Union (American Civil War)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Union, the name given to the federal government and loyal states of the United States during the American Civil War, was fighting not just for territory but for the very right to call itself a nation. When Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860, slave states began leaving the republic they had helped build. What followed was four years that would test whether the constitutional framework of the United States could survive a challenge from within.

  The word "Union" itself carried political weight. It appears in the very first governing document of the country, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, and resurfaces in the preamble to the Constitution of 1787: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union." To call the loyal side the Union was to assert that it, and not the Confederacy, was the legitimate continuation of the republic. Historian Michael Landis argued in 2015 that using the term "Union" actually concedes something to the Confederate view of secession, since the United States never, in his reading, ceased to exist as a nation.

  The questions that drove the war were stark. Could eleven states simply leave? Could a government born from democratic elections survive when those elections produced results one side refused to accept? And what kind of country would emerge from the fighting?

• 2. The Weight of a Word

  ›

  In 2021, the Army University Press announced it would replace "Union" with "Federal Government" or "U.S. Government" in its publications, calling this change more historically accurate because the term "Union" had always referred to all the states together, not just the loyal ones.

  Before the war, ordinary Americans used "the Union" to mean either the federal government or the unity of the states within the constitutional order. Confederate writers saw things differently. They sometimes called the U.S. Army the "abolition forces" and the U.S. Navy the "abolition fleet," framing the entire Northern war effort as a crusade against slavery rather than a defense of national sovereignty. Northern leaders framed the same effort as the opposite: a defense of the constitutional order against an illegal rebellion.

  Four of the Southern border states did not join the Confederacy. They stayed loyal to the federal government even though slavery was legal within their borders. West Virginia went a step further, separating from Virginia and entering the Union as a new state on the 20th of June 1863. Nevada joined as well, becoming a state on the 31st of October 1864. These additions reshaped what "the Union" actually contained as the war continued.

• 3. Lincoln and His Cabinet

  ›

  Historians have overwhelmingly praised what they call the "political genius" of Abraham Lincoln's performance as president, and the evidence behind that verdict reaches into every corner of how the war was fought.

  Lincoln's first task was military victory. That required learning an entirely new set of skills: strategy, diplomacy, the management of supplies, finances, and manpower, and the selection of generals who could win. At Gettysburg he found language for the national mission that observers have quoted ever since. His willingness to work with personal and political enemies kept Washington functioning more smoothly than Richmond, the Confederate capital, where Jefferson Davis's cabinet was comparatively fractious.

  With William Seward at the State Department, Salmon P. Chase managing the Treasury, and Edwin Stanton heading the War Department from 1862 onward, Lincoln surrounded himself with strong-willed rivals and channeled their competition toward results rather than mutual destruction. He largely left them to run their departments, reserving his direct attention for major appointments and the broadest strategic decisions.

  Congress was a different arena. The Republican majority passed sweeping legislation: the Morrill tariff, the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railroad Act, and the National Banking Act. Lincoln worked smoothly with key figures on each of these: Thaddeus Stevens on taxation, Charles Sumner on foreign affairs, Lyman Trumbull on legal questions, Justin Smith Morrill on land grants, and William Pitt Fessenden on finances. But military and reconstruction questions set Lincoln against the Radical Republicans, who dominated the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. That committee investigated every military failure during the 37th and 38th Congresses, distrusted West Point graduates, and tended to prefer politically reliable generals over effective ones.

• 4. A Nation Finances a War

  ›

  In 1860, the Treasury was a modest agency that collected a low tariff and managed land sales. Salmon P. Chase inherited it as a department that needed to fund a war of industrial scale without wrecking the economy.

  The United States spent $3.1 billion to fight the Civil War, more than $400 million in 1862 alone. The largest single source of revenue was excise taxes. The tax on spirits, for example, was 20 cents per gallon on 100 proof alcohol, roughly equal to the cost of production. After that came tariffs, raised in the final days of the Buchanan administration and twice more during the war. These are known as Morrill tariffs after their sponsor, Justin Smith Morrill. An income tax was also established during the war, though it was repealed after the fighting ended.

  Bonds were crucial. For the first time in American history, bonds in small denominations were sold directly to the public, with banker Jay Cooke designing a campaign that used publicity and patriotism as selling tools. At the same time, the old system of state-chartered bank notes was overhauled. Only newly established national banks could issue currency. The government also printed its own paper money, printed on the back in green ink. The public quickly called them "greenbacks."

  The contrast with the Confederacy was severe. Confederate currency inflated so badly that by February 1864, a Confederate dollar was worth four cents in gold. Customs revenue from tariffs alone totaled $345 million across the war years, or 43% of all federal tax revenue. The Union blockade denied that same revenue stream to the Confederacy.

• 5. The Home Front at War

  ›

  By the end of 1861, 700,000 soldiers were drilling in Union camps, and the society that supported them was reorganizing itself around the demands of the fight.

  More soldiers died of disease than from battle injuries. Epidemics of childhood diseases hit first, including chicken pox, mumps, whooping cough, and especially measles, as men who had rarely left home were gathered together by the thousands. Operations in Confederate territory introduced diarrhea, dysentery, typhoid fever, and malaria. There were no antibiotics. Surgeons prescribed coffee, whiskey, and quinine.

