The American Civil War wasn’t really a war between the states, it was a civil war between the people. The United States was not a nation-state, but a union of states, with slavery being the central issue of the Union. The war began at Fort Sumter on July 3rd, 1860, when the Union force of approximately fifteen thousand men approached Fort Pickens in Mississippi to reinforce the blockade of Southern ports blocking supplies and enlisting supplies in Quantico, Miss., a port on the Mississippi River that served as an entry point into Memphis.
The Civil War represented two different points of view in the minds of the American people. On the one hand, there were those that favored maintaining the Union and believed that it was important to keep the Union intact. On the other hand, there were those that believed that the States should have the right to secede from the Union. Those that wanted the former would call themselves the “Union States” and those that wished the latter would be known as the” Confederate States”. During the Civil War many southern Democrats were in favor of seceding from the Union while most of the Republicans were against it.
When the Civil War began, there were many conflicts, but they were primarily over issues of religion, ethnicity, class, territory, and race. Slavery was at the center of the issues that divided the United States and there were five-year conflicts over this issue. Some of the conflicts that occurred during this period of time were the following: the Louisiana Purchase, the Panic of 1812, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Compromise of the thirteen articles of the Constitution, the Kansas Nebraska Act, the Louisiana Purchase again, and the Kansas-California War. When the Civil War ended, there were eleven slave-holding states remained which included Arkansas, Iowa, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, and Wisconsin.
There were two-thirds of the states, when the Civil War ended. Of those twelve states, six became part of the United States afterwards and the remaining four were left out. The ten original slave-holding states stayed intact and later became the states of Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois. These remaining states gave us the concept of slavery and the confederacy.
Since the confederacy was created by the people for the people, anyone who disagreed with the Union’s actions were called a traitor by the pro-secessionist forces and even the blacks who had been victims of racism during the Civil War. This included both black and white individuals. One of the biggest arguments during the war was over slavery and the people’s desire to maintain slavery. The pro-secessionists wanted to end the economic hardships that came along with having to slave for another. They used the argument of “Lincoln’s Gold Standard” to justify their opposition to the Union.
Another important area of study during the period after the Civil War was ethnicity. The study of ethnicity during the Civil War focused on how race and ethnicity served as a wedge between the Union and the Confederates. This is not to say that the Union was evil; rather that they acted in a manner designed to divide the population to serve their will. Many ethnic peoples were either forced into the army or killed upon the battlefield. Thus ethnicity was seen as a key to understanding the motivations of the Civil War.
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