The Civil War Presidents: The Lives and Legacies of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis

While many in the North fretted over Lee's advance, Lincoln saw the offensive as an opportunity to destroy a Confederate army. The battle, fought over three days, resulted in the highest number of casualties in the war. Along with the Union victory in the Siege of Vicksburg , the Battle of Gettysburg is often referred to as a turning point in the war. Though the battle ended with a Confederate retreat, Lincoln was dismayed that Meade had failed to destroy Lee's army. Feeling that Meade was a competent commander despite his failure to pursue Lee, Lincoln allowed Meade to remain in command of the Army of the Potomac.

The Eastern Theater would be locked in a stalemate for the remainder of In November , Lincoln was invited to Gettysburg to dedicate the first national cemetery and honor the soldiers who had fallen. His Gettysburg Address became a core statement of American political values. Defying Lincoln's prediction that "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here", the Address became the most quoted speech in American history. He defined the war as an effort dedicated to the principles of liberty and equality for all. The emancipation of slaves was now part of the national war effort.

He declared that the deaths of so many brave soldiers would not be in vain, that slavery would end as a result of the losses, and the future of democracy in the world would be assured, that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth". Lincoln concluded that the Civil War had a profound objective: Compared to the Eastern Theater of the war, Lincoln exercised less direct control over operations that took place West of the Appalachian Mountains.

Grant quickly earned Lincoln's attention, winning the first significant Union victory at the Battle of Fort Henry and earning a national reputation with his victory at the Battle of Fort Donelson. Naval forces under the command of David Farragut captured the important port city of New Orleans. In April , Lincoln announced the Union blockade of all Southern ports; commercial ships could not get insurance and regular traffic ended. The South blundered in embargoing cotton exports in before the blockade was effective; by the time they realized the mistake, it was too late. By June , warships were stationed off the principal Southern ports, and a year later nearly ships were in service.

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Practically, the entire Confederate cotton crop was useless although it was sold to Union traders , costing the Confederacy its main source of income. Critical imports were scarce and the coastal trade was largely ended as well. Merchant ships owned in Europe could not get insurance and were too slow to evade the blockade; they simply stopped calling at Confederate ports.

Grant was one of the few senior generals that Lincoln did not know personally, and the president was not able to visit the Western Theater of the war. Nonetheless, Lincoln came to appreciate the battlefield exploits of Grant. Lincoln also obtained Congress's consent to reinstate for Grant the rank of Lieutenant General , which no U. Lincoln strongly approved of Grant's new strategy, which focused on the destruction of Confederate armies rather than the capture of Confederate cities.

Two months after being promoted to general-in-chief, Grant embarked upon his bloody Overland Campaign. This campaign is often characterized as a war of attrition , given high Union losses at battles such as the Battle of the Wilderness and Cold Harbor. Even though they had the advantage of fighting on the defensive, the Confederate forces had a similarly high level of casualties.

Johnston and John Bell Hood along the way. Sherman's victory in the September 2 Battle of Atlanta boosted Union morale, breaking the pessimism that had set in throughout Leaving Atlanta, and his base of supplies, Sherman's army marched east with an unknown destination, laying waste to about 20 percent of the farms in Georgia in his " March to the Sea ".

Lincoln watched the combat from an exposed position; at one point during the skirmish Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes shouted at him, "Get down, you damn fool, before you get shot! Sheridan quickly repelled Early and suppressed the Confederate guerrillas in the Shenandoah Valley. With Democratic gains in the and mid-term elections, Lincoln felt increasing pressure to finish the war before the end of his term in early Chase emerged as the most prominent potential intra-party challenger, and Senator Samuel C.

Pomeroy led a covert campaign for Chase's nomination. Though Hamlin hoped to be re-nominated as vice president, the convention instead nominated Andrew Johnson, the military governor of Tennessee. Lincoln had refused to weigh in on his preferred running mate, and the convention chose to nominate Johnson, a Southern War Democrat, in order to boost the party's appeal to Unionists of both parties. By August, Republicans across the country were experiencing feelings of extreme anxiety, fearing that Lincoln would be defeated. The outlook was so grim that Thurlow Weed told the president directly that his "re-election was an impossibility.

This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.

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Lincoln's re-election prospects grew brighter after the Union Navy seized Mobile Bay in late August and General Sherman captured Atlanta a few weeks later. The divided Democrats adopted a platform calling for peace with the Confederacy, but McClellan himself favored continuing the war. McClellan agonized over accepting the nomination, but after the Union victory in Atlanta, he accepted the nomination with a public letter.

