Mobilization to War - History

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During the period leading up to the declaration of war President McKinley asked for and received an immediate appropriation of 50 million dollars. Once war was declared McKinley requested 125,000 volunteers to fight. Over 1,000,000 men tried to enlist. 78% were rejected; the army could afford to be choosy. The period leading up to the start of hostilities seemed to finally close the wounds of the Civil War. Two Confederate generals were called back to service, Generals' Fitzhugh Lee and General Wheeler. Soon crowds in the South were cheery as soldiers carrying Old Glory marched off to war.

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Early Mobilization and War

In 1861, enthusiasm for war ran high on both sides. The North fought to restore the Union, which Lincoln declared could never be broken. The Confederacy, which by the summer of 1861 consisted of eleven states, fought for its independence from the United States. The continuation of slavery was a central issue in the war, of course, although abolitionism and western expansion also played roles, and Northerners and Southerners alike flocked eagerly to the conflict. Both sides thought it would be over quickly. Militarily, however, the North and South were more equally matched than Lincoln had realized, and it soon became clear that the war effort would be neither brief nor painless. In 1861, Americans in both the North and South romanticized war as noble and positive. Soon the carnage and slaughter would awaken them to the horrors of war.

THE FIRST BATTLE OF BULL RUN

After the fall of Fort Sumter on April 15, 1861, Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand volunteers from state militias to join federal forces. His goal was a ninety-day campaign to put down the Southern rebellion. The response from state militias was overwhelming, and the number of Northern troops exceeded the requisition. Also in April, Lincoln put in place a naval blockade of the South, a move that gave tacit recognition of the Confederacy while providing a legal excuse for the British and the French to trade with Southerners. The Confederacy responded to the blockade by declaring that a state of war existed with the United States. This official pronouncement confirmed the beginning of the Civil War. Men rushed to enlist, and the Confederacy turned away tens of thousands who hoped to defend the new nation.

Many believed that a single, heroic battle would decide the contest. Some questioned how committed Southerners really were to their cause. Northerners hoped that most Southerners would not actually fire on the American flag. Meanwhile, Lincoln and military leaders in the North hoped a quick blow to the South, especially if they could capture the Confederacy’s new capital of Richmond, Virginia, would end the rebellion before it went any further. On July 21, 1861, the two armies met near Manassas, Virginia, along Bull Run Creek, only thirty miles from Washington, DC. So great was the belief that this would be a climactic Union victory that many Washington socialites and politicians brought picnic lunches to a nearby area, hoping to witness history unfolding before them. At the First Battle of Bull Run, also known as First Manassas, some sixty thousand troops assembled, most of whom had never seen combat, and each side sent eighteen thousand into the fray. The Union forces attacked first, only to be pushed back. The Confederate forces then carried the day, sending the Union soldiers and Washington, DC, onlookers scrambling back from Virginia and destroying Union hopes of a quick, decisive victory. Instead, the war would drag on for four long, deadly years ([link]).

BALANCE SHEET: THE UNION AND THE CONFEDERACY

As it became clearer that the Union would not be dealing with an easily quashed rebellion, the two sides assessed their strengths and weaknesses. At the onset on the war, in 1861 and 1862, they stood as relatively equal combatants.

The Confederates had the advantage of being able to wage a defensive war, rather than an offensive one. They had to protect and preserve their new boundaries, but they did not have to be the aggressors against the Union. The war would be fought primarily in the South, which gave the Confederates the advantages of the knowledge of the terrain and the support of the civilian population. Further, the vast coastline from Texas to Virginia offered ample opportunities to evade the Union blockade. And with the addition of the Upper South states, especially Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, the Confederacy gained a much larger share of natural resources and industrial might than the Deep South states could muster.

