Unit 4

FIRST BRITISH COLONIES

Pre-history of North America (facts and myths)

Settlement of the North American continent began at least 15,000 years ago, after the ocean level had dropped to expose a landmass beneath the modern-day Bering Strait. The people who first crossed from Asia into North America were probably small family groups or hunting parties, who came both by foot and in watercraft along the North American coastline. Over the next several thousand years, the descendants of these people developed unique societies across North America with complex political, economic, and religious systems and lifeways adapted to particular local environments. Archaeologists refer to the earliest North Americans as Paleoindians, these people across the North American continent focused on hunting megafauna, using a toolkit that included knives, scrapers, some bone tools, and fine projectile points.

Then, at the pre-columbian era; Before contact with Europeans, the indigenous peoples of North America were divided into many different polities, from small bands of a few families to large empires. They lived in several "culture areas", which roughly correspond to geographic and biological zones and give a good indication of the main lifeway or occupation of the people who lived there. The Archaic period in the Americas saw a changing environment featuring a warmer more arid climate and the disappearance of the last megafauna. The majority of population groups at this time were still highly mobile hunter-gatherers; but now individual groups started to focus on resources available to them locally, thus with the passage of time there is a pattern of increasing regional generalization like, the Southwest, Arctic, Poverty, Dalton and Plano traditions. These regional adaptations would become the norm, with reliance less on hunting and gathering, with a more mixed economy of small game, fish, seasonally wild vegetables and harvested plant foods. In the Southwest of North America, Hohokam and Anasazi societies had been engaged in agricultural production with ditch irrigation and a sedentary village life for at least two millennia before the Spanish arrived in the 1540s.

Native Americans

The Apache are a group of culturally related Native American tribes in the Southwestern United States, which include the Chiricahua, Jicarilla, Lipan, Mescalero, Salinero, Plains and Western Apache. Distant cousins of the Apache are the Navajo, with which they share the Southern Athabaskan languages. There are Apache communities in Oklahoma, Texas, and on reservations in Arizona and New Mexico. Apache people have moved throughout the United States and elsewhere, including urban centres. 

The Apache Nations are politically autonomous, speak several different languages and have distinct cultures. Historically, the Apache homelands have consisted of high mountains, sheltered and watered valleys, deep canyons, deserts, and the southern Great Plains, including areas in what is now Eastern Arizona, Northern Mexico (Sonora and Chihuahua), New Mexico, West Texas, and Southern Colorado. These areas are collectively known as Apacheria. The Apache tribes fought the invading Spanish and Mexican peoples for centuries. The first Apache raids on Sonora appear to have taken place during the late 17th century. In 19th-century confrontations during the American-Indian wars, the U.S. Army found the Apache to be fierce warriors and skilful strategists. The Apache never became settled fanners. They wandered the deserts and mountains in small bands, hunting deer and gathering wild plants, nuts and roots. They also obtained food by raiding their Pueblo neighbours and stealing It. The Apache were fierce and warlike and they were much feared by the Pueblo.

The Iroquois or Haudenosaunee are a historically powerful northeast Native American confederacy. They were known during the colonial years to the French as the “Iroquois League”, and later as the “Iroquois Confederacy”, and to the English as the “Five Nations” (before 1722), and later as the “Six Nations”, comprising the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora peoples. The Iroquois have absorbed many other peoples into their cultures as a result of warfare, adoption of captives, and by offering shelter to displaced peoples.

The Iroquois were a group of tribes—a “nation”—, who lived far away from the Pueblo and the Apache in the thick woods of north-eastern North America. Like the Pueblo. the Iroquois were skilled farmers. In fields cleared from the forest they worked together growing beans. squash and twelve different varieties of maize. They were also hunters and fishermen. They used birch bark canoes to carry them swiftly along the rivers and lakes of their forest homeland. The Iroquois lived in permanent villages, in long wooden huts with barrel-shaped roofs. These huts were made from a framework of saplings covered by sheers of elm bark. Each was home to as many as twenty families. Each family had its own apartment on either side of a central hall. The Iroquois were fierce warriors. They were as feared by their neighbours as the Apache of the western deserts were feared by theirs. Around their huts they built strong wooden stockades to protect their villages from enemies. Eager to win glory for their tribe and faille and honour for themselves, they often fought one another. From boyhood on, male Iroquois were taught to fear neither pain nor death. Bravery in battle was the surest way for a warrior to win respect and a high position in his tribe.

