Här är en text på engelska som jag har skrivit om det amerikanska inbördeskriget
Pre-civil war America
In order to understand why there was such a great rancour between the different states in the Union at the time of the civil war, you have to go back in history to the time when the North American continent was populated. If you disregard the early Spanish colonies in the sixteenth century, the real colonization started early in the seventeenth century when the English disembarked at present Jamestown, Virginia. And from there they spread out over the near surroundings during the decades that followed. The Englishmen were of course not alone on the continent, there were also French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish and Mexican colonies. There was also a large population of Indians, who saw the colonizers as intruders. So already from the start there was a great divergence and belligerence between the different people that lived there. The Great Briton’s however came to dominate the colonization, and in 1733 they had control over 13 states that obeyed English law. But things weren’t so cosy, and you can’t really talk about any fraternity between the different nationalities, which all had different economical and political interests. They were also highly ruled by their respective Royal Families who transferred their European conflicts to their colonies, so of course there had to be a war. It was called the French and Indian war, and raged between the years 1756 and 1763. When it finally was over, the French had been forced to withdraw their forces from the American continent.
And now the English were the true masters of the American continent. However the subjects of the English crown in the colonies weren’t pleased with how things were going, and they felt that they didn’t get any understanding and support from their leaders. So there was to be another conflict. The sectional colonists simply wanted to get more self-determination, so that they could decide for themselves how to run their own business, both economical and political. It was the thirteen oldest states, on the east coast, that were the strongest advocates for secession from English ruling. The English however were of course not pleased with this invective cry for freedom that would weaken their domination on the American continent. And from 1775 to 1781 there was yet another war, known in history as the North American freedom war. The English finally had to admit they had been defeated, and had no choice but to recognize the independence of their former colonies. In 1789 the newly formed Union that emerged after the war swore their declaration of independence, and the United States of America was born.
The newly formed nation didn’t remind much of the United States as we know it today. Most of the lands (territories) on the North American continent still belonged to other nations, such as France, Great Britain, Spain and Mexico. But through both war ( the Mexican war 1846-1848) and through purchases the Union grew in the early nineteenth century, but it wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century that the United States as we know it today started to take form, and the Union stretched from coast to coast. Life in the former colonies was very divergent due to location and weather conditions. In the Southern states, where the weather allowed, there were mostly farmers that produced raw materials such as tobacco, rice, sugar cane and of course cotton. To aid the farmers in their work they used a slave system where African slaves, who were considered to be livestock, were forced to do all of the work. It was the cotton that made the most money, and the southern states produced ¾ of the world’s need of cotton. And this of course made the southern states very rich. They developed an aristocratic society that was totally different, both economically and socially, from the one that was to be found in the Northern states. The southern states concentrated their efforts in increasing their crops, and didn’t invest their money in industries like they did up north. The expansion of the infrastructure with roads and railroads that took place in the northern parts wasn’t anything that seemed to be appealing to the southern people. Therefore they came to be very dependent on the Northern states, from where they had to buy all of the products that they needed for their survival. They also came to be very dependent of the slaves, and without them their whole economical system would collapse.
The Northern states however were in no need of slaves, and most of them had already prohibited slavery in the early nineteenth century. They were instead concentrating their efforts in building their industries and their infrastructure. There were of course farmers that lived in the northern states as well, but they mostly grew wheat and corn. The immigration from Europe was also much bigger in the northern states, and their population was far bigger than the one in the south. And due to these differences this was a very volatile Union that could explode at any moment.
The slave question became the major political issue during the first half of the nineteenth century, especially when new states were formed in the territories. It was obvious that the different sides were no way near an understanding. Different laws were legislated, which in some cases outlawed slavery and in others allowed it. All depending on were the legislators came from. There were a number of different political parties, but the largest ones were the Whigs and the Democrats, but the senators didn’t vote according to which party they belonged to but instead they voted subservient to their state. This raised a lot of helter-skelter in the political life, and the precipice between North and South grew to be insurmountable. There was even some fighting that occurred between pro-slavers and non-slavers when it was to be decided if the new state of Kansas was to enter the Union as a free state or as a slave state. The most famous of the non-slavers is probably Johan Brown, who was solely responsible for the Pottawatomia massacre where he killed a whole bunch of pro-slavers. He later got a song written to his memory, called “John Brown’s body”.
