Civil war: northern attitudes


Delaware

Politicians of the Northern states pressed to end it, both because it was considered immoral and because white labor could not compete with unpaid black labor. The North demanded for its industrial growth a protective tariff, federal subsidies for shipping and internal improvements, and a sound banking and currency system. The West looked to Congress for free homesteads and federal aid for its roads and waterways. The South, however, regarded such measures as discriminatory, favoring Northern commercial interests, and it found intolerable the rise of antislavery agitation in the North. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president as the candidate of the Republican Party, which opposed the spread of slavery. The state of South Carolina had threatened to secede if the Republicans won, and in December 1860 it did so. Other slavery states followed in quick succession, and in February 1861 they formed a confederacy, the Confederate States of America. Delaware was a slaveholding border state with many Confederate sympathizers; Lincoln did not carry the state in 1860. However, Delaware had more economic ties with the North than with the South; by 1860 fewer than 2000 of the almost 22,000 blacks in the state were slaves, and most Delawareans opposed the extension of slavery. There was never any movement in Delaware to secede from the Union, and it remained loyal during the American Civil War (1861-1865) that followed the secessions. More than 13,000 Delawareans, nearly one-tenth of the state's population, served in the Union Army, and several hundred fought for the Confederacy. Fort Delaware, on Pea Patch Island in the Delaware River, was garrisoned by Union Army soldiers and served as a prison for Confederate prisoners of war. In 1861 Lincoln proposed that Delaware's slaves be freed and the owners compensated. That proposal failed, partly because of party politics on the part of the Delaware Democrats, and in 1865 the 13th Amendment to the Constitution freed the slaves with no compensation. The Democrats controlled the legislature throughout the war and repeatedly railed at the Republicans as the party that had started the war and was going to make blacks equal to whites. In the 1864 presidential election Lincoln again failed to carry Delaware, one of only three states that preferred his opponent, General George B. McClellan.

Illinois

An overwhelming majority of Illinoisans supported the Lincoln Administration in the Civil War. The fighting never reached Illinois, but more than 250,000 men from the state served in the Union Army, including the famous general (and later president) Ulysses S. Grant, who had moved from St. Louis, Missouri, to Galena, Illinois, in 1860. In the southern part of the state, some Illinoisans who sympathized with the South created a short-lived movement to found a separate state allied with the Confederacy later in the war, and secret societies opposed to continuing the war also flourished in Illinois. In the presidential election of 1864 Illinois again voted for Lincoln, and the Republicans also gained control of the state legislature. On February 1, 1865, near the end of the war, Illinois became the first state to ratify the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which abolished slavery.

Indiana

The French and the early American settlers from the South had brought black slaves into Indiana, but the number of slaves in the state never exceeded 250. Slavery was prohibited under the terms of both the Northwest Ordinance and the first state constitution of 1816. Although most Indianans known as Hoosiers were of Southern stock in 1860, they were from the upland South, where slaves were few, and opposed the extension of slavery to the territories. Most of them were equally opposed to interference with slavery where it already existed. Fearing an influx of free blacks and the resulting economic competition, Hoosiers in 1851 put a clause in the new state constitution forbidding blacks to settle in the state. The new Republican Party, organized in 1854 to oppose the spread of slavery, won power in Indiana in 1860 with the election of Henry Smith Lane as governor and Oliver P. Morton as lieutenant governor. When Lane became a U.S. senator in 1861, Morton became governor. Morton strongly backed Republican President Abraham Lincoln. efore the 1860 elections, the Southern state of South Carolina had threatened to secede from the union if Lincoln won. In December 1860, it did so. Other Southern states soon followed, and in February 1861 they declared themselves a confederacy, the Confederate States of America. In April 1861, Confederate forces bombarded a Union fort, beginning the American Civil War (1861-1865). Lincoln requested the other states to send troops to quell the rebellion. Indiana responded, and entered the Civil War on the Union side. Morton enjoyed a high degree of popular support in the early part of the war, and it was in large part due to his encouragement that Indiana contributed 200,000 troops to the Union forces. Later, however, opposition to Morton and, to a lesser extent, the Lincoln Administration mounted. After a federal law was passed in 1862 permitting the drafting of soldiers, there were frequent antidraft riots in Indiana, mainly in the southern part of the state. In the 1862 elections to the state legislature, the Democrats gained control of both houses. During the war, the Republicans tried to label their Democratic opponents as Copperheads (northern Democrats sympathetic to the rebels), but on the whole the Democrats in Indiana supported the Union war effort. They were hostile, however, to the zealously partisan Morton. In 1863 the hostility between the governor and the legislature led to a complete cessation of constitutional government and a failure to appropriate funds to carry on state functions.