Many miles to the west on the vast plains of grass that stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, there was another warrior nation. This group called themselves Dakota, which means “allies”. But they were better known by till' name which other Amerindians gave to them: Sioux, which means “enemies". The Sioux grew no crops and built no houses nor food, for shelter and for clothing they depended upon the buffalo. Millions of these large, slow-moving animals wandered across the western grasslands in vast herds. When the buffalo moved the Sioux moved. The buffalo never remained on one pasture for long so everything the Sioux owned was designed to be carried easily. Within hours they could take down the tepees, the conical buffalo-skin tents that were their homes, pack their belongings in lightweight leather bags—“parfleches”—and move off after the buffalo. They even carried fire from one camp to the next. A hot ember would be scaled inside a buffalo horn filled with rotted wood. There it would smolder for days, ready to bring: warmth from the old village to the new.

The Cherokee, or Cherokee are one of the indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands. Prior to the 18th century, they were concentrated in southwestern North Carolina, south-eastern Tennessee, and the tips of western South Carolina and north-eastern Georgia. The Cherokee language is part of the Iroquoian language group. In the 19th century, James Mooney, an American ethnographer, recorded one oral tradition that told of the tribe having migrated south in ancient times from the Great Lakes region, where other Iroquoian-speaking peoples lived; however, anthropologist Thomas R. Whyte writes that the origin of the proto-Iroquoian language was likely the Appalachian region and the split between Northern and Southern Iroquoian languages began 4,000 years ago. Today there are three federally recognized Cherokee tribes: the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina, the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma, and the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. By the 19th century, European settlers in the United States classified the Cherokee of the Southeast as one of the “Five Civilized Tribes,” because they were agrarian and lived in permanent villages and began to adopt some cultural and technological practices of the European American settlers. The Cherokee were one of the first, if not the first, major non-European ethnic group to become U.S. citizens. Article 8 in the 1817 treaty with the Cherokee stated Cherokees may wish to become citizens of the United States.

First attempt: John Cabot

John Cabot (c. 1450, disappeared May 1498), was a Venetian explorer and navigator known for his 1497 voyage to North America, where he claimed land in Canada for England.

Like Christopher Columbus, Cabot believed that sailing west from Europe was the shorter route to Asia. Hearing of opportunities in England, Cabot travelled there and met with King Henry VII, who gave him a grant to “seeke out, discover, and finde” new lands for England. In early May of 1497, Cabot left Bristol with a crew of 18 men. Cabot and his crew sailed west and north, under Cabot's belief that the route to Asia would be shorter from northern Europe than Columbus's voyage along the trade winds. On June 24, 1497, 50 days into the voyage, Cabot landed on the east coast of North America.

The precise location of Cabot’s landing is subject to controversy. Some historians believe that Cabot landed at Cape Breton Island or mainland Nova Scotia. Others believe he may have landed at Newfoundland, Labrador or even Maine. Though the Matthew's logs are incomplete, it is believed that John Cabot went ashore with a small party and claimed the land for the King of England. In July 1497, the ship sailed for England and arrived in Bristol on August 6, 1497.

First Arrivals

Virginia

The Colony of Virginia, chartered in 1606 and settled in 1607, was the first enduring English colony in North America, following failed proprietary attempts at settlement on Newfoundland by Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1583. The founder of the new colony was the Virginia Company, with the first two settlements in Jamestown on the north bank of the James River and Popham Colony on the Kennebec River in modern-day Maine, both in 1607. Tobacco became Virginia's first profitable export, the production of which had a significant impact on the society and settlement patterns. In 1624, the Virginia Company's charter was revoked by King James I, and the Virginia colony was transferred to royal authority as a crown colony.

After the English Civil War in the 1640s and 50s, the Virginia colony was nicknamed “The Old Dominion” by King Charles II for its perceived loyalty to the English monarchy during the era of the Protectorate and Commonwealth of England. From 1619 to 1775/1776, the colonial legislature of Virginia was the House of Burgesses, which governed in conjunction with a colonial governor.

Finally, after declaring independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1775, before the Declaration of Independence was officially adopted, the Virginia colony became the Commonwealth of Virginia, one of the original thirteen states of the United States. The entire modern states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois, and portions of Ohio and Western Pennsylvania were later created from the territory encompassed, or claimed by, the colony of Virginia at the time of further American independence in July 1776.