Confederate leaders hoped that a McClellan victory would lead to the beginning of peace negotiations, potentially leaving an independent Confederacy in place. Republican victories extended to other races, as the party gained dominant majorities in both houses of Congress and Republicans won nearly all of the gubernatorial races. Lincoln and the Republican Party mobilized support for the draft throughout the North and replaced the Union losses. After Lincoln won reelection in November , Francis Preston Blair , a personal friend of both Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, unsuccessfully encouraged Lincoln to make a diplomatic visit to Richmond.

Stephens , Senator Robert M. Campbell —to discuss terms to end the war. Lincoln refused to allow any negotiation with the Confederacy as a coequal; his sole objective was an agreement to end the fighting and the meetings produced no results. Grant ground down the Confederate army across several months of trench warfare. Due to the city's important location, the fall of Petersburg would likely lead to the fall of Richmond, but Grant feared that Lee would decide to move South and link up with other Confederate armies.

In March , with the fall of Petersburg appearing imminent, Lee sought to break through the Union lines at the Battle of Fort Stedman , but the Confederate assault was repulsed. On April 2, Grant launched an attack that became known as the Third Battle of Petersburg , which ended with Lee's retreat from Petersburg and Richmond. Johnston , who was positioned in North Carolina, while Grant sought to force the surrender of Lee's army. As he walked through the city, white Southerners were stone-faced, but freedmen greeted him as a hero, with one admirer remarking, "I know I am free for I have seen the face of Father Abraham and have felt him".

Throughout the first year and a half of his presidency, Lincoln made it clear that the North was fighting the war to preserve the Union and not to end slavery.

Presidency of Abraham Lincoln - Wikipedia

Though unwilling to publicly declare the abolition of slavery as a war goal, Lincoln considered various plans that would provide for the eventual abolition of slavery and explored the idea of compensated emancipation, including one proposed test case which would have seen all Delaware slaves freed by In an August letter to anti-slavery journalist Horace Greeley , Lincoln explained:.

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was". My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.

As the Civil War continued, freeing the slaves became an important wartime measure for weakening the rebellion by destroying the economic base of its leadership class. In August , Lincoln signed the Confiscation Act of , which authorized court proceedings to confiscate the slaves of anyone who participated in or aided the Confederate war effort.

The act however, did not specify whether the slaves were free. The following month, Lincoln signed the Confiscation Act of , which declared that all Confederate slaves taking refuge behind Union lines were to be set free. Union victories in and secured the border states, which in turn freed Lincoln's hand to pursue more aggressive anti-slavery policies. On July 22, , Lincoln read to his cabinet a preliminary draft of a proclamation calling for emancipation of all slaves in the Confederacy. As the Union had suffered several defeats in the early part of the war, Seward convinced Lincoln to announce this emancipation plan after a significant Union victory so that it would not seem like a move of desperation.

The Emancipation Proclamation, announced on September 22 and put in effect January 1, , applied in the eleven states that were still in rebellion in The proclamation did not cover the nearly , slaves in the slave-holding border states that had remained in the Union, nor did it apply to Tennessee or West Virginia, both of which were largely under the control of Union forces.

As Southern states were subdued, critical decisions had to be made as to the leadership and policies of these states. Louisiana, which had a larger slave population than other Confederate state occupied early in the war, became the center of discussion regarding Reconstruction under Lincoln and military governor Benjamin Butler. Banks , implemented a labor system in which free blacks worked as laborers on white-owned plantations. This model, which paid blacks wages but also represented a continuation of plantation agriculture, was adopted throughout much of the occupied South.

After , Democrats like Reverdy Johnson sought the withdrawal of the Emancipation Proclamation and amnesty for the Confederates. By contrast, Radical Republicans like Sumner argued that rebel Southerners had lost all rights by attempting to secede from the Union. In his ten percent plan , Lincoln sought to find a middle ground, calling for the emancipation of Confederate slaves and the re-integration of Southern states once ten percent of voters in a state took an oath of allegiance to the U.

As the Wade-Davis Bill interfered with Lincoln's plans for the readmission of Louisiana and Arkansas, Lincoln pocket vetoed the bill in late Even as they cooperated on most other issues, Lincoln and congressional Republicans continued to clash over Reconstruction policies after the election. Many in Congress sought far-reaching reforms to Southern society that went beyond the abolition of slavery, and they refused to recognize Lincoln's reconstituted Southern governments.

