In the last eight months of 1864 Union general William Tecumseh Sherman conducted some of the Civil War’s most significant military operations. When the general invaded Georgia in May, the Union war effort was in doubt, war weariness was ubiquitous in the North, the Lincoln administration’s days were seemingly numbered, and Confederate victory appeared a likely possibility. When the general captured Savannah at year’s end, Lincoln had secured reelection, the Empire State of the South had been gutted, and the Rebels had allowed their last viable chance at independence to slip through their grasp. Due to Sherman’s victories in Georgia, first during the Atlanta campaign (May 7–September 2, 1864) and then during his storied “March to the Sea” (November 15–December 21, 1864), the ultimate triumph of Union armies was all but guaranteed as the sun set on 1864.

When the American Civil War began in April 1861, statesmen around the world realized that the conflict held the potential to shape the future of the Western Hemisphere. Despite the rapid economic and territorial growth of the United States in the years after the War of 1812, the geopolitical development of the Americas remained unsettled. During the more than three-quarters of a century that preceded the Battle of Fort Sumter, a series of wars and revolutions had swept the hemisphere. As a result, the United States emerged independent; victorious slave insurgents founded the nation of Haiti; and Spanish Americans established a number of independent republics in South and Central America. To many observers it appeared that the people of the Americas had forever rejected the principles of monarchy and colonialism.

When the American Civil War began in April 1861, statesmen around the world realized that the conflict held the potential to shape the future of the Western Hemisphere. Despite the rapid economic and territorial growth of the United States in the years after the War of 1812, the geopolitical development of the Americas remained unsettled. During the more than three-quarters of a century that preceded the Battle of Fort Sumter, a series of wars and revolutions had swept the hemisphere. As a result, the United States emerged independent; victorious slave insurgents founded the nation of Haiti; and Spanish Americans established a number of independent republics in South and Central America. To many observers it appeared that the people of the Americas had forever rejected the principles of monarchy and colonialism.

On May 14, 1860, New York’s Harper’s Weekly published a double-page lithograph, depicting eleven “Prominent Candidates for the Republican Nomination at Chicago” just a few days before the party convention. The artist arranged the portraits in two groups of five on the right and left, with New York’s William H. Seward occupying the central place. A past senator and governor, Seward was a strong-minded abolitionist and one of the early architects of the Republican party. Many felt that the nomination was his to lose. To Seward’s left were five men in three rows: Missouri’s Edward Bates, New Jersey’s Alexander Pennington, Ohio’s Salmon P. Chase, transplanted Californian John C. Frémont, and Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois. Frémont had been the Republican standard-bearer four years before, but this time around he was not seen as a likely choice. Chase, on the other hand, had a substantial reputation as an ardent Radical and a leading Republican. The fairly moderate Lincoln was also a serious possibility, although he lacked the national stature of Seward or Chase.

On May 14, 1860, New York’s Harper’s Weekly published a double-page lithograph, depicting eleven “Prominent Candidates for the Republican Nomination at Chicago” just a few days before the party convention. The artist arranged the portraits in two groups of five on the right and left, with New York’s William H. Seward occupying the central place. A past senator and governor, Seward was a strong-minded abolitionist and one of the early architects of the Republican party. Many felt that the nomination was his to lose. To Seward’s left were five men in three rows: Missouri’s Edward Bates, New Jersey’s Alexander Pennington, Ohio’s Salmon P. Chase, transplanted Californian John C. Frémont, and Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois. Frémont had been the Republican standard-bearer four years before, but this time around he was not seen as a likely choice. Chase, on the other hand, had a substantial reputation as an ardent Radical and a leading Republican. The fairly moderate Lincoln was also a serious possibility, although he lacked the national stature of Seward or Chase.

The year 1864 opened to a mixed military picture. In the American Civil War’s western theater, Union forces had won a string of victories, securing the Mississippi River and much of Tennessee. In the east, the Army of the Potomac, led by Major General George G. Meade, had rebuffed General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg but had achieved little of significance since then. Profound war weariness gripped the Northern populace. It was an election year, and President Abraham Lincoln rightfully questioned whether voters would give him a second term. Unless Federal armies won victories, the presidential race seemed destined to favor an opposition candidate willing to negotiate with the South, enabling the Rebels to achieve through political means the ends that had eluded them by force of arms.

Stationed in the Shenandoah Valley in spring 1862 2nd Massachusetts Infantry captain Henry N. Comey marveled at “the most fertile land I have ever seen … It is no wonder that the rebels are defending [it] so well.” Yet the landscape was as intimidating as it was bucolic: “We were fenced in by huge walls on both sides of us and cut off from communication except from the north.”

