The American Civil War (1861–1865)

The American Civil War was the war of 1861–1865 between the Union and a Confederacy of states that seceded to preserve slavery; it ended with Union victory and slavery abolished. A further reading holds its settlement reorganized the labor topology of an already integrated capitalism.

⚖️ Causes

• Slavery: central, historians overwhelmingly agree, at least for the South; the North's reasons disputed.1↘

  On Wikipedia's account the origins of the war were rooted in the Southern states' desire to preserve slavery: historians in the 21st century overwhelmingly agree on the centrality of slavery, at least for the Southern states, and disagree on the North's reasons for refusing secession, whose primary reason it gives as preserving the Union, and a panel of historians said in 2011 that slavery and its discontents were the primary cause of disunion and that disunion itself sparked the war.§3
• Territories: the principal battle: slavery's expansion west.1↘

  The principal political battle leading to secession was over whether slavery would expand into the Western territories; the American Battlefield Trust's overview says the war started over the national government's power to prohibit slavery in the territories, the Gilder Lehrman card gives secession over slavery and territorial expansion disputes as its trigger, History.com names tensions over slavery, states' rights and westward expansion, and Britannica disputes over slavery and states' rights.§4
• Also named: states' rights (History.com, Britannica).1↘

  The principal political battle leading to secession was over whether slavery would expand into the Western territories; the American Battlefield Trust's overview says the war started over the national government's power to prohibit slavery in the territories, the Gilder Lehrman card gives secession over slavery and territorial expansion disputes as its trigger, History.com names tensions over slavery, states' rights and westward expansion, and Britannica disputes over slavery and states' rights.§4
• Lost Cause: denial disproven by the secession documents.1↘

  The Lost Cause ideology, which denies that slavery was the principal cause of secession, is called pseudo-historical and disproven by the seceding states' own secession documents, Mississippi's declaration among them ("Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery"), and the Beards, who downplayed slavery, are said to have formalized the Lost Cause myth in an interpretation abandoned by historians generally by the 1950s; the war is one of the most extensively studied and written about episodes in the history of the United States and remains the subject of cultural and historiographical debate.§5

🗓️ Course

• 1860–61: Lincoln elected; eleven states seceded; Fort Sumter, April 12, 1861.1↘

  Decades of controversy over slavery came to a head when Abraham Lincoln, a Republican who opposed slavery's expansion, won the 1860 presidential election; seven slave states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America, four more seceded after the war began, and the war began on April 12, 1861, when the Confederacy bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina.§2
• 1863: Emancipation Proclamation, a wartime measure; Vicksburg; Gettysburg.2↘

  Lincoln initially claimed that preserving the Union was the central goal, while the South fought to preserve slavery; abolition became a Union war goal on January 1, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation declared all slaves in rebel states to be free, a decision History.com says Lincoln justified as a wartime measure, and by 1864, in the Trust's overview, a limited war to restore the Union had given way to "total war" to destroy the Old South and its basic institution of slavery.§6 The First Battle of Bull Run, on July 21, 1861, dashed any hopes of a quick Union victory; Antietam was the war's bloodiest single day of fighting; in 1863 the Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy at the Mississippi while Lee's incursion north failed at Gettysburg; Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, Lincoln was shot by an assassin on April 14, Johnston's surrender on April 26 effectively ended the war, and resistance collapsed when Jefferson Davis was captured on May 10, 1865.§8
• 1865: Appomattox, April 9; Lincoln assassinated.1↘

  The First Battle of Bull Run, on July 21, 1861, dashed any hopes of a quick Union victory; Antietam was the war's bloodiest single day of fighting; in 1863 the Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy at the Mississippi while Lee's incursion north failed at Gettysburg; Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, Lincoln was shot by an assassin on April 14, Johnston's surrender on April 26 effectively ended the war, and resistance collapsed when Jefferson Davis was captured on May 10, 1865.§8

