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THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR – BETWEEN FREEDOM AND

SLAVERY

Îndrumător: Buzăianu Ema Candidat: Honciu

Mario

Târgoviște, 2021
 CONTENTS

Argument..................................................................................pg. 3

Introduction..............................................................................pg. 4

Chapter 1-Slavery.....................................................................pg.5

Chapter 2-Anti-Slavery Perspecive..........................................pg.6

Chapter 3-Abolitionist...............................................................pg.7

Chapter4-Licoln’s Elections....................................................pg.8

Chapter 5-The Civil War...........................................................pg.9

Chapter 6-Welcome to the Freedom.........................................pg.10

Conclusion..................................................................................pg.13

Bibliography...............................................................................pg.14
 Argument

I chose this subject because the American Civil War left a positive mark on the
impressive history of the Americans by ending the wrong mentality of the
Southerners and making racism and slavery a thing of the past.Besides this war
with a surprisingly beneficial effect for the Americans, Licoln's life was a heroic
one because he started from a modest family, being the poorest American
president. He worked hard all his life, he became president, he guided the country
in its most difficult times, abolished slavery and immediately afterwards was
killed. He was morally strong, going through a crucial war in which more soldiers
were killed than in any other American war, and he overcame the drama of his 11-
year-old son's death. Through this far-reaching war, the historical course of the
United States of America has changed, bringing to the surface the discontent of the
people but also the increasingly serious racial problems with detrimental
consequences for American society. Thus, the proclamation of emancipation
represented a passport of the consecrated rights regarding the freedom of the
citizen, a fact that ensured stability and balance in the face of racial issues.

Introduction
 American Civil War, or Civil War or War Between the States, (1861–65)
Conflict between the U.S. federal government and 11 Southern states that fought to
secede from the Union. It arose out of disputes over the issues of slavery, trade and
tariffs, and the doctrine of states’ rights. In the 1840s and ’50s, Northern
opposition to slavery in the Western territories caused the Southern states to fear
that existing slaveholdings, which formed the economic base of the South, were
also in danger. By the 1850s abolitionism was growing in the North, and when the
antislavery Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860,
the Southern states seceded to protect what they saw as their right to keep slaves.
They were organized as the Confederate States of America under Jefferson Davis.
The Northern states of the federal Union, under Lincoln, commanded more than
twice the population of the Confederacy and held greater advantages in
manufacturing and transportation capacity. The war began in Charleston, S.C.,
when Confederate artillery fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. 

Chapter 1
 Slavery

Slavery was the main cause of disunion. The issue of slavery had confounded the
nation since its inception, and increasingly separated the United States into a
slaveholding South and a free North. The issue was exacerbated by the rapid
territorial expansion of the country, which repeatedly brought to the fore the issue
of whether new territory should be slaveholding or free. The issue had dominated
politics for decades leading up to the war. Key attempts to solve the issue included
the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, but these only postponed
an inevitable showdown over slavery.There were opposing views even in the
Union States, with some Northern soldiers indifferent on the subject of
slavery, while Confederate soldiers fought the war primarily to protect a Southern
society of which slavery was an integral part.Enslaved people in the antebellum
South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Most lived on large
plantations or small farms; many masters owned fewer than 50 enslaved
people.Land owners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them
through a system of restrictive codes. They were usually prohibited from learning
to read and write, and their behavior and movement was restricted.Many masters
raped enslaved women, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while
rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished. A strict hierarchy among the
enslaved (from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field
hands) helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their masters.
 Chapter 2
Anti-Slavery Perspective

From the anti-slavery perspective, the issue was primarily about whether the
system of slavery was an anachronistic evil that was incompatible
with republicanism. The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was containment—to
stop the expansion and thus put slavery on a path to gradual extinction. The slave-
holding interests in the South denounced this strategy as infringing upon their
Constitutional rights. Southern whites believed that the emancipation of slaves
would destroy the South's economy, due to a large amount of capital invested in
slaves and fears of integrating the ex-slave black population. In particular, many
Southerners feared a repeat of 1804 Haiti massacre, (also known as "the horrors of
Santo Domingo") in which former slaves systematically murdered most of what
was left of the country's white population – including men, women, children, and
even many sympathetic to abolition after the successful slave revolt in Haiti.
Historian Thomas Fleming points to the historical phrase "a disease in the public
mind" used by critics of this idea and proposes it contributed to the segregation in
the Jim Crow era following emancipation. These fears were exacerbated by
the 1859 attempt of John Brown to instigate an armed slave rebellion in the South.

Chapter 3
 Abolitionists

The American Revolution and the cause of liberty added tremendous impetus to

the abolitionist cause. Slavery, which had been around for thousands of years, was
considered "normal" and was not a significant issue of public debate prior to the
Revolution. The Revolution changed that and made it into an issue that had to be
addressed. As a result, shortly after the Revolution, the northern states quickly
started outlawing slavery. Even in southern states, laws were changed to limit
slavery and facilitate manumission. The amount of indentured servitude
(temporary slavery) dropped dramatically throughout the country. An Act
Prohibiting Importation of Slaves sailed through Congress with little opposition.
President Thomas Jefferson supported it, and it went into effect on January 1,
1808. Benjamin Franklin and James Madison each helped found manumission
societies. Influenced by the Revolution, many individual slave owners, such
as George Washington, freed their slaves, often in their wills. The number of free
blacks as a proportion of the black population in the upper South increased from
less than 1 percent to nearly 10 percent between 1790 and 1810 as a result of these
actions.