Disagreements within Congress prevented the passage of any Reconstruction bill or the recognition of governments in Arkansas and Louisiana. Historian Eric Foner notes that no one knows what Lincoln would have done about Reconstruction had he served out his second term, but writes,. Unlike Sumner and other Radicals, Lincoln did not see Reconstruction as an opportunity for a sweeping political and social revolution beyond emancipation.

He had long made clear his opposition to the confiscation and redistribution of land. He believed, as most Republicans did in April , that the voting requirements should be determined by the states. He assumed that political control in the South would pass to white Unionists, reluctant secessionists, and forward-looking former Confederates. But time and again during the war, Lincoln, after initial opposition, and come to embrace positions first advanced by abolitionists and Radical Republicans Lincoln undoubtedly would have listened carefully to the outcry for further protection for the former slaves It is entirely plausible to imagine Lincoln and Congress agreeing on a Reconstruction policy that encompassed federal protection for basic civil rights plus limited black suffrage, along the lines Lincoln proposed just before his death.

In December , a proposed constitutional amendment that would outlaw slavery was introduced in Congress; though the Senate voted for the amendment with the necessary two-thirds majority, the amendment did not receive sufficient support in the House. With the aid of large Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, Lincoln believed that he could permanently end the institution of slavery in the United States. Rather than waiting for the 39th Congress to convene in March, Lincoln pressed the lame duck session of the 38th Congress to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment as soon as possible.

After an extensive lobbying campaign by Lincoln and Seward, the House narrowly cleared the two-thirds threshold in a vote. With the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, some abolitionist leaders viewed their work as complete, though Frederick Douglass believed that "slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot. In the decades prior to the Civil War, Southern congressmen had blocked the passage of various economic proposals, including federal funding for internal improvements , support for higher education, and increased tariff rates designed to protect domestic manufacturing against foreign competition.

The 37th Congress , which met from to , passed public acts, more than double the number of the 27th Congress , which had previously held the record for most public acts passed. The 38th Congress, meeting from to , passed public acts. Many of these bills were designed to raise revenue for funding the war, as federal expenses increased seven-fold in the first year of the Civil War. Congress quickly approved Lincoln's request to assemble a ,man army, but initially resisted raising taxes to pay for the war.

This taxation of income reflected the increasing amount of wealth held in stocks and bonds rather than property, which the federal government had taxed in the past. Lincoln also signed the second and third Morrill Tariffs , the first having become law in the final months of Buchanan's tenure. These tariff acts raised import duties considerably compared to previous tariff rates, and they were designed to both raise revenue and protect domestic manufacturing against foreign competition.

During the war, the tariff also helped manufacturers off-set the burden of new taxes. Compared to pre-war levels, the tariff would remain relatively high for the remainder of the 19th century. The revenue measures of proved inadequate for the funding of the war, forcing Congress to pass further bills designed to generate revenue. Greenbacks were not backed by gold or silver , but rather by the promise of the United States government to honor their value. Despite these new measures, funding the war continued to be a difficult struggle for Chase and the Lincoln administration.

Hoping to stabilize the currency, Chase convinced Congress to pass the National Banking Act in February , as well as a second banking act in Those acts established the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to oversee "national banks," which would be subject to federal, rather than state, regulation. In return for investing a third of their capital in federal bonds, these national banks were authorized to issue federal banknotes. Many of the bills passed by the 37th and 38th Congress were designed at least in part to pay for the war, but other bills instituted long-term reforms in areas unrelated to revenue.

Under the act, settlers would be granted acres of public land if they invested five years into developing the land. The law gave each member of Congress 30, acres of public land to sell, with proceeds funding the establishment of land-grant colleges. The Pacific Railway Acts of and granted federal support for the construction of the United States' First Transcontinental Railroad , which was completed in In June , Lincoln approved the Yosemite Grant enacted by Congress, which provided unprecedented federal protection for the area now known as Yosemite National Park.

Before Lincoln's presidency, Thanksgiving, while a regional holiday in New England since the 17th century, had been proclaimed by the federal government only sporadically and on irregular dates. In the aftermath of the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and began to imprison suspected Confederate sympathizers. In , Seward set up a special office in the State Department designed to monitor internal security, and the federal government and local police officers worked together to suppress those suspected of actively supporting the Confederacy.