🕊️ Outcomes and costs

• Abolition: Thirteenth Amendment; four million freed; the Union preserved.2↘

  The war ended with Union victory, the dissolution of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery: the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and four million enslaved black people were freed, and in the Trust's overview Northern victory preserved the United States as one nation, in a war it calls the central event in America's historical consciousness, which determined what kind of nation the United States would be.§9 The war was among the first to use industrial warfare and was the deadliest in American history: History.com estimates 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers killed, the Trust 625,000 lives, and Wikipedia an estimated 700,000 soldiers dead in its lead and an estimated 698,000 soldier deaths, two-thirds by disease, among at least 1,030,000 casualties, while Jim Downs states that counting the enslaved people who died of disease, starvation or exposure would take the toll past one million.§10
• Labor: the Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces.1↘

  The Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces, and some 186,000 Black soldiers joined the Union Army by the time the war ended in 1865, 38,000 of whom lost their lives.§7
• Dead: 620,000–750,000 soldiers (History.com), about 698,000 (Wikipedia); over a million with enslaved deaths, Downs states.1↘

  The war was among the first to use industrial warfare and was the deadliest in American history: History.com estimates 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers killed, the Trust 625,000 lives, and Wikipedia an estimated 700,000 soldiers dead in its lead and an estimated 698,000 soldier deaths, two-thirds by disease, among at least 1,030,000 casualties, while Jim Downs states that counting the enslaved people who died of disease, starvation or exposure would take the toll past one million.§10
• Wealth in persons: at least $1,000 per healthy adult, wiped off the books.1↘

  The war destroyed much of the South's wealth, in part because wealth held in enslaved people, at least $1,000 for a healthy adult before the war, was wiped off the books; the goals of Reconstruction, from the Union perspective, included ending slavery permanently and preventing semi-slavery status, while Jim Crow laws, Black Codes and other impediments would slow progress for generations, and with the withdrawal of federal troops the Jim Crow era of disenfranchisement and legal segregation was ushered in.§11
• Reconstruction: a Union goal: prevent semi-slavery status; Jim Crow followed.1↘

  The war destroyed much of the South's wealth, in part because wealth held in enslaved people, at least $1,000 for a healthy adult before the war, was wiped off the books; the goals of Reconstruction, from the Union perspective, included ending slavery permanently and preventing semi-slavery status, while Jim Crow laws, Black Codes and other impediments would slow progress for generations, and with the withdrawal of federal troops the Jim Crow era of disenfranchisement and legal segregation was ushered in.§11

🔧 The settlement as labor regime (held)

• Accepted: slavery and its expansion caused the war; no post-2000 scholarship found for a war for cheap wage labor.2↘

  A further reading accepts this conventional account in full: it records that the field holds slavery and its expansion to have caused secession and the war, cites Mississippi's declaration, Marx's conclusion of 1861 that at most the Morrill tariff went through Congress because secession had taken place, and Gunderson's estimate that slaves were 38 percent of the population of the eleven Confederate states and contributed 23 percent of whites' income, and holds that the stake was slavery itself, its value as property and its need for territory.§12 It records the "Beard-Hacker Thesis", quoted as having become the most widely accepted interpretation of the war's economic impact by the Second World War, as abandoned as an account of causes after about 1950 and cut down as an account of consequences by quantitative economic history, and reports that its research found no post-2000 scholarship arguing that the North went to war to obtain cheap wage labor for its industry, beside the thesis it began from, that the North fought to free cheap wage labor for its industry, which, it says, the record divides.§13
• Two axes, specified: juridical scope of the claim on the worker; grain of measurement.1↘

  It specifies two quantities that move separately, the juridical scope of the claim on the worker (the person and the lifetime, or labor-power for a bounded interval) and the grain at which productive activity is measured (life, year, day, hand, task, motion, second), reads emancipation as a discontinuity in the first, and holds on contemporary texts that slavery sold the person and wage labor sold capacity for an interval, with Hammond's slaves "hired for life" against hirelings "hired by the day" and Lincoln at Milwaukee reporting the mud-sill reasoning as a choice whether capital shall "hire laborers" or "buy them".§15
• First fruit: the eight hours' agitation, as Marx names it.1↘