  The Union response was to build army hospitals in every state and to organize an entirely new set of private and public agencies. The United States Sanitary Commission, led by Frederick Law Olmsted as its executive director, raised millions of dollars and gathered vast quantities of statistical data. The Women's Central Association of Relief for Sick and Wounded in the Army was founded in 1861 by Henry Whitney Bellows, a Unitarian minister, alongside the social reformer Dorothea Dix. Poet Walt Whitman volunteered in the hospitals. The United States Christian Commission sent 6,000 volunteers into the camps to distribute Bibles, help soldiers write letters home, teach reading and writing, and set up camp libraries.

  John Shaw Billings, born in 1838, served as a senior surgeon and later built two of the world's most important libraries: the Library of the Surgeon General's Office, now known as the National Library of Medicine, and the New York Public Library. He also developed a system for mechanically analyzing data by punching it onto cards. His student Herman Hollerith later extended that idea, and Hollerith's company became International Business Machines, known as IBM, in 1911.

• 6. Opposition From Within

  ›

  The Copperheads were a large faction of Northern Democrats who demanded an immediate peace settlement and wanted to restore the Union as it had been, which meant restoring slavery. Their strength was concentrated in the area just north of the Ohio River and in some urban ethnic wards.

  The most prominent Copperhead was Clement L. Vallandigham, an Ohio congressman and Democratic Party leader who lost his race for governor in 1863. Republican prosecutors in the Midwest charged some Copperhead activists with treason in a series of trials in 1864. Whether those charges were fair is still debated: some historians argue that the conspiracies were real, while others say the Republicans greatly exaggerated the threat for partisan gain.

  The draft produced the sharpest confrontations. The New York City draft riots ran from the 13th of July to the 16th of July 1863. Irish Catholic and other workers fought police, militia, and regular Army units. The Army ultimately used artillery, firing grape shot down cobblestone streets, to suppress the uprising. The protests had begun over the draft but quickly became violent attacks on Black residents of the city. Holmes County, Ohio, saw smaller disturbances in June 1863; local politicians called Lincoln and Congress despotic, and the Army had to send in armed units to restore order.

  Copperhead strength rose and fell with Union fortunes on the battlefield. After Atlanta fell in September 1864, military success seemed certain and Copperheadism collapsed. In the 1864 election, the Republicans and War Democrats ran together under the National Union Party banner. They defeated Democratic candidate George B. McClellan by a landslide. For the next 30 years, Democrats carried the burden of having opposed the martyred Lincoln.

• 7. Guerrilla War and the Border

  ›

  Missouri saw more than 1,000 engagements between Union and Confederate forces, and that count does not include the uncounted raids and attacks carried out by informal armed bands.

  Roving insurgent groups, among them Quantrill's Raiders and the men of Bloody Bill Anderson, struck both military installations and civilian settlements across western Missouri. Federal leaders responded in 1863 by issuing General Order No. 11, which forcibly evacuated the residents of Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties. Nearly 20,000 people, mostly women, children, and the elderly, were driven from their homes on short notice. Many never returned. The affected counties remained economically devastated for years. Future U.S. President Harry Truman's grandparents were caught up in those raids, and Truman himself told stories of how they had been held in what he called concentration camps.

  In Kentucky, the situation led to direct military rule. In June 1864, Major General Stephen G. Burbridge was given command of the state and martial law was authorized by President Lincoln. Burbridge's policy included the public execution of four guerrillas for every unarmed Union citizen killed. After a falling out with Governor Thomas E. Bramlette, Burbridge was dismissed in February 1865. Confederates called him the "Butcher of Kentucky."

  Nearly 100,000 Unionists from the South served in the Union Army during the war, and Unionist regiments were raised from every Confederate state except South Carolina. Among those units was the 1st Alabama Cavalry Regiment, which served as William Sherman's personal escort on his march to the sea.

• 8. What the War Built

  ›

  Agriculture was the largest single industry in the Union during the war, and it prospered. Britain depended on American wheat for a quarter of its food imports, which meant demand stayed strong even as hundreds of thousands of farmers were in uniform.

  The war sped up the adoption of horse-drawn machinery: the reaper and the mower spread quickly across farms where wives had taken over from absent husbands. The army consumed horses for cavalry and artillery and mules for wagons, and it had cash to pay for them, though quality was uneven in the early months and an unprecedented epidemic of a fatal disease called glanders baffled veterinarians.

  The Republican Congress reshaped the country's economic foundations. The Homestead Act opened public lands for free settlement. The Pacific Railroad Act funded construction that would eventually link the coasts. Land grants to railroad companies allowed them to sell family farms of 80 to 200 acres at low prices with extended credit. The Morrill Land Grant College Act created an educational system geared toward agricultural and mechanical sciences.

  The war's organizational demands also changed how Americans thought about public welfare. The experiences of the Sanitary Commission and similar bodies set the stage for large-scale community philanthropy built on fund-raising campaigns and private donations. Mary Livermore, born in 1820, managed the Chicago branch of the Sanitary Commission and used the organizational skills she built there to mobilize support for women's suffrage after the war. She argued that women needed more education and more job opportunities, a position she developed directly from her wartime work.