In the subsequent case of Ex parte Merryman , Chief Justice Taney asserted that only Congress had the right to suspend habeas corpus. In a message to Congress delivered in July , Lincoln responded by arguing that his actions had been constitutional and necessary given the threat posed by the Confederacy. As the war continued, many in the North came to resist the sacrifices required by the war, and recruiting declined.

The conscription act included various exemptions and allowed potential draftees to pay for substitutes, but it nonetheless proved unpopular in many communities and among many state and local leaders. The New York City draft riots of July saw mobs attack soldiers, policemen, and African Americans, and was only subdued after Lincoln diverted soldiers from the Gettysburg Campaign. Rejecting calls to institute martial law in the city, Lincoln appointed John Adams Dix to oversee New York City, and Dix allowed the city hold civilian trials on those who had participated in the riots.

Clement Vallandigham , a Copperhead Democrat from Ohio, emerged as one of the most prominent critics of the war. General Ambrose Burnside arrested Vallandigham in May after the latter strongly criticized the draft and other wartime policies. A military commission subsequently sentenced Vallandigham to imprisonment until the end of the war, but Lincoln intervened to have Vallandigham released into Confederate territory. Ohio Democrats nonetheless nominated Vallandigham for governor in June Conflicts with Native Americans on the American frontier continued during the Civil War, as American settlers continued to push west.

Presented with execution warrants for convicted Santee Dakota who were accused of killing innocent farmers, Lincoln conducted his own personal review of each of these warrants, eventually approving 39 for execution one was later reprieved. However, as the war to preserve the Union was Lincoln's primary concern, he simply allowed the system to function unchanged for the balance of his presidency.

Two new states were admitted to the Union while Lincoln was in office. In the June Wheeling Convention, delegates from several counties in western Virginia formed the Restored Government of Virginia , ostensibly as the legitimate government of Virginia. In the following year, the people of West Virginia voted to secede from Virginia, and a new state constitution was written. West Virginia , the Supreme Court implicitly affirmed that the breakaway Virginia counties did have the proper consents necessary to become a separate state.

Congress approved an enabling act authorizing Nevada Territory to form a state government in March ; similar legislation was also approved for Colorado Territory and Nebraska Territory. Nebraska's constitutional convention voted against statehood, while voters in Colorado rejected the proposed state constitution, so of those three territories, only Nevada became a state during Lincoln's presidency. Although they remained out of the war, the European powers, especially France and Britain , factored into the American Civil War in various ways.

European leaders saw the division of the United States as having the potential to eliminate, or at least greatly weaken, a growing rival. They looked for ways to exploit the inability of the U. Spain invaded the Dominican Republic in , while France established a puppet regime in Mexico.

Lincoln's foreign policy was deficient in in terms of appealing to European public opinion. The European aristocracy the dominant factor in every major country was "absolutely gleeful in pronouncing the American debacle as proof that the entire experiment in popular government had failed. Confederate spokesman, on the other hand, were much more successful by ignoring slavery and instead focusing on their struggle for liberty, their commitment to free trade, and the essential role of cotton in the European economy. Any chance of a European intervention in the war ended with the Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, as European leaders came to believe that the Confederate cause was doomed.

Elite opinion in Britain tended to favor the Confederacy, but public opinion tended to favor the United States. Large scale trade continued in both directions with the United States, with the Americans shipping grain to Britain while Britain exported manufactured items and munitions. British trade with the Confederacy was limited, with a trickle of cotton going to Britain and some munitions slipped in by numerous small blockade runners. A serious diplomatic dispute between the U. The Union Navy intercepted a British mail ship, the Trent , on the high seas and seized two Confederate envoys en route to Europe.

The incident aroused public outrage in Britain; the government of Lord Palmerston protested vehemently, while the American public cheered. Lincoln ended the crisis, known as the Trent Affair , by releasing the two diplomats, who had been seized illegally. British financiers built and operated most of the blockade runners , spending hundreds of millions of pounds on them; but that was legal and not the cause of serious tension.

They were staffed by sailors and officers on leave from the Royal Navy. Navy captured one of the fast blockade runners, it sold the ship and cargo as prize money for the American sailors, then released the crew. In December , France invaded Mexico. While the official justification was the collection of debts, France eventually established a puppet state under the rule of Maximilian I of Mexico.