  Of the war's labor result it cites the first fruit Marx names, the eight hours' agitation, and the Baltimore General Congress of Labour of 16 August 1866 calling for a law making eight hours the normal working-day, and reads the contested object, once the noun could no longer be sold, as the length of the day; it cites Du Bois's account that the black worker won the war by a general strike which transferred his labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader, reads that strike as the verb withdrawn from the noun's owner, and holds Du Bois a weaker source for Northern motive.§17
• General strike: Du Bois's, read as the verb withdrawn from the noun's owner.1↘

  Of the war's labor result it cites the first fruit Marx names, the eight hours' agitation, and the Baltimore General Congress of Labour of 16 August 1866 calling for a law making eight hours the normal working-day, and reads the contested object, once the noun could no longer be sold, as the length of the day; it cites Du Bois's account that the black worker won the war by a general strike which transferred his labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader, reads that strike as the verb withdrawn from the noun's owner, and holds Du Bois a weaker source for Northern motive.§17
• Exception clause: read as a third configuration: the state holds the person by sentence, a lessee buys the labor.1↘

  It reads the Thirteenth Amendment's exception for punishment for crime as opening a third configuration, the state holding the person by sentence and a lessee buying the labor, citing Georgia's making its prisoners available for hire in 1868 and Mancini's description of leasing as "a means of racial subordination and labor discipline", and it holds that the settlement abolished the noun as a legal form, put the verb under contract, pledged it as debt, brokered it and kept a penal exception, and closed toward contract and debt the opening that the freedpeople's own general strike had forced.§20

📜 Instruments (documented)

• 1864 Act: wage pledges up to twelve months held valid; servitude disclaimed; repealed 1868.1↘

  Of the settlement it documents the Act to Encourage Immigration of 4 July 1864, which it calls the most direct federal instrument of labor supply in the war years and under which emigrants' pledges of the wages of their labor for up to twelve months to repay their emigration were held valid in law, read as the verb mortgaged in advance with the debt following the worker onto homestead land; the statute disclaims "the relation of Slavery or servitude" seven months before Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, and a cited history records Congress repealing it in 1868 in the face of protests by labor organizations.§18
• Freedmen's Bureau: despite similar coercion, wage labor valued in 'fundamentally different' ways (Ruef).1↘

  It reports Ruef's finding that under the Freedmen's Bureau's effort to reinstate plantation labor, despite similarities in coercion and the organization of labor, the valuation of wage labor was linked to human capital investments and statistical discrimination in fundamentally different ways, Stanley's that in the era of slave emancipation no ideal of freedom had greater power than that of contract, and Hartman's that black subordination continued under the aegis of contract, and it places the "public and psychological wage" it quotes, paid in part to white laborers, in the settlement of the war.§19
• Priced body: a lost right eye at $240, a sale reporter's arithmetic.1↘

  Before the war, it documents, capacity was already priced and measured: a reporter of a slave sale set a young man sold at $1,280 beside his counterpart "in all marketable points" who had lost his right eye and sold at $1,040, and put "the market value of the right eye" at $240, and slaveholders, on Rosenthal's account, measured workers against "the prime field hand" and its expected production per day, which the paper reads as a verb-measure attached to a noun.§16

🧭 Bounds and relations

• Not claimed: that Northern industry caused or fought the war for labor, or that wage labor and slavery are one relation.1↘

  It states that it does not claim that Northern industry caused the war or fought it for labor, that freedpeople were moved North in numbers that fed Northern industry, or that wage labor and slavery are the same relation, states that the Northern wage-labor market was already formed before 1861 and that no source it consulted documents a line from plantation records to Taylor or Ford, and cites its field consensus through a Wikipedia summary, with a survey of historians listed as not yet read.§21
• The Amendment's reach: fully applied, held to abolish every contract binding future labor to present terms (#497, #1150).1↘