Something had to be done, and an Illinois congressman called Abraham Lincoln, who belonged to the newly started Republican Party, decided that he might be the one who could set things straight and decided to run for president. He was a well known non-slaver who wanted full abolition of slavery, and his nomination caused a wide spread concern throughout the southern states. Lincoln had a group of followers, known as the wide-awakes, that tirelessly worked in order to get Lincoln elected as president. And in November of 1860 he won the presidential race with smallest margin possible. And it was probably only because of the ruptures within the Democratic Party that he managed to take the presidential chair, because in reality Lincoln didn’t get more than 39% of the votes.
When knowledge of Lincoln’s victory was spread out over the states the reactions came almost immediately. In the winter 1860-1861 South-Carolina announced their secession from the Union, and was soon to be followed by Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. This was a hapless trend of events for the not yet one hundred years old Union and especially for Abraham Lincoln, who can’t have been so pleased.
In February 1861 the Confederate States of America was formed, and Jefferson Davies was elected president. The Union had finally ruptured, and this even before Lincoln had been sworn in as the 16th president of the United States. The precipice between the south and north was now impossible to repair, and everyone in the whole nation held their breath, waiting for the war that certainly would come.
The civil war
But at first nothing really happened. The Southerners had of course mobilized their militia long before their secession, and the Northerners still had their forts and strongholds on Southern soil, but no side wanted to be the one who fired the first shot. Neither side would agree on a covenant that could stop a war, whereas that would make them look bad and make them lose adherents among their own followers, nor were they willing to take responsibility for an outbreak of war. This standstill could not last forever, and it didn’t. And on April 12, 2 months after the secession, there was finally time for some action. Union major Robert Anderson, was commander at fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina and had to this day refused to surrender and give up his fort to the Confederate forces that had gathered in Charleston. But in the morning of this particular day, he was given a final ultimatum by General Pierre Beauregard of the Confederacy, who was an old friend of Anderson’s from West Point Military Academy, that if he didn’t yield and give up the fort at a certain hour, the bombardments would begin. And at exactly 4:30 AM, after a definitive refusal from Anderson, Lieutenant Henry S. Farley of the Confederate forces fired what would be the first official shot of the civil war. And now there was no turning back, all efforts to stop this war with negotiations had failed, and it seems that the different sides were of such different opinions, that a covenant between them was entirely impossible. The battle however seems to have ended without any casualties on either side. When you read about this battle you get the feeling that neither of the commanding officers really wanted to fight, and had some kind of gentlemen’s agreement between them. They were old friends, so who knows?
The war was now officially started, and it came to be a very bloodstained and grievous war for both sides. After the Confederate victory at Charleston, 4 other states chose to leave the Union and take sides with the Confederacy. These states were: Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. I think that the reason why they didn’t join the Confederacy at once was that they probably were ruled by yellow-bellies, who wanted some guarantee to the Confederates ability before they dared to leave the Union. This increased the population in the Confederacy, so that they now had 9 million citizens and 4 million slaves. This was to be compared to the Union, who had a population of over 20 million.
The Confederacy, in spite of the fact that they were outnumbered, started out the war in a very fierce manner and managed to win the prefatory battles, like the first one at Bull Run were the Union forces lost 1500 hundred men and had to withdraw their army back to Washington. There seems to have been a number of different reasons for the Southerners´ successes, and one was that most of the officers in the federal army had Southern heritage and joined with their kin as the war started, like General Robert E Lee who came to be commander of the Confederate forces. One other reason could have been that they also were more prepared for war, but that is hard for me to speculate about. But the first year of the war however ended in favour for the Confederacy, who tried to end the war quickly with a devastating blow against the Union capital. At this point Lincoln obviously felt a little bit panic-stricken, and ordered that 500 000 men should have to enlist into the Union’s army. And he had a lot of people to choose from, so it was not really any big problem. The war however continued in favour for the Confederacy a while longer, and Lincoln needed more troops without any delay. And as his army grew larger and stronger, the Confederacy started to loose their advantage.
The battles that followed were real nightmares, and it wasn’t uncommon with death tolls of over 10 000 on both sides. And one of the most dreadful of them all was at Antietam, Maryland where 26 000 soldiers on both sides got either killed or wounded. The war luck now definitely had started to turn bad for the Confederacy, and after Antietam General Lee was forced to withdraw his forces back into Virginia. The Confederacy refused to give up the fight and more Confederate attacks followed. Lincoln still felt that he had to increase his forces, and thereby he issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 that freed all slaves in the Union. By doing like this Lincoln made sure that the Negro communities would have no choice but to join the Union’s forces. Lincoln’s major concern wasn’t the slave issue, even if that is the main thing that he is remembered for, but instead his main goal was to prevent the Union from falling apart at all costs.