Still, the Confederacy had disadvantages. The South’s economy depended heavily on the export of cotton, but with the naval blockade, the flow of cotton to England, the region’s primary importer, came to an end. The blockade also made it difficult to import manufactured goods. Although the secession of the Upper South added some industrial assets to the Confederacy, overall, the South lacked substantive industry or an extensive railroad infrastructure to move men and supplies. To deal with the lack of commerce and the resulting lack of funds, the Confederate government began printing paper money, leading to runaway inflation ([link]). The advantage that came from fighting on home territory quickly turned to a disadvantage when Confederate armies were defeated and Union forces destroyed Southern farms and towns, and forced Southern civilians to take to the road as refugees. Finally, the population of the South stood at fewer than nine million people, of whom nearly four million were black slaves, compared to over twenty million residents in the North. These limited numbers became a major factor as the war dragged on and the death toll rose.

The Union side held many advantages as well. Its larger population, bolstered by continued immigration from Europe throughout the 1860s, gave it greater manpower reserves to draw upon. The North’s greater industrial capabilities and extensive railroad grid made it far better able to mobilize men and supplies for the war effort. The Industrial Revolution and the transportation revolution, beginning in the 1820s and continuing over the next several decades, had transformed the North. Throughout the war, the North was able to produce more war materials and move goods more quickly than the South. Furthermore, the farms of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the Old Northwest, and the prairie states supplied Northern civilians and Union troops with abundant food throughout the war. Food shortages and hungry civilians were common in the South, where the best land was devoted to raising cotton, but not in the North.

Unlike the South, however, which could hunker down to defend itself and needed to maintain relatively short supply lines, the North had to go forth and conquer. Union armies had to establish long supply lines, and Union soldiers had to fight on unfamiliar ground and contend with a hostile civilian population off the battlefield. Furthermore, to restore the Union—Lincoln’s overriding goal, in 1861—the United States, after defeating the Southern forces, would then need to pacify a conquered Confederacy, an area of over half a million square miles with nearly nine million residents. In short, although it had better resources and a larger population, the Union faced a daunting task against the well-positioned Confederacy.

MILITARY STALEMATE

The military forces of the Confederacy and the Union battled in 1861 and early 1862 without either side gaining the upper hand. The majority of military leaders on both sides had received the same military education and often knew one another personally, either from their time as students at West Point or as commanding officers in the Mexican-American War. This familiarity allowed them to anticipate each other’s strategies. Both sides believed in the use of concentrated armies charged with taking the capital city of the enemy. For the Union, this meant the capture of the Confederate capital in Richmond, Virginia, whereas Washington, DC, stood as the prize for Confederate forces. After hopes of a quick victory faded at Bull Run, the months dragged on without any major movement on either side ([link]).

General George B. McClellan, the general in chief of the army, responsible for overall control of Union land forces, proved especially reluctant to engage in battle with the Confederates. In direct command of the Army of the Potomac, the Union fighting force operating outside Washington, DC, McClellan believed, incorrectly, that Confederate forces were too strong to defeat and was reluctant to risk his troops in battle. His cautious nature made him popular with his men but not with the president or Congress. By 1862, however, both President Lincoln and the new Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had tired of waiting. The Union put forward a new effort to bolster troop strength, enlisting one million men to serve for three-year stints in the Army of the Potomac. In January 1862, Lincoln and Stanton ordered McClellan to invade the Confederacy with the goal of capturing Richmond.

To that end, General McClellan slowly moved 100,000 soldiers of the Army of the Potomac toward Richmond but stopped a few miles outside the city. As he did so, a Confederate force led by Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson moved north to take Washington, DC. To fend off Jackson’s attack, somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of McClellan’s soldiers, led by Major General Irvin McDowell, returned to defend the nation’s capital, a move that Jackson hoped would leave the remaining troops near Richmond more vulnerable. Having succeeding in drawing off a sizable portion of the Union force, he joined General Lee to launch an attack on McClellan’s remaining soldiers near Richmond. From June 25 to July 1, 1862, the two sides engaged in the brutal Seven Days Battles that killed or wounded almost twenty thousand Confederate and ten thousand Union soldiers. McClellan’s army finally returned north, having failed to take Richmond.