Jamestown

In June of 1606, King James I granted a charter to a group of London entrepreneurs, the Virginia Company, to establish an English settlement in the Chesapeake region of North America. In December of that year, 104 settlers sailed from London with Company instructions to build a secure settlement, find gold, and seek a water route to the Pacific. The traditional telling of early Jamestown history portrayed those pioneers as ill-suited for the task. But 20 years of archaeological research at the site of James Fort suggests that Captain Bartholomew Gosnold and many of the artisans, craftsmen, and labourers who accompanied the gentlemen leaders made every effort to build a successful colony.

On May 14, 1607, the Virginia Company settlers landed on Jamestown Island to establish an English colony 60 miles from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Discovery of the exact location of the first fort indicates its site was in a secure place, where Spanish ships could not fire point blank into the fort. The Virginia Company tried to intensify the focus on money-making industry with The First Supply to Jamestown. But disease, famine, and sporadic attacks from the neighbouring Powhatan Indians took a tremendous toll on the population of the settlement. There were also times when trade with the Powhatan revived the colony with food in exchange for glass beads, copper, and iron implements. Captain John Smith was particularly good at this trade. But his strict leadership made enemies within and without the fort, and a mysterious gunpowder explosion badly injured him and sent him back to England in October 1609. What followed was Jamestown’s darkest hour, the “starving time” winter of 1609-10.

The first representative assembly in English North America convened in the Jamestown church on July 30, 1619. The General Assembly met in response to orders from the Virginia Company “to establish one equal and uniform government over all Virginia” and provide “just laws for the happy guiding and governing of the people there inhabiting.” A few weeks later came the first arrival of Africans to Jamestown. These Africans became indentured servants, similar in legal position to many poor Englishmen who traded several years of labour in exchange for passage to America. (The legal system of race-based chattel slavery did not fully develop in Virginia until the 1680s.)

After Chief Powhatan’s death, his brother took leadership of the Indians of eastern Virginia and, in 1622, ordered a surprise attack on the English tobacco farms and settlements. More than 300 settlers were killed.

Virginia became a crown colony in 1624. As Jamestown grew into a robust “New Town” to the east, written references to the original fort disappeared. In 1676 a rebellion in the colony led by Nathaniel Bacon sacked and burned much of the capital town. Jamestown remained the capital of Virginia until its major statehouse, located on the western end of the island, burned in 1698. The capital moved to Williamsburg in 1699, and Jamestown began to slowly disappear above the ground. By the 1750s the land was heavily cultivated, primarily by the Travis and Ambler families.

A military post was located on the island during the American Revolution, and American and British prisoners were exchanged there. French soldiers also sought refuge at Jamestown after the nearby Battle of Greensprings in 1781. In 1861 the island was occupied by Confederate soldiers who built an earthen fort near the 17th-century brick church tower as part of the defence system to block any Union advance up the James River. There was no battle at “Fort Pocahontas”, but after Confederate forces abandoned it in 1862, Union troops and freed slaves occupied the island the rest of the war.

In 1893 Jamestown was owned by Mr. and Mrs. Edward Barney. Today, Jamestown is jointly operated by Preservation Virginia and NPS.

Pocahontas

She was a favourite daughter of the most powerful Native American in Virginia. She took a keen interest in the new settlers on the island in the big river that flowed to the bay. And she grew up to take a specific role as peacemaker between the English and the Powhatan Indians—a role that her early death cut short, giving her uncle an opportunity to order a massive sneak attack that killed hundreds of colonists.

The world of Pocahontas changed dramatically during her lifetime. At her birth, her father, Wahunsenacawh, had expanded his political leadership across 8,000 square miles from the banks of the James River north to the Potomac River, covering more than 30 communities that included nearly 15,000 people. The English who came to Jamestown Island in 1607 resisted his wish that they become another subject community. Pocahontas was directly involved in the relationship between the English and the Powhatan Indians that whipsawed between friendly trade of food and open warfare and kidnapping. She herself was kidnapped from a village on the Potomac River and held in captivity for a year before she announced to Chief Powhatan her conversion to Christianity and her desire to marry English tobacco grower John Rolfe.

She chose to take an English name, “Rebecca,” that means “mother of two peoples,” and they married in the large church inside James Fort on April 5, 1614. They had a son. They travelled to England to promote the colony to investors, and Rebecca was celebrated in the highest London society. But as the Rolfes began their return to Virginia, she took ill and died in Gravesend, England. The Powhatan Indian confederacy rapidly declined after her uncle’s attack in 1622 failed to stop English colonization.