However, this proposal was declined by the other European powers, who feared alienating the North. Napoleon's bellicose stance towards Russia in the January Uprising divided the powers and greatly diminished any chance of a joint European intervention. With the end of the American Civil War in , the U. Lincoln was shot in the back of his head by actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. The mortally wounded president was immediately examined by a doctor in the audience and then carried across the street to Petersen's Boarding House where he died At 7: They hoped to revive the Confederate cause by creating chaos through destabilizing the federal government.

Although Booth succeeded in killing Lincoln, the larger plot failed. Seward was attacked, but recovered from his wounds, and Johnson's would-be assassin fled Washington upon losing his nerve. With the failure of the plot to assassinate Johnson, Johnson succeeded Lincoln, becoming the 17th President of the United States. In surveys of U. Generally, the top three presidents are rated as 1. George Washington; and 3. Roosevelt, although Lincoln and Washington, and Washington and Roosevelt, are occasionally reversed. The successful reunification of the states had consequences for the name of the country.

The term "the United States" has historically been used, sometimes in the plural "these United States" , and other times in the singular, without any particular grammatical consistency. The Civil War was a significant force in the eventual dominance of the singular usage by the end of the 19th century. The Union victory and the subsequent Supreme Court case of Texas v. White ended debate regarding the constitutionality of secession and Nullification by the states.

In addition to ending slavery, the Reconstruction Amendments enshrined Constitutional clauses promoting racial equality. As early as the s, a time when most political rhetoric focused on the sanctity of the Constitution, Lincoln redirected emphasis to the Declaration of Independence as the foundation of American political values—what he called the "sheet anchor" of republicanism. As Diggins concludes regarding the highly influential Cooper Union speech of early , "Lincoln presented Americans a theory of history that offers a profound contribution to the theory and destiny of republicanism itself.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. First inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. List of federal judges appointed by Abraham Lincoln. Battle of Fort Sumter. States that seceded before April 15, States that seceded after April 15, States that permitted slavery, but did not secede. States of the Union where slavery was banned. Eastern Theater of the American Civil War. Gettysburg Campaign and Gettysburg Address. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

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We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

United States presidential election, Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Union American Civil War. Native Americans in the American Civil War. Diplomacy of the American Civil War. United Kingdom and the American Civil War. France and the American Civil War. Abraham Lincoln cultural depictions. The Oxford History of the American People. Dave Leip's Atlas of U. Burlingame writes, "Lincoln's unwillingness to make a public declaration may have been a mistake.

Such a document might have allayed fears in the Upper South and Border States and predisposed them to remain in the Union when hostilities broke out. But it might also have wrecked the Republican coalition and doomed his administration to failure before it began. The Impending Crisis — Abraham Lincoln, March 4, ". Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies. Retrieved April 9, Michigan and Drexel U. Archived from the original on October 22, Goodwin writes, "Every member of this administration was better known, better educated, and more experienced in public life than Lincoln.

I want to put them all in my cabinet. Thomas and Harold M.

Rise and Fall: The Life and Legacy of Jefferson Davis

Presidents and their Justices. University Press of America. Archived from the original on July 30, Retrieved 11 August Naval War College Review. The Collapse of the Confederacy p. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln , vol. To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party. Retrieved December 21, What Shall We Do with the Negro?

University of Virginia Press. Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library. The destruction of slavery. Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. Retrieved February 20, West Virginia 78 U. The Military Genius of Abraham Lincoln. The World Publishing Co. Lincoln Day by Day: Lincoln sesquicentennial Commission, Life and Public Services of Hon. Books for Libraries, What he intended to say; What he said; What he was reported to have said; What he wishes he had said.

The Bond Wheelwright Co. Fordham University Press, Chicago; Johnson Publishing Co. Louisiana State University Press, Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadershi p. University of South Carolina, The Image of Lincoln in the South. The University of Tennessee Press, We Are Lincoln Men: Abraham Lincoln and his Friends. The Story of the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Long Road to Equality. How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy. Oxford University Press, Rutledge Hill Press, Handlin, Oscar and Lilian. Abraham Lincoln and The Union. The University of Tennessee, The University of Press of Kentucky, Literary Classics of the United States Inc.

Leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis

Thirty years and Four Years in the White House. The Frontier Years of Abe Lincoln: In the words of his Friends and Family. Humorous Stories by and about Abraham Lincoln. The Abraham Lincoln Companion: The Observations of John G. Nicolay and John Hay. Southern Illinois University Press, Lincoln in the Popular Mind.