CHAPTER 14 Two Societies at War, 1861–1865

What a scene it was,” Union soldier Elisha Hunt Rhodes wrote in his diary at Gettysburg in July 1863. “Oh the dead and the dying on this bloody field.” Thousands of men had already died, and the slaughter would continue for two more years. “Why is it that 200,000 men of one blood and tongue … [are] seeking one another’s lives?” asked Confederate lieutenant R. M. Collins as another gruesome battle ended. “We could settle our differences by compromising and all be at home in ten days.” But there was no compromise. “God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not yet end,” President Abraham Lincoln reflected. “The Almighty has His own purposes.”

While the reasons for the war are complex, racial slavery played a primary role. To southern whites, the Republican victory in 1860 presented an immediate danger to the slave-owning republic that had existed since 1776. “[O]ur struggle is for inherited rights,” declared one southern leader. Southerners did not believe Lincoln when he promised not “directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” Soon, a southern senator warned, “cohorts of Federal office-holders, Abolitionists, may be sent into [our] midst” to encourage slave revolts and, even worse, racial mixture. By racial mixture, white southerners meant sexual relations between black men and white women, given that white masters had already fathered untold thousands of children by their enslaved black women. “Better, far better! [to] endure all horrors of civil war,” insisted a Confederate recruit, “than to see the dusky sons of Ham leading the fair daughters of the South to the altar.” To preserve black subordination and white supremacy, radical southerners chose the dangerous enterprise of secession.

Lincoln and the North would not let them go in peace. Living in a world still ruled by monarchies, northern leaders believed that the collapse of the American Union might forever destroy the possibility of democratic republican governments. “We cannot escape history,” Lincoln eloquently declared. “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”

And so came the conflict. Called the War Between the States by southerners and the War of the Rebellion by northerners, the struggle finally resolved the great issues of the Union and slavery. The costs were terrible: more American lives lost than the combined total for all the nation’s other wars, and a century-long legacy of bitterness between the triumphant North and the vanquished white South.