In 1863 the Union forces grew more and more confident the more battles they won, but the Confederacy still was a hazardous threat. And in May of that year, General Lee and his troops managed too defeat Union General Hooker at the battle of Chancellorsville, Virginia. The Union lost 17 000 men, out of 130 000, that were either killed or wounded, and the Confederation lost 13 000, out of 60 000. The reason for these heavy casualties in this war probably depended upon the way the armies fought. The battle strategy, both used by North and South, was the same that always had been used in war. Large numbers of soldiers marching against each other on an open battlefield, and that tactic had worked rather well before. But now both sides had new weapons, which could kill more enemies from a longer distance, and thereby the soldiers died like flies. It is remarkable that the same tactics later were used in World War one, when it was obvious that they did no longer work. In early July 1863 the Confederate forces, under General Lee, decided to invade Pennsylvania in order to lure the Union forces out of Virginia and make them fight the war in their own backyard. And the trick seemed to work at first. The Confederate forces, that included approximately 75 000 men, stood against 85 000 Union soldiers, and in the opening battles it looked like the Confederacy would win, but they hadn’t counted on the Union soldiers eagerness to fight. When the battle finally ended, 3 days later, the Confederate forces had been forced to divide into smaller groups and fled the scene back into Virginia. Even though there were heavy casualties on both sides, this particular battle is considered to be the one that destroyed the fighting spirit of the Confederacy, and henceforth the Confederate troops were forced to fight while they were running for cover.
After Gettysburg there was no longer any question which side that would win the war, even if the Confederate forces continued to fight until 1865. There were of course many battles that were fought, both at sea and on land, before the Union army finally managed to defeat the Confederacy, but in this essay I have written about the ones that I think made most difference to the outcome of the war. In April 1865, General Lee realized that he had no other choice than to yield, and he surrendered his Confederate army to Union General Ulysses S: Grant at the village of Appomattox. The war was over at last. Lincoln was probably overjoyed by this, but his luck didn’t come to last for a very long time. Just 5 days after the surrender of the Confederacy, he got his head blown off while he was visiting a theatre. A man called John Wilkes Booth, who was a Southerner, was arrested and later hung for the murder. But I don’t really think that Lincoln’s death mattered much to the general public at that time, so many people had already died and the war was finally over.
Post-civil war America
What happened in the United States after the war is almost as complicated to describe as the war itself. The Confederacy was defeated, the Confederate Army was dissolved and the slaves were set free. But the question concerning how the Union was to be rebuilt caused a great discord among the different fractions of Union leaders. Lincoln’s plan had been to incorporate the former Confederate states back into the Union as quickly and smoothly as possible, and that the leaders of the Confederacy should be given a full pardon. These ideas came to a halt when he was shot. Andrew Johnson, who was Lincoln’s successor, wasn’t quite as forgiving at first, and wanted all the Confederate leaders to stand trial for treason. He agreed however that the former Confederate states should be incorporated without delay, and their general opinion seems to have been that they never left the Union in the first place, because that was impossible by law. And as the Southerner he was, President Johnson wasn’t really interested in giving the former slaves the same rights as white folks, even when that had come to be one of the main issues of the war.
Former President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davies, was thereby hunted down and arrested. General Lee was charged with treason, and so were many others of the former Confederate leaders. But almost no one came to stand trial in the end, and they were all granted amnesty if they just swore an oath of allegiance. One Confederate officer who was sentenced, and later hung, was Captain Henry Wirz, who had been commandant in the Confederate prison camp Andersonville. He was found guilty to have starved, tortured and murdered thousands of Union soldiers. But in the end it seems that everybody just wanted to forget what had happened and get on with their lives. As time went by, President Johnson seems to have changed his mind and started to rebuild the South more and more in favour of the former Confederates.
There was however a lot of work that had to be done before things could go back to normal. The Southern states lay in ruins. Banks were closed, factories dismantled, the livestock was dead and most of the farms were destroyed. Not to mention that their whole economy was almost non-existing. President Johnson decided that every former landowner should get his land back, and that the Southern states should be allowed to govern themselves in order to get the nation back on its feet. This was not a very good idea for the former slaves, who had started to grow crops on the land of their former masters. Suddenly they once again found themselves without lands and means for survival, and had no other choice than to start working for the same people who had once been their owners. And of course they were paid minimal wages.