Her native world was largely lost to time until the Jamestown Rediscovery Project began excavating the James Fort site in 1994. The archaeological research has uncovered thousands of native artifacts—the largest known collection of Virginia Indian artifacts from the contact period. In 2010, the Jamestown Rediscovery team found the church site of her James Fort wedding. This website and a new exhibit in the Archaearium museum on the island present a vivid picture of Virginia Indians and colonists sharing the same space and fashioning a new world out of their two cultures.

Virginia Company

The Virginia Company refers collectively to two joint stock companies chartered under James I on 10 April 1606 with the goal of establishing settlements on the coast of North America. The companies were called the “Virginia Company of London” and the “Virginia Company of Plymouth”. They operated with identical charters but with different territories. An area of overlapping territory was created within which the two companies were not permitted to establish colonies within one hundred miles of each other. The Plymouth Company never fulfilled its charter, but its territory was claimed by England and became New England. As corporations, the companies were empowered by the Crown to govern themselves, and they conferred that right onto their colonies. The Virginia Company failed in 1624, but the right to self-government was not taken from the colony. The principle was thus established that a royal colony should be self-governing, and this formed the genesis of democracy in America.

The Company's purpose was to set up colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America. It was a joint stock company, the investors paid the costs of its expeditions and in return were given the right to divide up any profits its made. The Jamestown settlers were employees of the Virginia Company. The Company's directors hoped that the settlers would find pearls, silver, or some other valuable product in Virginia and so bring them a quick profit on their investment.

Black Africans

An indentured servant would work for several years without wages. The status of indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland was similar to slavery. Servants could be bought, sold, or leased and they could be physically beaten for disobedience or running away. Unlike slaves, they were freed after their term of service expired or was bought out, their children did not inherit their status, and on their release from contract they received a year provision of corn, double apparel, tools necessary and a small cash payment called freedom dues.

The first Africans slaves arrived via Santo Domingo to the San Miguel de Guadalupe colony. The ill-fated colony was almost immediately disrupted by a fight over leadership, during which the slaves revolted and fled the colony to seek refuge among local Native Americans.

INDEPENDENCE

FIRST CONFLICTS BETWEEN BRITAIN AND NA COLONIES (TEA TAXE)

Britain had won an empire against France. But its victory led directly to conflict whit its American colonies. Even before the final defeat of the French, colonists in search of better land began to move over the Appalachian Mountains into the Ohio valley. To prevent war with the Amerindian tribes who lived in the area, the English king, George III, issued a proclamation in 1763. It forbade colonists to settle west of the Appalachians until proper treaties had been made with the Amerindians.

The king's proclamation angered the colonists. They became angrier still when the British government told them that they must pay new taxes on imports of sugar, coffee, textiles, and other goods. The government also told them that theu must feed and find shelter for British soldiers it planned to keep in the colonies.

This taxes got angry the Amerindians.

In 1765 the British Parliament passed another new law called the Stamp Act. This too was intended to raise money to pay for the defense of the colonies. It said that the colonists had to buy special tax stamps and attach them to newspapers, licenses, and legal papers such as wills and mortgages. Ever since the early years of the Virginia settlement Americans had claimed the right to elect representatives to decide the taxes they paid. Now they insisted that as "freeborn Englishmen" they could be taxed only by their own colonial assemblies. In 1765 representatives from nine colonies met in New York. They formed the "Stamp Act Congress" and organized opposition to the Stamp Act. All over the colonies merchants and shopkeepers refused to sell British goods until the Act was withdrawn. In Boston and other cities angry mobs attacked government officials selling the stamps. Most colonists simply refused to use them.

In 1767 the British placed new taxes on tea, paper, paint, and various other goods that the colonies imported from abroad. A special customs office was set up in Boston to collect the new duties. Again the colonists refused to pay. Riots broke out in Boston and the British sent soldiers to keep order. It was not until 1770, when the British removed all the duties except for the one on tea, that there was less trouble. But some colonists in Massachussets were determined to keep the quarrel going. In December 1773, a group of them disguised themselves as Mohawk Amerindians. They boarded British merchant ships in Boston harbor and threw 342 cases of tea into the sea. The British reply to this "Boston Tea Party" was to pass a set of laws to punish Massachussets. Colonists soon began calling these laws the "Intolerable Acts". Boston harbor was closed to all trade until the tea was paid for. More soldiers were sent there to keep order. The powers of the colonial assembly of Massachussets were greatly reduced.

FIRST AND SECOND CONTINENTAL CONGRESS

The Continental Congress, also known as the Philadelphia Congress, was a convention of delegates called together from the Thirteen Colonies. It became the governing body of the United States during the American Revolution.

