Print
Email
Look It Up
AT A GLANCE
Civil War
4 articles on Civil War
Civil War
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 4281 Includes: Major Battles and Campaigns | Struggle for Emancipation | Blacks in the Military | BibliographyFew events in American history are more significant than the Civil War. The four years of conflict from 1861 to 1865 changed the nation more profoundly than any other single event. The bloody war finally laid to rest the contentious issue of slavery, ending half the nation's horrendous reliance on the buying and selling of human flesh. The Union's industrial power, which the war only provided a glimpse of, grew and strengthened throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. The way Americans saw themselves also changed. The war brought a new sense of nationalism, especially to the Union; Americans began to refer to “The United States” as opposed to “TheseUnited States.” Americans also started to view the federal government and the presidency differently. Instead of being some entity in far-off Washington, D.C., during and after the ...
Read full articleCivil War, American
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 3914 Includes: Economic Causes | Compromise over Slavery | From Compromise to Confrontation | African Americans Volunteer to Fight | Blacks in Union Camps | Blacks Behind Confederate Lines | Momentum for Abolitionism | Official Black Troops | End of the War: The North | End of the War: The South | BibliographyMilitary conflict between the United States of America and eleven former states that seceded and formed the Confederate States of America. The American Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865, took more than 600,000 lives, but brought freedom to four million African American slaves. The immediate and primary cause of the Civil War was the South's support for slavery and the North's increasing opposition to the practice. Several other economic and political factors, however, had conspired to make the issue of slavery of utmost importance to the future of the nation.Since its settlement, the southern United States had received most of its income from farming, which depended heavily on slave labor. By 1860cotton—King Cotton, as it became known—was the chief crop of the South and accounted ...
Read full articleCivil War
Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition
Word Count: 7532 Includes: Education | Civil Rights Activism | Support for Union Cause | Resistance | Entrepreneurship | Military Participation | Collective Mobilization | BibliographyThe April 1861 Confederate States of America (CSA) attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, signaled the beginning of the Civil War. At the time, there were 4,441,830 blacks—3,953,760 enslaved and 488,070 free—in the United States. There were 19,830 more free women than men on the eve of the Civil War and 11,490 more enslaved women than men.The free black population was woefully small when compared to the enslaved population, yet more than 186,000 slave- and freeborn black soldiers, in the prime of their lives, served the Union. Added to that number were 30,000 sailors and 250,000 menial laborers. A few black men served the Confederacy as bondservants accompanying owners to war, but there were no official black soldiers who fought for the CSA. An African American regiment was raised in Louisiana at the request of free blacks in ...
Read full articleCivil War (1861–65)
Source: The Oxford Companion to American Military History
Word Count: 18449 Includes: The Roots of Sectional Conflict. | Rising Sectional Tensions in the 1850s. | Lincoln's Election and the Secession Crisis. | Fort Sumter and the Outbreak of War. | Manpower. | Economic Mobilization and Its Effects. | Politics and Dissent. | Supporting the War Effort. | Conclusions.
The election of the Republican Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in November 1860 triggered a chain of events that within six months shattered the Union and culminated in the outbreak of the Civil War. The coming to power of a Republican and Northern administration committed to prohibiting the expansion of slavery struck at the vital interests of the slave South; it was the signal eagerly awaited by the proponents of Southern independence to launch a secession movement. Tensions over slavery and the struggles to perpetuate or end the institution that dated back to the incomplete American Revolution of 1776had now become so polarized along sectional lines that the North and South ...Causes Military and Diplomatic Course Domestic Course Postwar Impact Changing Interpretations
Read full article