AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

American Civil War

American Civil War

The American Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate troops attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Although complex economic and social forces motivated Southerners to secede and ultimately take up arms, the war was fought over the union of the United States, threatened by the issue of whether or not slavery would continue in the United States. Despite the popular myth that African Americans were simply the subjects of this debate, blacks were involved in and affected by nearly every aspect of the war (Hargrove, 1988). At the onset of the conflict, more than 4.5 million people of African descent lived in the United States, and 3.5 million of these men, women, and children lived as slaves in the South. (Blacks comprised nearly one-third of the overall population south of the Mason-Dixon Line.)

The Civil War came as the culmination of decades of heated political debate. The 1857 Dred Scott decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, which categorized enslaved African Americans as property and and declared that African Americans had no political rights, followed important laws that shaped the national conversation about slavery (Ramold, 2002). The Compromise of 1850, a series of five laws, allowed the admission of California to the Union as a free state while declaring that future states carved from territory taken in the war with Mexico would be allowed to determine for themselves whether or not slavery would be permitted within their borders The Fugitive Slave Law, a part of the compromise, required northern states to return runaway slaves. However, many citizens in the North refused to obey, and free blacks and abolitionists began to see war as inevitable. In 1859 antislavery advocate John Brown led a raid on a federal arsenal with the hope of eventually freeing slaves in the South, and in 1861 the Republican Party, which was formed by antislavery activists, gained control of the White House when Abraham Lincoln became president.

Before Lincoln was even inaugurated, South Carolina seceded from the Union, and by June 1861, ten other southern states had followed suit. Once the fighting began in April, African Americans heeded Frederick Douglass's call for “black men just now to take up arms in behalf of their country” (Hargrove, 1988, p. 2). Thousands of African Americans volunteered to join the Union Army; yet Lincoln initially objected to their participation, arguing that the chief ...