  Three further deposits relate the war at their own grades: a paper that presents itself as the second half of a two-part argument restates the grammar of the two halves, slavery having priced the noun and Fordism specified the verb, and reads as a third relation to the person a holder that held the body by confinement and was paid a daily fee in the form of hire; a reading of the Thirteenth Amendment, in two versions, holds that it reaches private contracts and, fully applied, abolishes every contract that binds future labor to present terms; and another deposit lists the Civil War's causes among its examples of major historical events, events whose public-knowledge framing shapes contemporary political identity, and defines a stabilized node as an event, among other kinds, whose public-knowledge background is deep.§22
• Stabilized node: the war's causes, a listed major historical event (#166).1↘

  Three further deposits relate the war at their own grades: a paper that presents itself as the second half of a two-part argument restates the grammar of the two halves, slavery having priced the noun and Fordism specified the verb, and reads as a third relation to the person a holder that held the body by confinement and was paid a daily fee in the form of hire; a reading of the Thirteenth Amendment, in two versions, holds that it reaches private contracts and, fully applied, abolishes every contract that binds future labor to present terms; and another deposit lists the Civil War's causes among its examples of major historical events, events whose public-knowledge framing shapes contemporary political identity, and defines a stabilized node as an event, among other kinds, whose public-knowledge background is deep.§22

The American Civil War was the war of 1861–1865 between the Union and a Confederacy of states that seceded to preserve slavery; it ended with Union victory, the Confederacy dissolved and slavery abolished, four million freed, in the deadliest war in American history.

⚖️ Causes

• Slavery: central, historians overwhelmingly agree, at least for the South; the North's reasons disputed.1↘

  On Wikipedia's account the origins of the war were rooted in the Southern states' desire to preserve slavery: historians in the 21st century overwhelmingly agree on the centrality of slavery, at least for the Southern states, and disagree on the North's reasons for refusing secession, whose primary reason it gives as preserving the Union, and a panel of historians said in 2011 that slavery and its discontents were the primary cause of disunion and that disunion itself sparked the war.§3
• Territories: the principal battle: slavery's expansion west.1↘

  The principal political battle leading to secession was over whether slavery would expand into the Western territories; the American Battlefield Trust's overview says the war started over the national government's power to prohibit slavery in the territories, the Gilder Lehrman card gives secession over slavery and territorial expansion disputes as its trigger, History.com names tensions over slavery, states' rights and westward expansion, and Britannica disputes over slavery and states' rights.§4
• Also named: states' rights (History.com, Britannica).1↘

  The principal political battle leading to secession was over whether slavery would expand into the Western territories; the American Battlefield Trust's overview says the war started over the national government's power to prohibit slavery in the territories, the Gilder Lehrman card gives secession over slavery and territorial expansion disputes as its trigger, History.com names tensions over slavery, states' rights and westward expansion, and Britannica disputes over slavery and states' rights.§4
• Lost Cause: denial disproven by the secession documents.1↘

  The Lost Cause ideology, which denies that slavery was the principal cause of secession, is called pseudo-historical and disproven by the seceding states' own secession documents, Mississippi's declaration among them ("Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery"), and the Beards, who downplayed slavery, are said to have formalized the Lost Cause myth in an interpretation abandoned by historians generally by the 1950s; the war is one of the most extensively studied and written about episodes in the history of the United States and remains the subject of cultural and historiographical debate.§5

🗓️ Course

• 1860–61: Lincoln elected; eleven states seceded; Fort Sumter, April 12, 1861.1↘

  Decades of controversy over slavery came to a head when Abraham Lincoln, a Republican who opposed slavery's expansion, won the 1860 presidential election; seven slave states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America, four more seceded after the war began, and the war began on April 12, 1861, when the Confederacy bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina.§2
• 1863: Emancipation Proclamation, a wartime measure; Vicksburg; Gettysburg.2↘

