [IV. Losses] 35 [V. Navies] 37 [VI. Diplomacy] 42 [VII. Prisons and Prisoners of War] 45 [VIII. Arms] 48 [IX. Leaders] 52 [X. The Common Soldiers] 57 [XI. The War’s Legacy] 62 [XII. Suggested Topics for Further Discussion] 64
Construction of the U. S. Capitol was still in progress when civil war began.
I. CAUSES OF THE CIVIL WAR
Historians past and present disagree sharply over the major cause of the Civil War.
Some writers have viewed the struggle of the 1860’s as a “war of rebellion” brought on by a “slavepower conspiracy.” To them it was a conflict between Northern “humanity” and Southern “barbarism.” James Ford Rhodes, who dealt more generously with the South than did many other Northern writers of his time, stated in 1913: “Of the American Civil War it may safely be asserted that there was a single cause, slavery.”
Other historians, such as Charles A. Beard and Harold U. Faulkner, have argued that slavery was only the surface issue. The real cause, these men state, was “the economic forces let loose by the Industrial Revolution” then taking place in the North. These economic forces were strong, powerful, and “beating irresistibly upon a one-sided and rather static” Southern way of life. Therefore, the 1860’s produced a “second American Revolution,” fought between the “capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West” on the one hand, and the “planting aristocracy of the South” on the other.