General Lee, flush from his success at keeping McClellan out of Richmond, tried to capitalize on the Union’s failure by taking the fighting northward. He moved his forces into northern Virginia, where, at the Second Battle of Bull Run, the Confederates again defeated the Union forces. Lee then pressed into Maryland, where his troops met the much larger Union forces near Sharpsburg, at Antietam Creek. The ensuing one-day battle on September 17, 1862, led to a tremendous loss of life. Although there are varying opinions about the total number of deaths, eight thousand soldiers were killed or wounded, more than on any other single day of combat. Once again, McClellan, mistakenly believing that the Confederate troops outnumbered his own, held back a significant portion of his forces. Lee withdrew from the field first, but McClellan, fearing he was outnumbered, refused to pursue him.

The Union army’s inability to destroy Lee’s army at Antietam made it clear to Lincoln that McClellan would never win the war, and the president was forced to seek a replacement. Lincoln wanted someone who could deliver a decisive Union victory. He also personally disliked McClellan, who referred to the president as a “baboon” and a “gorilla,” and constantly criticized his decisions. Lincoln chose General Ambrose E. Burnside to replace McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac, but Burnside’s efforts to push into Virginia failed in December 1862, as Confederates held their position at Fredericksburg and devastated Burnside’s forces with heavy artillery fire. The Union’s defeat at Fredericksburg harmed morale in the North but bolstered Confederate spirits. By the end of 1862, the Confederates were still holding their ground in Virginia. Burnside’s failure led Lincoln to make another change in leadership, and Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker took over command of the Army of the Potomac in January 1863.

General Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the West, operating in Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Mississippi River Valley, had been more successful. In the western campaign, the goal of both the Union and the Confederacy was to gain control of the major rivers in the west, especially the Mississippi. If the Union could control the Mississippi, the Confederacy would be split in two. The fighting in this campaign initially centered in Tennessee, where Union forces commanded by Grant pushed Confederate troops back and gained control of the state. The major battle in the western theater took place at Pittsburgh Landing, Tennessee, on April 6 and 7, 1862. Grant’s army was camped on the west side of the Tennessee River near a small log church called Shiloh, which gave the battle its name. On Sunday morning, April 6, Confederate forces under General Albert Sidney Johnston attacked Grant’s encampment with the goal of separating them from their supply line on the Tennessee River and driving them into the swamps on the river’s western side, where they could be destroyed. Union general William Tecumseh Sherman tried to rally the Union forces as Grant, who had been convalescing from an injured leg when the attack began and was unable to walk without crutches, called for reinforcements and tried to mount a defense. Many of Union troops fled in terror.

Unfortunately for the Confederates, Johnston was killed on the afternoon of the first day. Leadership of the Southern forces fell to General P. G. T. Beauregard, who ordered an assault at the end of that day. This assault was so desperate that one of the two attacking columns did not even have ammunition. Heavily reinforced Union forces counterattacked the next day, and the Confederate forces were routed. Grant had maintained the Union foothold in the western part of the Confederacy. The North could now concentrate on its efforts to gain control of the Mississippi River, splitting the Confederacy in two and depriving it of its most important water route.

Read a first-hand account from a Confederate soldier at the Battle at Shiloh, followed by the perspective of a Union soldier at the same battle.

In the spring and summer of 1862, the Union was successful in gaining control of part of the Mississippi River. In April 1862, the Union navy under Admiral David Farragut fought its way past the forts that guarded New Orleans and fired naval guns upon the below-sea-level city. When it became obvious that New Orleans could no longer be defended, Confederate major general Marshall Lovell sent his artillery upriver to Vicksburg, Mississippi. Armed civilians in New Orleans fought the Union forces that entered the city. They also destroyed ships and military supplies that might be used by the Union. Upriver, Union naval forces also bombarded Fort Pillow, forty miles from Memphis, Tennessee, a Southern industrial center and one of the largest cities in the Confederacy. On June 4, 1862, the Confederate defenders abandoned the fort. On June 6, Memphis fell to the Union after the ships defending it were destroyed.