The First Continental Congress met briefly from September 5 to October 26, 1774. Representatives from each colony, except Georgia, met in Philadelphia. The royal governor in Georgia succeeded in blocking delegates from being sent to the congress. The representatives gathered to discuss their response to the British "Intolerable Acts." They met to discuss their relationship with Britain, and how to assert their rights with the British government. They wanted to appear as united colonies in their reply to Britain. The purpose of the First Continental Congress was not to seek independence from Britain.

The congress had three objectives: to compose a statement of colonial rights, to identify British parliaments violation of those rights, and to provide a plan that would convince Britain to restore those rights.

The members agreed to boycott British goods and passed resolutions asserting colonial rights. They also agreed to meet again in May 1775, if the British did not change their policies.

In retaliation, the King and Lord North of England decided to punish and weaken the colonies. They blocked colony access to the North Atlantic fishing area.

The Second Continental Congress convened on May 10, 1775, at Philadelphia's State House, passing the resolution for independence the following year on July 2, 1776, and publicly asserting the decision two days later with the Declaration of Independence. Unlike the First Continental Congress, this time the colony of Georgia would join and all thirteen colonies were represented.

Thomas Jefferson of Virginia drafted the declaration, and John Adams was a leader in the debates in favor of its adoption. John Hancock of Massachusetts was the president during those debates.

To govern during the American Revolutionary War, the Second Continental Congress continued, meeting at various locations, until it became the Congress of the Confederation when the Articles of Confederation were ratified on March 1, 1781.

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

Declaration of Independence, in U.S. history, document that was approved by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, and that announced the separation of 13 North American British colonies from Great Britain. It explained why the Congress on July 2 “unanimously” by the votes of 12 colonies (with New Yorkabstaining) had resolved that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be Free and Independent States.” Accordingly, the day on which final separation was officially voted was July 2, although the 4th, the day on which the Declaration of Independence was adopted, has always been celebrated in the United States as the great national holiday—the Fourth of July, or Independence Day.

The Declaration of Independence was written largely by Jefferson, who had displayed talent as a political philosopher and polemicist in his A Summary View of the Rights of British America, published in 1774. At the request of his fellow committee members he wrote the first draft. The members of the committee made a number of merely semantic changes, and they also expanded somewhat the list of charges against the king. The Congress made more substantial changes, deleting a condemnation of the British people, a reference to “Scotch & foreign mercenaries” (there were Scots in the Congress), and a denunciation of the African slave trade (this being offensive to some Southern and New Englanddelegates)

The Declaration of Independence has also been a source of inspiration outside the United States. It encouraged Antonio de Nariño and Francisco de Miranda to strive toward overthrowing the Spanish empire in South America, and it was quoted with enthusiasm by the Marquis de Mirabeau during the French Revolution. It remains a great historical landmark in that it contained the first formal assertion by a whole people of their right to a government of their own choice. What Locke had contended for as an individual, the Americans proclaimed as a body politic. Moreover, they made good the argument by force of arms.

How every body can read in the text, the declaration has served to justify the extension of American political and social democracy:

“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

Since 1952 the original parchment document of the Declaration of Independence has resided in the National Archives exhibition hall in Washington, D.C.

CIVIL WAR

CAUSES

The Northern and Southern sections of the United States  developed along different lines. The South remained a predominantly agrarian economy while the North became more and more industrialized. Different social cultures and political beliefs developed. All of this led 
to disagreements on issues such as taxes, tariffs and internal improvements as well as states rights versus federal rights.
Slavery: the burning issue that led to the disruption of the union was the debate over the future of slavery.
The Dred Scott decision: Dred Scott was a slave who sought citizenship through the American legal system, and whose case eventually ended up in the Supreme Court State's Rights: It refers to the struggle between the federal government and individual states over political power.
Abolitionist movement: By the early 1830's, those who wished to see that institution abolished within the United States were becoming more strident and influential.
The election of Abraham Lincoln: when he Republican candidate  Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election, Southerns fears that the Republicans would abolish slavery reached a new peak.
REPUBLICAN PARTY: Abraham Lincoln

The Republican Party is one of the world's oldest extant political parties. It is the second oldest existing political party in the United States after its primary rival, the Democratic Party. It emerged in 1854 to combat the Kansas-Nebraska Act, an act that dissolved the terms of the Missouri Compromise and allowed slave or free status to be decided in the territories by popular sovereignty. The party had almost no presence in the Southern United States, but by 1858 in the North it had enlisted former Whigs and former Free Soil Democrats to form majorities in nearly every Northern state. With its election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and its sucess in guiding the Union to victory and abolishing slavery, the party came to dominate the national political scene until 1932. The Republican Party was based on northern white Protestans, bussinesmen,small bussiners owners, professionals, factory workers, farmers and African Americans. It was pro-bussines, supporting banks, the gold standard, railroads and high tariffs to protect factory workers and grow industry faster.