Many of the Southern states also began to restrict the Negro communities’ social, economical and political rights by legislating what came to be called the black codes. These codes could punish a Negro, who was found without means, to forced labour for up to a year. Negroes were also prohibited to use the same transportations as whites. And if there were to be an interracial marriage, both parts could be sentenced to life imprisonment. And even President Johnson himself was against the idea that Negroes should be allowed to vote. This of course led to protests. Both from members of Congress, and especially by former Negro Union soldiers, who refused to accept this early form of apartheid. Finally the situation was so infected that race riots broke out, both in Memphis and in New Orleans, where Negro protesters fought with the local police with many casualties as result. And for a while it looked like slavery was about to be reintroduced in the Southern states, with the President’s blessing.
Luckily for the Negroes, the majority of congress refused to accept this retrogression and passed two bills that were designed to protect the freed slaves, invalidate the black codes and give every person born in the United States, except Indians, automatic citizenship. President Johnson didn’t approve and sent a veto against it which was later overridden by Congress. It was now obvious for all that the President now didn’t have the support he needed, and questions were raised if he tried to start a second civil war. After a lot of struggles Congress finally decided to try to remove Johnson from office, and he was impeached of several crimes and had to stand trial. Johnson was acquitted, but his time as President was coming to an end. The decisions that Johnson had made regarding the governing of the former Confederate states were torn up, and the leading politicians in these states were removed from office. The former Confederacy then was divided into 5 different military districts, where military law was introduced.
The next President came to be Union war hero Ulysses S Grant, and he did his best to steer the Union back on the right course. The 14th Amendment, which guaranteed Negroes citizenship, had already been included to the Constitution, to the southerners’ consternation, and was now followed by the 15th Amendment, which was constructed so that every man, despite colour, was allowed to vote. This was an enormous step forward for the Negroes who never had the rights to decide anything, but the problems weren’t over. The Southerners, who didn’t want to be considered as equal to their former slaves, did their best to prevent the Negroes from making use of their newly given rights. Secret societies were formed, like the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia and the Sons of Midnight among many other similar organizations, whose sole intentions were to scare the Negroes into obedience. A lot of maltreatments and killings of former slaves took place, and some of these quasi-military organizations have lived on even into this day.
Progress was despite all protests being done, and schools were built to educate the former slaves. Many of them also got land from the Government so that they could grow their own crop. Society was slowly recovering from the war and the industries started to bloom. Between 1865 and the turn of the century some 600 000 new patents were issued, and the future superpower took giant leaps into industrialization. The hostilities between the different fractions in society never disappeared, but they cooled off considerably. The former Confederate states got back their self-government as time went by, and it almost was as if the war never had happened. The Union Army was concentrated in killing off all Indians, who hadn’t been given the same rights as the former slaves. It is really quite remarkable that the Americans could recognize that the Negroes had been treated unjust, but that they weren’t concerned about their treatment of the Indians.
But the Union had survived this first serious threat and was now concentrating its efforts towards the future and towards all the wars and conflicts that would later follow.
Comment
When you learn about this war, it is hard not to reflect over what the world would have looked like if the outcome of the war had been different, and the Confederacy had won. The United States has played a significant role in world politics during the twentieth century, especially in both of the world wars. And who knows if the Nazis would have been defeated if it weren’t for the aid of the United States. Or if they would have come to power in the first place, if the Americans hadn’t involved themselves in the First World War. And no one can really say which side the Americans would have chosen to support in these conflicts if they had been ruled by an apartheid government. These are of course questions that it is impossible to get an answer to.
One other thing that it is interesting to reflect upon is if the war really changed that much in the first place. The Union remained undivided and the slaves were set free, but the treatment of Negroes stayed the same for a long, long time after the war was over. The apartheid like systems of the southern states remained long into the twentieth century, and still remains in one form or the other even in this day.
You can also draw an equality mark towards later conflicts, where the Americans eagerly have gone to war as casually as they did 1861. And even if they still say that they go to war because they want to protect human rights, as they said about their interference in Korea, in Vietnam and even about their present war against Iraq, the true reasons for their military actions, both past and present, come down to only one thing. And that thing is money.
When I read about this war I learned quite a few new things about it that I had never heard of before. But it would have been completely impossible for me to write an essay that would have contained all the facts. But I think that it gives a pretty fair description of the events that took place.