Iowa

Most Iowans did not support slavery, but since the Missouri Compromise in 1820 had forbidden slavery in Iowa and the other territories of the northern plains, the issue did not dominate early Iowa politics. In 1854, however, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which nullified the Missouri Compromise by allowing the settlers to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. Iowans reacted quickly. Protest groups organized to oppose the measure because it meant that slavery might be legal on Iowa's western border. In 1854 James Grimes, an antislavery member of the Whig Party, was elected governor and helped to organize the antislavery Republican Party in Iowa. Southwestern Iowa became a center of supplies for antislavery forces in Kansas when fighting broke out there following the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Iowa Quakers were especially active in the movement to abolish slavery. Eastern crusaders on their way to Kansas traveled through Iowa to avoid passing through Missouri (a slave state), and an underground railroad across the southern part of Iowa helped runaway slaves escape. The famous abolitionist John Brown not only used Iowa as a base for some of his antislavery activities, but he trained his band in Iowa for the raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia). When the Civil War began in 1861, most Iowa troops were sent south into Missouri and the western campaigns. The state supplied more soldiers for the Union Army per capita than any other northern state, about 80,000 Iowans in all. Many Iowa women also contributed to the war effort by taking over the family farms while their husbands and sons were in battle. Annie Wittenmeyer of Keokuk won national recognition for her work providing better diets for the sick and wounded in military hospitals.

Kansas

Shortly after Kansas achieved statehood the Civil War began. Kansas contributed more than 20,000 men (two-thirds of the adult males in the state) to the Union effort. Blacks and Native Americans each contributed soldiers to the Union troops raised in Kansas. Kansas's troops served on the plains, saw action in Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and the Indian Territory, and the Eighth Kansas Infantry distinguished itself at Lookout Mountain and Chickamauga. There were no major battles in Kansas, but Kansas troops helped pursue a retreating Confederate force under General Sterling Price in October 1864, following his defeat at the battle of Westport in present-day Kansas City, Missouri. The Confederates were caught in Kansas, but Price managed to escape.

Kentucky

The failure of Crittenden's compromise presaged the outbreak of the American Civil War (1861-1865) in April. Kentucky's governor, Beriah Magoffin, refused both the Union's and the Confederacy's call for volunteers. In May the state legislature resolved that Kentucky would take no part in the fighting, and Magoffin issued a proclamation declaring the state to be neutral in the conflict. Because of the state's strategic location, neither side fully respected Kentucky's neutrality. Recruiters from both the Union and the Confederacy enlisted Kentuckians. First the Confederacy, then the Union, began moving troops into the state. Throughout the war Kentucky remained at the mercy of the occupying armies. The first major battle of the war in Kentucky, the Battle of Mill Springs or Logan's Crossroads, fought at Nancy in January 1862, resulted in a Confederate defeat. Then, late in the summer of 1862, Confederate forces embarked on a bold campaign to take Kentucky. They pushed northward and westward into the state from central Tennessee and defeated Union Army troops at Richmond and Munfordville. However, the main Confederate advance was halted at Perryville on October 8, 1862. The Battle of Perryville, also known as the Battle of Chaplin Hills, was the bloodiest engagement in the state's history. More than 7600 casualties were counted. No other large-scale battles took place in the state, although raids by Confederate General John Hunt Morgan gained much notice. During the later years of the war, guerrilla bands, including the notorious group led by Captain William Quantrill, made sporadic raids in Kentucky. In November 1861, without legal sanction, supporters of the Confederacy met at Russellville and passed an act of secession, declaring Kentucky to be a Confederate state. This action was recognized by the Confederacy but not by the Union. The state was a star in both flags. Throughout the war, Kentuckians remained divided in their loyalties to North and South. A total of about 100,000 Kentuckians, including more than 20,000 blacks, joined the Union Army, while about 40,000 residents joined the Confederate forces. A number of native Kentuckians played a prominent role in the Civil War. Besides the opposing presidents Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, ...