CONFEDERATE STATES

The Confederate States of America was a collection of states that seceded from he United States in 1860 following the election of President Abraham Lincoln. 
Led by Jefferson Davis and existing from 1861 to 1865, the Confederacy struggled for legitimacy and was never recognized as a sovereign nation. After suffering a crushing defeat in the Civil War, the Confederate States of America ceased to exist. The Confederacy was originally formed by seven secessionist slave-holding states: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Lousiana, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri and Texas in the Lower South region of the United States, whose regional economy was heavily dependent upon agriculture, particularly cotton, and a plantation system that relied upon the labor of African-American slaves.


DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE TWO ARMIES


THE CONFEDERACY



The Confederate States of America , commonly referred to as the Confederacy, was an unrecognized country in North America that existed from 1861 to 1865. The Confederacy was originally formed by seven secessionist slave-holding states – South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas – in the Lower South region of the United States, whose regional economy was heavily dependent upon agriculture, particularly cotton, and a plantation system that relied upon the labor of African-American slaves. States volunteered militia units and the new government hastened to form its own Confederate States Army from scratch practically overnight. After the Civil War began in April, four slave states of the Upper South – Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina – also declared their secession and joined the Confederacy. The Confederacy later accepted Missouri and Kentucky as members, although neither officially declared secession nor were they ever largely controlled by Confederate forces; Confederate shadow governments attempted to control the two states but were later exiled from them.The Confederate military leadership included many veterans from the United States Army and United States Navy who had resigned their Federal commissions and had won appointment to senior positions in the Confederate armed forces. Many had served in the Mexican–American War (including Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis), but some such as Leonidas Polk (who graduated from West Point but did not serve in the Army) had little or no experience. The Confederate officer corps consisted of men from both slave-owning and non-slave-owning families. The Confederacy appointed junior and field grade officers by election from the enlisted ranks. Although no Army service academy was established for the Confederacy, some colleges maintained cadet corps that trained Confederate military leadership. Many thousands of slaves served as laborers, cooks, and pioneers. Some freed blacks and men of color served in local state militia units of the Confederacy, but the Congress refused "to guarantee the freedom of black volunteers". So no more than two hundred black combat troops were ever raised.




THE UNION









During the American Civil War, the Union referred to the United States of America and specifically to the national government of President Abraham Lincoln and the 20 free states, 4 border and slave states that supported it. Unlike the Confederacy, the Union had a large industrialized and urbanized area (the Northeast), and more advanced commercial, transportation and financial systems than the rural South. Additionally, the Union states had a manpower advantage of 5 to 2 at the start of the war. the Union turned its growing potential advantage into a much stronger military force. However, much of the Union strength had to be used to garrison conquered areas, and to protect railroads and other vital points. The Union's great advantages in population and industry would prove to be vital long-term factors in its victory over the Confederacy, but it took the Union a long while to fully mobilize these resources. The Union economy grew and prospered during the war while fielding a very large army and navy.The Republicans in Washington had a Whiggish vision of an industrial nation, with great cities, efficient factories, productive farms, all national banks, all knit together by a modern railroad system, to be mobilized by the United States Military Railroad. Enthusiastic young men clamored to join the Union army in 1861. They came with family support for reasons of patriotism and excitement. Washington decided to keep the small regular army intact; it only had 16,000 men and was needed to guard the frontier. Its officers could, however, join the temporary new volunteer army that was formed, with expectations that their experience would lead to rapid promotions. The problem with volunteering, however, was its serious lack of planning, leadership, and organization at the highest levels. Washington called on the states for troops, and every northern governor set about raising and equipping regiments, and sent the bills to the War Department. The men could elect the junior officers, while the governor appointed the senior officers, and Lincoln appointed the generals.






MAIN EVENTS AND CHARACTERS






In February 1861, seven Southern slave states individually declared their secession from the U.S. to form the Confederate States of America, or the South. The Confederacy grew to include eleven slave states. The Confederacy was never diplomatically recognized by the United States government.

War broke out in April 1861, when Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina, shortly after U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated. The nationalists of the Union proclaimed loyalty to the U.S. Constitution. They faced secessionists of the Confederate States, who advocated for states' rights to expand slavery.

