American civil war

The American Civil War divided the young American nation. It caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and a great deal of grief and hardship. It split friends and families. Fathers and sons and brothers fought on opposite sides. The war lasted for four years, from April 1861 to April 1865
It was a military conflict (1861–65) between the United States of America (the Union) and 11 secessionist Southern states, organized as the Confederate States of America (the Confederacy). In the South, the conflict is also known as the War Between the States.

Background.
The Civil War was the culmination of four decades of intense sectional conflict and reflected deep-seated economic, social, and political differences between the North and the South. The South, overwhelmingly agricultural, produced cash crops—cotton, tobacco, and sugarcane—for export to the North or to Europe, but it depended on the North for manufactures and for the financial and commercial services essential to trade. Underscoring sectional differences, the labor force in the South included nearly 4 million enslaved blacks. Although the slaveholding planter class formed a small minority of the population, it dominated Southern politics and society. Slaves were the largest single investment in the South, and the fear of slave unrest ensured the loyalty of nonslaveholders to the economic and social system.

The secession crisis
In the first half of the nineteenth centry the American nation became divided. The politicial parties formed during the period, the Republicans (1854), and the Democrats (1860),fosused their attention on issues the most important for citizens. The republicans dominated in the North and they wanted a strong Union and the abolition of slavery. In the South Democrats preached free trade and they increasingly insisted on states sovereignty.The presidental elections of 1860 proved a success for Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate and well-known abolitionist. Becouse of the Lincoln’s presidental victory, the slave states had lost the balance of power in the Senate and were facing a future as a perpetual minority after decades of nearly continuous control of the presidency and the Congress. By March 1861, when Lincoln was inaugurated, seven states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—had adopted ordinances of secession, and the CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA, with Jefferson Davis as president, had been formed.
In his inaugural address, Lincoln held that secession was illegal and stated that he intended to maintain federal possessions in the South. On April 12, 1861, when an attempt was made to resupply Fort Sumter, a federal installation in the harbor at Charleston, S.C., Southern artillery opened fire. Three days later, Lincoln called for troops to put down the rebellion. In response, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee also joined the Confederacy.

Resources of North and South.
Neither the North nor the South was prepared in 1861 to wage a war. With a population of 22 million, the North had a greater military potential. The South had a population of 9 million, but of that number, nearly 4 million were enslaved blacks whose loyalty to the Confederate cause was always in doubt. Before the war ended, the South had enlisted about 900,000 white males, and the Union had enrolled about 2 million men (including 186,000 blacks), nearly half of them toward the end of the war.
In addition, the North possessed clear material advantages—in money and credit, factories, food production, mineral resources, and transport—that proved decisive.
Even with its superior manpower and resources, however, the North did not achieve the quick victory it had expected. To raise, train, and equip a massive fighting force from inexperienced volunteers and to find efficient military leadership proved a formidable and time-consuming task. The South, with its stronger military tradition, had more men experienced in the use of arms and produced an able corps of officers, including Robert E. Lee.




Hostilities.
The Confederacy enjoyed a certain advantage in conducting defensive operations on familiar terrain. If the South could keep its army in the field until the North lost the will to fight, the Confederacy would win the war. In contrast, the North needed to attack on a broad front and sustain long avenues of communication and supply.
Whereas the South merely had to defend itself, the North needed to destroy the South’s capacity to make war and compel total surrender. Confederate leaders also differed on the most effective strategy. Davis thought in terms of a defensive war that would wear down the North, attract foreign sympathy and support, and result in the acknowledgment of Southern independence. But the long, exposed frontier between the North and the South rendered such a strategy unrealistic.
In July 1861 the Confederates won the first big battle of the Civil War. It took place near a small river in Virginia called Bull Run. The next year both sides won several battles, but both lost many men killed or wounded.
Early in 1863 the Southern armies, under their general Robert E. Lee, seemed to be winning the war. Lee invaded the Northern states with an army of 75,000 men. In July he met an army of 90,000 men at the little town of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania.
The two armies fought for three days. Lee lost 20,000 men killed or wounded. He had to retreat. The battle was a turning point in the war. The Confederates no longer had the strength to attack the North. It was all they could do to defend their own territory.

Results of the War.
Measured in physical devastation and human lives, the American Civil War was the costliest war in the experience of the American people. When the war ended, 620,000 men (in a nation of 35 million people) had been killed and at least that many more had been wounded. The North lost a total of 364,000 (nearly one of every five Union soldiers) and the South 258,000 (nearly one of every four Confederate soldiers). More men died of disease and sickness than on the battlefield; the ratio was about four to one.
The physical devastation was largely limited to the South, where almost all the fighting took place. Large sections of Richmond, Charleston, Atlanta, Mobile, and Vicksburg lay in ruins. The countryside through which the contending armies had passed was littered with gutted plantation houses and barns, burned bridges, and uprooted railroad lines. Many crops were destroyed or confiscated, and much livestock was slain. More than $4 billion worth of property had been wiped out through emancipation, the repudiation of Confederate bonds and currency, the confiscation of cotton, and war damage.
Slavery and disputes over constitutional questions concerning States\' Rights were clearly the \"causes\" of the war, and Union victors determined to end slavery and to strip the States of their powers to define citizenship and to deny citizens fundamental rights. During the early part of the war, Lincoln, to hold together his war coalition of Republicans and War Democrats, emphasized preservation of the Union as the sole objective of the war, from a northern perspective, but with the Emancipation Proclamation, announced in September 1862, and put into effect on January 1, 1863, Lincoln adopted an end to slavery as a second war aim. The Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves held in territory under Confederate control at the time of the Proclamation. It had little immediate effect except as territories were conquered by Union forces, but, as a practical matter, it committed the United States to the war aim of ending slavery
Economically, the war encouraged the mechanization of production and the accumulation of capital in the North. The needs of the armies in the field resulted in the mass production of processed foods, ready-made clothing, and shoes, and after the war, industry converted such production to civilian use. By 1865 the U.S. was on its way to becoming an industrial power.
Finally, the American Civil War brought freedom to nearly 4 million blacks. But the attitudes that had sustained slavery in the South for more than 300 years did not end with the war, there
by creating tensions and problems that would persist into the 20th centry.



Bibliografia:
http://www.historychannel.com
http://www.von-zumbusch-hauptschule.de/projekte/usaprojekt/history.htm#civil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page