Section Summary

Many in both the North and the South believed that a short, decisive confrontation in 1861 would settle the question of the Confederacy. These expectations did not match reality, however, and the war dragged on into a second year. Both sides mobilized, with advantages and disadvantages on each side that led to a rough equilibrium. The losses of battles at Manassas and Fredericksburg, Virginia, kept the North from achieving the speedy victory its generals had hoped for, but the Union did make gains and continued to press forward. While they could not capture the Southern capital of Richmond, they were victorious in the Battle of Shiloh and captured New Orleans and Memphis. Thus, the Confederates lost major ground on the western front.

The U.S. Government Has Mobilized Private Companies to Face Crises Before. Here’s What to Know

A bout a week after President Trump announced on March 18 that he was invoking the Defense Production Act to ramp up production of medical supplies during the coronavirus pandemic, the chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said the Trump Administration would actually use the law “for the first time” on Tuesday to get 60,000 test kits and 500 million masks. The Department of Health and Human Services has estimated that the national stockpile of emergency medical supplies only contains 1% of the 3.5 billion N95 respirators and masks that will be needed if the pandemic continues for a year.

The Defense Production Act allows the President to enlist American business in addressing a national emergency, by empowering him to take such steps as incentivizing production and requiring companies to accept and prioritize certain contracts. Though Trump has sought to position himself as a wartime president, he has so far seemed reluctant to use the Korean War-era law to make demands of industry. But as the U.S. has steeled itself for the impact of COVID-19, the comparisons between today’s need for mobilization and past examples of wartime mobilization have been hard to avoid &mdash and those past examples can perhaps offer insight into today’s situation.

One aspect of the history is clear: when business has successfully stepped up for national-security purposes, the federal government and the military have played a key role in coordinating the effort.

Mark Wilson, a historian and expert on businesses during Civil War and World War II, says the Trump Administration telling governors asking for ventilators to “try getting it yourselves” was a “throwback to the mid-19th century” when, at the outbreak of the Civil War, states had to find their own blankets and weapons before national authorities took over the acquisition of these items for the Union side. Likewise, individuals volunteering to sew masks for healthcare workers and personal use today resembles the home-spun efforts of those who volunteered to sew clothing and prepare food packages for men going off to the war. However, as the Civil War went on, those more local efforts were eclipsed by mass-produced clothing operations.

Another key lesson from the history is that the mobilization of industry doesn’t happen overnight. Rather, when it works most smoothly, it relies on groundwork that has been laid long before and maintained between crises.

“One thing I think some people are saying is, ‘Oh, in World War II, we just flipped the switch, and we had GM and Ford make all the stuff we needed, converting their auto plants to make tanks and machine guns,’ and I think that’s misleading for at least two reasons,” Wilson says, “In previous war mobilizations it took weeks, multiple months to get stuff done.”

In the 1920s and 󈧢s, after World War I, the military established planning units such as the Army Industrial College, so that they were ready for the next round of wartime mobilization. In addition, the U.S. began specifically preparing for World War II well before Pearl Harbor.

“Americans think about Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and then we know by 1942 the economy was already turning out a huge amount of munitions,” Wilson says. “The real story is that the U.S. was mobilizing gradually and then steadily more intensively with the outbreak of World War II in Europe in the fall of 1939.”

Back then, before the U.S. officially entered the war, American manufacturers became inundated with orders for materiel from Britain and France, especially after the fall of France in the spring of 1940, so the U.S. government funded the construction of new plants for making explosives and aircraft, for instance. So when Pearl Harbor happened on Dec. 7, 1941, the ramp-up that followed had a running start. And in addition, during World War II, the government “simply flat-out paid for and owned new production lines,” and thus they were “absorbing all the risk.”