By early 1861, General Winfield Scott had devised the Anaconda Plan to win the war with as little bloodshed as possible.  Scott argued that a Union blockade of the main ports would weaken the Confederate economy. In April 1861, 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 1861 before the blockade was effective; by the time they realized the mistake, it was too late. "King Cotton" was dead, as the South could export less than 10 percent of its cotton. The blockade shut down the ten Confederate seaports with railheads that moved almost all the cotton, especially New Orleans, Mobile, and Charleston. 

At the beginning of 1864, Lincoln made  Ulysses S. Grant  commander of all Union armies. Grant made his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac, and put Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman in command of most of the western armies. On the other side, General Robert E. Lee was the most representative character of the Confederacy. 

Grant's army set out on the Overland Campaign with the goal of drawing Lee into a defense of Richmond, where they would attempt to pin down and destroy the Confederate army. The Union army first attempted to maneuver past Lee and fought several battles, notably at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor. These battles resulted in heavy losses on both sides, and forced Lee's Confederates to fall back repeatedly. Grant finally found a commander, General Philip Sheridan, aggressive enough to prevail in the Valley Campaigns of 1864. Sheridan was initially repelled at the Battle of New Market by former U.S. Vice President and Confederate Gen. John C. Breckinridge. The Battle of New Market was the Confederacy's last major victory of the war. After redoubling his efforts, Sheridan defeated Maj. Gen. Jubal A. Early in a series of battles, including a final decisive defeat at the Battle of Cedar Creek.

Meanwhile, Sherman maneuvered from Chattanooga to Atlanta, defeating Confederate Generals Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood along the way. The fall of Atlanta on September 2, 1864, guaranteed the reelection of Lincoln as president. Hood left the Atlanta area to swing around and menace Sherman's supply lines and invade Tennessee in the Franklin-Nashville Campaign. Union Maj. Gen. John Schofield defeated Hood at the Battle of Franklin, and George H. Thomas dealt Hood a massive defeat at the Battle of Nashville, effectively destroying Hood's army. Lee's army, thinned by desertion and casualties, was now much smaller than Grant's. One last Confederate attempt to break the Union hold on Petersburg failed at the decisive Battle of Five Forks on April 1. This meant that the Union now controlled the entire perimeter surrounding Richmond-Petersburg, completely cutting it off from the Confederacy. Realizing that the capital was now lost, Lee decided to evacuate his army.

Initially, Lee did not intend to surrender, but planned to regroup at the village of Appomattox Court House, where supplies were to be waiting, and then continue the war. Grant chased Lee and got in front of him, so that when Lee's army reached Appomattox Court House, they were surrounded. After an initial battle, Lee decided that the fight was now hopeless, and surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865, at the McLean House. In an untraditional gesture and as a sign of Grant's respect and anticipation of peacefully restoring Confederate states to the Union. 



THE END OF THE WAR




By 1864, the Confederacy was running out of almost everything—men, equipment, food, money. As fall coloured the trees of the eastern woods, The Union armies moved in to end the war. In November 1864, a Union army led by General William T. Sherman began to march through the Confederate state of Georgia. Its soldiers destroyed everything in their path. They tore up railroad tracks, burned crops and buildings, drove off cattle. On December 22 they occupied the city of Savannah. The Confederacy was split again, this time from cast to west. After capturing Savannah, Sherman turned north. He matched through the Carolinas, burning and destroying again as he made for Richmond.

The Confederate capital was already in danger from another Union army led by General Grant. By March 1865. Grant had almost encircled the city and on April 2 Lee was forced to abandon it to save his army from being trapped. He marched south, hoping to fight on from a strong position in the mountains. But Grant followed those behind and other Union soldiers blocked Lee's way forward. Lee was trapped. On April 9, 1865, he met Grant in a house in a tiny village called Appomattox and surrendered his army.

Gram treated the defeated Confederate soldiers generously. After they had given up their weapons and promised never again to fight against the United States, he allowed them to go home. He told them they could keep their horses "to help with the spring ploughing." As Lee rode away. Grant stood in the doorway chewing a piece of tobacco and told his men: "The war is over. The rebels arc our countrymen again.

The Civil War gave final answers to two questions that had divided the United States ever since it became an independent nation. It pm an end to slavery. In lR65 this was abolished everywhere ill the United States by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. And it decided finally that the United States was one nation. whose parts could not be separated.