  Lincoln initially claimed that preserving the Union was the central goal, while the South fought to preserve slavery; abolition became a Union war goal on January 1, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation declared all slaves in rebel states to be free, a decision History.com says Lincoln justified as a wartime measure, and by 1864, in the Trust's overview, a limited war to restore the Union had given way to "total war" to destroy the Old South and its basic institution of slavery.§6 The First Battle of Bull Run, on July 21, 1861, dashed any hopes of a quick Union victory; Antietam was the war's bloodiest single day of fighting; in 1863 the Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy at the Mississippi while Lee's incursion north failed at Gettysburg; Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, Lincoln was shot by an assassin on April 14, Johnston's surrender on April 26 effectively ended the war, and resistance collapsed when Jefferson Davis was captured on May 10, 1865.§8
• 1865: Appomattox, April 9; Lincoln assassinated.1↘

  The First Battle of Bull Run, on July 21, 1861, dashed any hopes of a quick Union victory; Antietam was the war's bloodiest single day of fighting; in 1863 the Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy at the Mississippi while Lee's incursion north failed at Gettysburg; Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, Lincoln was shot by an assassin on April 14, Johnston's surrender on April 26 effectively ended the war, and resistance collapsed when Jefferson Davis was captured on May 10, 1865.§8

🕊️ Outcomes and costs

• Abolition: Thirteenth Amendment; four million freed; the Union preserved.2↘

  The war ended with Union victory, the dissolution of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery: the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and four million enslaved black people were freed, and in the Trust's overview Northern victory preserved the United States as one nation, in a war it calls the central event in America's historical consciousness, which determined what kind of nation the United States would be.§9 The war was among the first to use industrial warfare and was the deadliest in American history: History.com estimates 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers killed, the Trust 625,000 lives, and Wikipedia an estimated 700,000 soldiers dead in its lead and an estimated 698,000 soldier deaths, two-thirds by disease, among at least 1,030,000 casualties, while Jim Downs states that counting the enslaved people who died of disease, starvation or exposure would take the toll past one million.§10
• Labor: the Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces.1↘

  The Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces, and some 186,000 Black soldiers joined the Union Army by the time the war ended in 1865, 38,000 of whom lost their lives.§7
• Dead: 620,000–750,000 soldiers (History.com), about 698,000 (Wikipedia); over a million with enslaved deaths, Downs states.1↘

  The war was among the first to use industrial warfare and was the deadliest in American history: History.com estimates 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers killed, the Trust 625,000 lives, and Wikipedia an estimated 700,000 soldiers dead in its lead and an estimated 698,000 soldier deaths, two-thirds by disease, among at least 1,030,000 casualties, while Jim Downs states that counting the enslaved people who died of disease, starvation or exposure would take the toll past one million.§10
• Wealth in persons: at least $1,000 per healthy adult, wiped off the books.1↘

  The war destroyed much of the South's wealth, in part because wealth held in enslaved people, at least $1,000 for a healthy adult before the war, was wiped off the books; the goals of Reconstruction, from the Union perspective, included ending slavery permanently and preventing semi-slavery status, while Jim Crow laws, Black Codes and other impediments would slow progress for generations, and with the withdrawal of federal troops the Jim Crow era of disenfranchisement and legal segregation was ushered in.§11
• Reconstruction: a Union goal: prevent semi-slavery status; Jim Crow followed.1↘

  The war destroyed much of the South's wealth, in part because wealth held in enslaved people, at least $1,000 for a healthy adult before the war, was wiped off the books; the goals of Reconstruction, from the Union perspective, included ending slavery permanently and preventing semi-slavery status, while Jim Crow laws, Black Codes and other impediments would slow progress for generations, and with the withdrawal of federal troops the Jim Crow era of disenfranchisement and legal segregation was ushered in.§11