In the Aug. 20, 1945, issue TIME reported on the full volume of that effort: “In the five years since the fall of France, U.S. industry and labor had turned out: 299,000 combat planes (96,000 last year) 3,600,000 trucks 100,000 tanks 87,620 warships (including landing craft), 5,200 merchant vessels 44 billion rounds of ammunition 434 million tons of steel 36 billion yards of cotton textiles for war.”

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When the Korean War started in the summer of 1950, five years after World War II ended and with the Cold War in full swing, it was clear reinforcements were once again needed. The U.S. was in a “very vulnerable position” and “did not have the industrial capacity” to meet the military needs in Korea, Congressional Research Service foreign-policy and national-defense analyst David E. Lockwood explained at a House briefing in 1983. Measures to “stimulate and increase production on an emergency basis” became “very necessary.”

President Truman signed the Defense Production Act, which was based on the WWII-era War Powers Acts, on Sept. 8, 1950, about two months into the conflict. The act initially gave the President short-term use of wide-ranging powers from the requisition of property, material and facilities to the ability to place ceilings on wages and prices. In the spring of 1953, as the conflict was winding down Congress terminated several of the most expansive powers in the law it has since been renewed dozens of times in roughly the same format it was in after 1953.

There are, however, some important differences between today’s situation and past examples of government and industry working together to face a national emergency.

One key difference, Wilson says, is a change in the last three decades in the way America goes to war and a narrower view of the federal government’s role in society. A conservative tendency toward small government via deregulation, outsourcing and privatization, he argues, has sifted into the realms of emergency planning and central coordination.

Even so, the original rationale behind the Defense Production Act has eerie echoes to today’s war-like mobilization of industry. As the Congressional Research Service analyst put it, the situation in Korea “had reached a critical point it was clear that it was going to last a long time. It was not going to be over quickly. And it was going to require a major mobilization effort on the part of American industry.”

Contents

Naval blockade Edit

Britain used its large navy to prevent cargo vessels entering German ports, mainly by intercepting them in the North Sea between the coasts of Scotland and Norway. The wider sea approaches to Britain and France, their distance from German harbors and the smaller size of the German surface fleet all made it harder for Germany to reciprocate. Instead, Germany used submarines to lie in wait for, and then sink, merchant ships heading for British and French ports.

The strategy behind the blockade Edit

The Royal Navy successfully stopped the shipment of most war supplies and food to Germany. Neutral American ships that tried to trade with Germany were seized or turned back by the Royal Navy who viewed such trade as in direct conflict with the Allies' war efforts. The impact from the blockade became apparent very slowly because Germany and its allies controlled extensive farmlands and raw materials. It was eventually successful because Germany and Austria-Hungary had decimated their agricultural production by taking so many farmers into their armies. By 1918, German cities were on the verge of a major food shortage the front-line soldiers were on short rations and were running out of essential supplies. [5]

Germany also considered a blockade. "England wants to starve us", said Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the man who built the German fleet and who remained a key advisor to the Kaiser Wilhelm II. "We can play the same game. We can bottle her up and destroy every ship that endeavors to break the blockade". [6] Unable to challenge the more powerful Royal Navy on the surface, Tirpitz wanted to scare off merchant and passenger ships en route to Britain. He reasoned that since the island of Britain depended on imports of food, raw materials, and manufactured goods, scaring off a substantial number of the ships would effectively undercut its long-term ability to maintain an army on the Western Front. While Germany had only nine long-range U-boats at the start of the war, it had ample shipyard capacity to build the hundreds needed. However, the United States demanded that Germany respect the international agreements upon "freedom of the seas", which protected neutral American ships on the high seas from seizure or sinking by either belligerent. Furthermore, Americans insisted that causing the deaths of innocent American civilians was unwarranted and grounds for a declaration of war. [7] The Royal Navy frequently violated America's neutral rights by seizing merchant ships. Wilson's top advisor, Colonel Edward M. House commented that, "The British have gone as far as they possibly could in violating neutral rights, though they have done it in the most courteous way". [8] When Wilson protested these violations of American neutrality, the Royal Navy backed down.