Chapter 4
 Lincoln's Election

The election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 was the final trigger for
secession. Efforts at compromise, including the Corwin Amendment and
the Crittenden Compromise, failed. Southern leaders feared that Lincoln would
stop the expansion of slavery and put it on a course toward extinction. The slave
states, which had already become a minority in the House of Representatives, were
now facing a future as a perpetual minority in the Senate and Electoral College
against an increasingly powerful North. Before Lincoln took office in March 1861,
seven slave states had declared their secession and joined to form the Confederacy.
According to Lincoln, the American people had shown that they had been
successful in establishing and administering a republic, but a third challenge faced
the nation, maintaining a republic based on the people's vote against an attempt to
overthrow it. Abraham Lincoln did believe that slavery was morally wrong, but
there was one big problem: It was sanctioned by the highest law in the land,
the Constitution. The nation’s founding fathers, who also struggled with how to
address slavery, did not explicitly write the word “slavery” in the Constitution, but
they did include key clauses protecting the institution, including a fugitive slave
clause and the three-fifths clause, which allowed Southern states to count enslaved
people for the purposes of representation in the federal government. 

Chapter 5
The Civil War
Both sides quickly raised armies. In July 1861, 30,000 Union troops marched
toward the Confederate capital at Richmond, Va., but were stopped by Confederate
forces in the Battle of Bull Run and forced to retreat to Washington, D.C. The
defeat shocked the Union, which called for 500,000 more recruits. The war’s first
major campaign began in February 1862, when Union troops under Ulysses S.
Grant captured Confederate forts in western Tennessee. Union victories at the
battles of Shiloh and New Orleans followed. In the East, Robert E. Lee won
several Confederate victories in the Seven Days’ Battles and, after defeat at the
Battle of Antietam, in the Battle of Fredericksburg (December 1862). After the
Confederate victory at the Battle of Chancellorsville, Lee invaded the North and
engaged Union forces under George Meade at the momentous Battle
of Gettysburg. The war’s turning point in the West occurred in July 1863 with
Grant’s success in the Vicksburg Campaign, which brought the entire Mississippi
River under Union control. Grant’s command was expanded after the Union defeat
at the Battle of Chickamauga, and in March 1864 Lincoln gave him supreme
command of the Union armies. He began a strategy of attrition and, despite heavy
Union casualties at the battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, began to
surround Lee’s troops in Petersburg, Va. (see Petersburg Campaign). Meanwhile
William T. Sherman captured Atlanta in September (see Atlanta Campaign), set
out on a destructive march through Georgia, and soon captured Savannah. Grant
captured Richmond on April 3, 1865, and accepted Lee’s surrender on April 9 at
Appomattox Court House. On April 26 Sherman received the surrender of Joseph
Johnston, thereby ending the war. The mortality rates of the war were staggering—
there were about 620,000 deaths out of a total of 2.4 million soldiers. The South
was devastated. But the Union was preserved, and slavery was abolished.

Chapter 6
Welcome to the Freedom
That day—January 1, 1863—President Lincoln formally issued
the Emancipation Proclamation , calling on the Union army to liberate all
enslaved people in states still in rebellion as “an act of justice, warranted
by the Constitution, upon military necessity.” These three million enslaved
people were declared to be “then, thenceforward, and forever free.” The
proclamation exempted the border states that remained in the Union and all
or parts of three Confederate states controlled by the Union army.The
Emancipation Proclamation transformed the Civil War from a war against
secession into a war for “a new birth of freedom,” as Lincoln stated in
his Gettysburg Address in 1863 . This ideological change discouraged the
intervention of France or England on the Confederacy’s behalf and enabled
the Union to enlist the 180,000 African American soldiers and sailors who
volunteered to fight between January 1, 1863, and the conclusion of the
war.Despite its limitations, Lincoln’s proclamation marked a crucial
turning point in the evolution of Lincoln’s views of slavery, as well as a
turning point in the Civil War itself. By war’s end, some 200,000 Black
men would serve in the Union Army and Navy, striking a mortal blow
against the institution of slavery and paving the way for its eventual
abolition by the 13th Amendment.

Conclusion

Some have called the American Civil War the last of the old-fashioned wars;
others have termed it the first modern war. Actually, it was a transitional war, and
it had a profound impact, technologically, on the development of modern weapons
and techniques. There were many innovations. It was the first war in history in
which ironclad warships clashed; the first in which the telegraph and railroad
played significant roles; the first to use, extensively, rifled ordnance and shell guns
and to introduce a machine gun (the Gatling gun); the first to have widespread
newspaper coverage, voting by servicemen in the field in national elections, and
photographic recordings; the first to organize medical care of troops
systematically; and the first to use land and water mines and to employ
a submarine that could sink a warship. It was also the first war in which armies
widely employed aerial reconnaissance (by means of balloons). The Civil War has
been written about as few other wars in history have. More than 60,000 books and
countless articles give eloquent testimony to the accuracy of poet Walt Whitman’s
prediction that “a great literature will…arise out of the era of those four years.”
The events of the war left a rich heritage for future generations, and
that legacy was summed up by the martyred Lincoln as showing that the reunited
sections of the United States constituted “the last best hope of earth.”

Bibliography

 https://www.britannica.com/summary/American-Civil-War
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War
 https://www.history.com/