Bur the war left bitter memories. The United States fought other wars later. but all were outside its own boundaries. The Civil War caused terrible destruction at home. All over the South cities and farms lay in ruins. And more Americans died in this war than in any other, before or since. By the time Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. the dead on both Sides totalled 635.000.




AFTERMATH OF THE WAR




LICOLN'S MURDER




In the evening President Lincoln and his wife went to Ford's Theater in Washington to see a play called "Our American Cousin." The theater was full and the audience cheered

the President as he took his scat in a box beside the stage. Once Lincoln was safely in his seat, his bodyguards moved away to watch the play themselves from scats in the gallery.

At exactly 10:13, when the play was part way through, a pistol shot rang through the darkened theater. As the President slumped forward in his scat, a man in a black felt hat and high boots jumped from the box on to the stage. He waved a gun in the air and shouted "Sic semper tyrannis!" and then ran out of the theater. It was discovered later that the gunman was an actor named John Wilkes Booth. He was captured a few days later, hiding in a barn in the Virginia countryside.

Lincoln was carried across the street to the house of a tailor. He died there in a downstairs bedroom the next morning. Men and women wept in the streets when they heard the news. The poet James Russell Lowell wrote: "Never before that startled April morning did such multitudes of men shed tears for the death of one they had never seen, as if with him a friendly presence had been taken from their lives."

Lincoln was succeeded as President by his Vice President, Andrew Johnson. The biggest problem the new President faced was how to deal with the defeated South. Lincoln had made no secret of his own ideas about this. Only a few weeks before his death he had begun his second term of office as President. In his inaugural address he had asked the American people to help him to "bind up the nation's wounds" and rebuild their war-battered homeland.

Lincoln blamed individual southern leaders for the war, rather than the people of the seceding states as a whole. He intended to punish only those guilty individuals and to let the rest of the South's people play a full part in the nation's life again.




ABOLITION OF SLAVERY




The Reconstruction Amendments are the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the United States Constitution, adopted between 1865 and 1870, the five years immediately following the Civil War. The last time the Constitution had been amended was with the Twelfth Amendment more than 60 years earlier in 1804. The Reconstruction amendments were important in implementing the Reconstruction of the American South after the war. Their proponents saw them as transforming the United States from a country that was (in Abraham Lincoln's words) "half slave and half free" to one in which the constitutionally guaranteed "blessings of liberty" would be extended to the entire populace, including the former slaves and their descendants.

The Thirteenth Amendment (proposed in 1864 and ratified in 1865) abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except for those duly convicted of a crime. The Fourteenth Amendment (proposed in 1866 and ratified in 1868) addresses citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws for all persons. The Fifteenth Amendment (proposed in 1869 and ratified in 1870) prohibits discrimination in voting rights of citizens on the basis of "race, colour, or previous condition of servitude." This amendment did not

include a specific prohibition on discrimination on the basis of sex; it took another amendment—the Nineteenth, ratified in 1920—to prohibit such discrimination explicitly. Men and women of all races, regardless of prior slavery, could vote in some states of the early United States, such as New Jersey, provided that they could meet other requirements, such as property ownership.




RACIST LAWS AND ORGANISATIONS




When a state voted to accept the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, Johnson intended that it should be accepted back into the Union as a full and equal member. But white southerners were determined to resist any changes that threatened their power to control the life of the South. They were especially horrified at the idea of giving equal rights to their former black slaves.

The other former Confederate states shared this attitude. All their assemblies passed laws to keep blacks in an inferior position. Such laws were called "Black Codes." "Federal bayonets" might have made the blacks free, but the ruling whites intended them to remain unskilled, uneducated and landless, with no legal protection or rights of their own.

Black Codes refused blacks the vote, said that they could not serve on juries, forbade them to give evidence in court against a white man. In Mississippi blacks were not allowed to buy or to rent farm land. In Louisiana they had to agree to work for one employer for a whole year and could be imprisoned and made to do forced labour if they refused. With no land, no money and no protection from the law, it was almost as if blacks were still slaves.

Southern whites were determined to prevent this uprising of black people's rights. They organized terrorist groups to make white men the masters once more. The main aim of these groups was to threaten and frighten black people and prevent them from claiming their rights.

The largest and most feared terrorist group was a secret society called the Ku Klux Klan. Its members dressed themselves in white sheets and wore hoods to hide their faces. They rode by night through the southern countryside, beating and killing any blacks who tried to improve their position. Their sign was a burning wooden cross, which they placed outside the homes of their intended victims. This use of violence and fear helped white racists to win back control of state governments all over the South.