American Civil War

Civil war in America, which took place from April 1861 to April 1865. The warring parties were the United States of America in the North (proclaimed on July 4, 1776) and the Confederate States of America in the South (a regime established in 1861–1865 as a result of the American Civil War). The war ended in victory for the North. What began as a war to preserve the unity of the nation evolved into a war to free the black slaves.

After the independence of the United States from the British Empire, the South and the North developed along two different development paths, consequently the United States was still in a state of separation; economically, politically and ideologically. In the South, slave labor was prevalent, in 1860, the number of black slaves in the South had reached 4 million. The Republican Party was founded in 1791 by some plantation owners and entrepreneurs which had ties to slave-owners in the South. (In 1794 it was renamed as the Democratic-Republican Party and in 1840 it was officially renamed as the Democratic Party). Democratic-Republican Party had won the presidency and majority deputies for the Congress (parliament) in the 1800 elections. In the North, capitalist economy encountered a rapid development. In 1860, the industrial production in the North regions ranked fourth in the world, with a total output value of 1.88 billion U.S. dollars. In 1854, the Republican Party was founded to represent the interests of the business entrepreneurs class, the Republican Party ascended to power in 1860. Due to different policies pursued by the North and the South have led to serious divisions in the attitudes of religious communities as well. The Northern churches continued to justify the emancipation of black slaves through their interpretation of the Bible, while the churches in the South used Calvinistic religious apologetic thoughts to provide the rationale for slavery and promoted the South’s move to secede from the Union.

The conflict and struggle between the North and the South became increasingly intense from the 19th century onwards, with the struggle revolving around the newly annexed territories in West America. The United States expanded its territory on the East Bank of the Mississippi River in 1783, Louisiana from Napoleon’s France in 1803, Florida from Spain in 1819, Texas, New Mexico, Oregon and California through the Mexican-American War during 1845-1853. Later, the United States purchased Alaska region from Russia in 1867 and annexed the Hawaiian Islands in 1898. The North pushed the development of capitalism in the western regions, restricted or even forbade the expansion of slavery; whereas the South tried to expand slavery in the western region and even all across America. By the 1850s, the conflict between the two sides turned into an armed conflict in some regions. Against the attacks of slave-owners, the bourgeoisie in the North began to advocate the abolition of slavery. Especially after the election of Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860, who advocated the abolition of slavery, Southern slave-owners launched a revolt. In February 1861, six slave-owning states in the South (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana) declared independence, and formed the Confederacy government and formed the Confederate States of America, Richmond city as its capital, and Jefferson Davis, as the president. In April of the same year, the army of the Confederate preemptively seized Fort Sumter and the American Civil War broke out.

The period between April 1861 to September 1862 was the stage of “limited war”. The Lincoln administration’s main purpose in the early years of the Civil War was to restore the unity of the North and the South, it feared that disturbing the slavery system would push some border slave states to the side of the forces of rebelling Southern slave-owners, thus losing the important strategic regions in the border states. Since the Northern Government refused to declare the liberation of slaves, the North suffered successive military defeats in the first stage of the Civil War. The war entered the stage of “revolutionary war” since after September 1862. From May to September 1862, after preparations the Lincoln administration promulgated the Homestead Act and the “Emancipation Proclamation” of black slaves; consequently a large number of black slaves joined the Northern camp, giving the North an abundant supply of fighter force which rapidly reversed the unfavorable situation. On July 1, 1863, the two armies fought a decisive battle in Gettysburg. On July 3, the troops of the South was defeated and the warfare initiative on the battlefields shifted was to the Northern army. On April 9, 1865, the Southern Army was besieged by the Northern Army and forced to surrender to the Commander-in-Chief of the Federal Army, who was General Grant. After the end of the Civil War and the reunification of the United States, slavery ceased all across the country.

The Civil War was the second bourgeois revolution in the American history. The Civil War dissolved slavery, solved the question of peasants’ land in a favorable way, safeguarded national unity, cleared the way for the accelerated development of American capitalism, and laid the foundation for the United States to rank among the world’s most powerful countries. The limitation of the Civil War was that it only abolished slavery in the revolting states of the South, and although the blacks were emancipated, they were not granted the same rights as the whites, leaving behind the historical roots of racial discrimination in the USA.