AP U.S. History 5.8: Military Conflict in the Civil War

Mobilization means turning a society's people, money and industry toward war, and neither side was ready for a long one in 1861. On April 29, 1861, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, told its Congress at Montgomery: "It is proposed to organize and hold in readiness for instant action, in view of the present exigencies of the country, an army of 100,000 men." At first, volunteers filled the ranks on both sides.

Volunteers were not enough for a long war, and both sides turned to a draft. The Confederacy went first: its War Department's records on conscription and exemptions begin in 1862. The Union followed with the Enrollment Act of 1863, which made men from twenty to forty-five subject to the draft.

Wars cost money as well as men. An act of Congress of July 1, 1862, levied the first income tax Americans actually paid, an emergency measure to finance the Union cause. The Confederacy, with far less industry to tax, collected a tax in kind, paid in goods such as crops rather than cash, and in 1864 and 1865 it impressed enslaved people, forcing them into war labor.

Sources: Jefferson Davis, Message to Congress, April 29, 1861 (Avalon Project); Guide to the War Department Collection of Confederate Records (National Archives); Civil War Draft Records (Prologue, National Archives); Income Tax Records of the Civil War Years (Prologue, National Archives).

The home front, life away from the battlefields, was divided on both sides.

In the North, a drafted man could buy his way out of service, usually by hiring a substitute to serve in his place. Grover Cleveland, a future president enrolled in June 1863, paid a substitute. In 1864 the New York lawyer George Templeton Strong paid a "big 'Dutch' boy of about twenty" $1,100 to serve for him. Michael T. Meier, writing in the National Archives' Prologue magazine, calls the Enrollment Act "this unpopular law." By the summer of 1862, the historian Daniel E. Sutherland writes, Lincoln also faced a rising tide of public criticism of how the war was going in the East, with midterm elections ahead. In the slave state of Maryland, where a crowd had attacked Union troops in Baltimore in the war's first week, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and arrested disloyal citizens, including members of the state legislature.

The Confederacy was divided too. Across the South, Sutherland writes, Unionist and Confederate neighbors who had taken rival sides fought each other for control of their communities. And enslaved people inside the Confederacy were never behind its war; a National Archives teaching guide notes that the South had to fear them as a threat of rebellion and of help to the Union.

Sources: Civil War Draft Records (Prologue, National Archives); Abraham Lincoln and the Guerrillas (Prologue, National Archives); Factors that Affected the Civil War (National Archives teaching guide).

The Confederacy did not have to conquer the North, only outlast it. It had able commanders, among them Robert E. Lee, Joseph Johnston and Stonewall Jackson, and Lee took the war north. In September 1862 the Union army turned back his first invasion of the North at Antietam, Maryland.

The turning came in July 1863, with two Union victories: the Battle of Gettysburg, in Pennsylvania, and the fall of Vicksburg to Grant's army in the West. On July 7 Lincoln telegraphed General Henry Halleck: "We have certain information that Vicksburg surrendered to Gen. Grant on the 4th of July." But General George Meade hung back, and Lee's beaten army escaped into Virginia.

Lincoln found the general he wanted in Ulysses S. Grant, whose victories had secured parts of the Mississippi River basin, and nominated him to be Lieutenant General of the Army. A strategy is the plan that links a war's goals. The teaching guide lists four: control the Mississippi River; cut the South off from foreign traders and smugglers, the job of Lincoln's naval blockade; defeat the Confederate army in the field; and curtail the South's ability to produce goods and war materials.

Sources: Factors that Affected the Civil War (National Archives teaching guide); War Department General Order 143 (National Archives); Emancipation Proclamation (National Archives); Lincoln's telegram to Halleck, July 7, 1863 (Prologue, National Archives); The Union Navy in the Civil War (Prologue, National Archives).

The North's resources were greater in almost every way. Its population was several times the South's, which meant more soldiers and more workers. It had most of the factories that made war materials, a network of roads, canals and railroads that could resupply armies in the field, and a far stronger navy.

Resources win faster when the enemy's are destroyed. Infrastructure is the railroads, roads, factories and farms that let a society feed and supply its armies. In 1863 the Union army's General Orders No. 100, rules of war prepared by Francis Lieber, permitted such destruction when the war required it. Article 17 says: "War is not carried on by arms alone. It is lawful to starve the hostile belligerent, armed or unarmed, so that it leads to the speedier subjection of the enemy."

In the war's last year the Union put this to work. General William T. Sherman captured Atlanta on September 2, 1864, and then set out to march from Atlanta to the sea; he later telegraphed Lincoln that Savannah, Georgia, had surrendered, as a Christmas present to the President. In the war's last year, Union armies destroyed much of the South's infrastructure.

Sources: Factors that Affected the Civil War (National Archives teaching guide); General Orders No. 100 (Avalon Project); The Union Navy in the Civil War (Prologue, National Archives).