In June 1862 three white women in occupied Alabama got into a dispute with a Union officer over a Confederate flag. Described as a “baby flag” by one of the women, that small textile had great significance to all parties. The incident happened in Huntsville, which the Northern army had taken over in April of that year. From the beginning of the occupation, civilians and soldiers had been in conflict over many issues, tangible and intangible. The display of the flag was highly controversial, perceived as a defiant gesture toward the occupiers. Rowena Webster, one of the three women, was evidently carrying the flag in her hand; when an officer tried to take it from her, she resisted. Showing that he took the dispute very seriously, he threatened to put the smallpox virus into the houses nearby if she refused to give up the flag. Then Yankee troops arrested all three women and took them to US Major General Ormsby Mitchel of the Army of the Ohio. Their conversation was an anticlimax. Even though Mitchel was strongly pro Union, as well as an abolitionist, he seemed reluctant to punish these women, mainly because of their gender. He decided to warn them to behave better in the future, and they were released. The incident was a standoff, as were so many disputes that took place during occupation.

On Monday, February 18, 1861, on a cold, cloudy day in Montgomery, Alabama, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as the first and only president of the Confederate States of America. Davis recognized the difficult task ahead of him. The South was building a new country, and while he hoped for peace, he acknowledged that the Confederacy could be embarking on this experiment while fighting a war for its existence. As he concluded his address, the 52-year-old Davis offered a prophetic self-analysis. Speaking directly to an audience that numbered in the thousands – and indirectly to the entire Confederacy – he admitted that “you will see [in me] many errors to forgive [and] many deficiencies to tolerate.” At the same time, however, “you shall not see in me either a want of zeal or fidelity [to] the cause.” Three weeks earlier, in a private letter, he had conceded the enormity of the challenge facing whoever held the office.

For decades historians of the Civil War Era have agreed that the causes of the war lay in issues related to slavery rather than sectional disagreements over economics and state rights. Northern criticism of the slave labor system, Southern proslavery defensiveness, Southern efforts to expand slavery into US territories, Northern fear of proslavery domination of the federal government, and a Northern free-labor ideology all had roles. While recognizing the importance of these slavery-related factors, this chapter emphasizes the role of physical conflict over slavery itself in pushing the two sections toward war. Slave escapes, Southern attempts to recapture escapees and kidnap free African Americans into slavery, Northern aid to the escapees and kidnap victims, and aggressive physical abolitionist interference with slavery in the South shaped this long conflict.

Ulysses S. Grant’s successful campaign against Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862 left the western Confederacy reeling. The capture of the Tennessee and Cumberland river forts placed nearly a third of available Confederate troop strength in the theater into Federal custody. Flanked by Grant and facing Don Carlos Buell’s approaching Army of the Ohio as well, Confederate department commander Albert Sidney Johnston led a ragged, dismal, rain and sleet soaked retreat out of southern Kentucky. Plagued by desertions and stragglers, his army stumbled across Tennessee until it reached northern Mississippi. Nashville, one of the Confederacy’s most industrialized cities, fell without a fight in Johnston’s wake before the month ended, and soon with it most of Middle Tennessee’s rich farmlands. Simultaneously, John Pope’s Army of the Mississippi and Andrew Foote’s fleet of Union gunboats pursued Confederates fleeing their Mississippi River “Gibraltar” at Columbus, Kentucky. They drove down the flooded river valley until encountering the Confederate bastion at Island No. 10 opposite New Madrid, Missouri. Farther west across the river, Federal troops under Samuel Curtis already were in the act of shoving Sterling Price’s secessionist Missourians out of southwestern Missouri into Arkansas during a brutal winter campaign. Reuniting the separated Confederate forces including Price’s that had won a victory at Wilson’s Creek the previous summer, new Confederate commander Earl Van Dorn launched an ill-fated attack at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, that left his defeated army staggering southward in the cold. Not surprisingly, given the collapse of the Confederacy’s western line of defenses and its apparent implosion, many Federal soldiers gleefully anticipated a prompt end to the war after an additional season of mopping up.

Emancipation is the Civil War’s hallmark achievement and most enduring legacy. In many ways, it is the conflict’s distinguishing mark, the silver lining that elevates it from another pointless bloodbath to a just war. Yet while it was taking place, the destruction of Southern slavery was a long-winded, haphazard process, fraught with inconsistencies and suffused with tragedy. At any given moment and at any given place, the fate of emancipation rested on a combination of factors: the particular configuration of slavery in the area, the geographical lay of the land, the balance of power between Union and Confederate forces, the policies of both governments, the individual attitudes of local commanders, and the ability of enslaved people to seize opportunity from these shifting circumstances. On the ground, the war never was a steady march towards freedom, and the collapse of the slave system was marked by great variation across time and space. In some locales, it was quick and sudden, marked by wholesale departures of the enslaved population or by spurts of violence against masters and their property. In others, slavery died a slow and gradual death, with acts of resistance so subtle they were barely visible to the naked eye.