German submarines torpedoed ships without warning, causing sailors and passengers to drown. Berlin explained that submarines were so vulnerable that they dared not surface near merchant ships that might be carrying guns and which were too small to rescue submarine crews. Britain armed most of its merchant ships with medium caliber guns that could sink a submarine, making above-water attacks too risky. In February 1915, the United States warned Germany about the misuse of submarines. On April 22, the German Imperial Embassy warned U.S. citizens against boarding vessels to Britain, which would have to face German attack. On May 7, Germany torpedoed the British passenger liner RMS Lusitania, sinking her. This act of aggression caused the loss of 1,198 civilian lives, including 128 Americans. The sinking of a large, unarmed passenger ship, combined with the previous stories of atrocities in Belgium, shocked Americans and turned public opinion hostile to Germany, although not yet to the point of war. [10] Wilson issued a warning to Germany that it would face "strict accountability" if it sank more neutral U.S. passenger ships. [11] Berlin acquiesced, ordering its submarines to avoid passenger ships.

By January 1917, however, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff decided that an unrestricted submarine blockade was the only way to achieve a decisive victory. They demanded that Kaiser Wilhelm order unrestricted submarine warfare be resumed. Germany knew this decision meant war with the United States, but they gambled that they could win before America's potential strength could be mobilized. [12] However, they overestimated how many ships they could sink and thus the extent Britain would be weakened. Finally, they did not foresee that convoys could and would be used to defeat their efforts. They believed that the United States was so weak militarily that it could not be a factor on the Western Front for more than a year. The civilian government in Berlin objected, but the Kaiser sided with his military. [13]

Business considerations Edit

The beginning of war in Europe coincided with the end of the Recession of 1913–1914 in America. Exports to belligerent nations rose rapidly over the first four years of the War from $824.8 million in 1913 to $2.25 billion in 1917. [14] Loans from American financial institutions to the Allied nations in Europe also increased dramatically over the same period. [15] Economic activity towards the end of this period boomed as government resources aided the production of the private sector. Between 1914 and 1917, industrial production increased 32% and GNP increased by almost 20%. [16] The improvements to industrial production in the United States outlasted the war. The capital build-up that had allowed American companies to supply belligerents and the American army resulted in a greater long-run rate of production even after the war had ended in 1918. [17]

In 1913, J. P. Morgan, Jr. took over the House of Morgan, an American-based investment bank consisting of separate banking operations in New York, London, and Paris, after the death of his father, J. Pierpont Morgan. [15] The House of Morgan offered assistance in the wartime financing of Britain and France from the earliest stages of the war in 1914 through America's entrance in 1917. J.P. Morgan & Co., the House of Morgan's bank in New York, was designated as the primary financial agent to the British government in 1914 after successful lobbying by the British ambassador, Sir Cecil Spring Rice. [15] The same bank would later take a similar role in France and would offer extensive financial assistance to both warring nations. J.P. Morgan &Co. became the primary issuer of loans to the French government by raising money from American investors. [15] Morgan, Harjes, the House of Morgan's French affiliated bank, controlled the majority of the wartime financial dealings between the House of Morgan and the French government after primary issuances of debt in American markets. [15] Relations between the House of Morgan and the French government became tense as the war raged on with no end in sight. [15] France's ability to borrow from other sources diminished, leading to greater lending rates and a depressing of the value of the franc. After the war, in 1918, J.P. Morgan & Co. continued to aid the French government financially through monetary stabilization and debt relief. [15]

Because America was still a declared neutral state, the financial dealings of American banks in Europe caused a great deal of contention between Wall Street and the U.S. government. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan strictly opposed financial support of warring nations and wanted to ban loans to the belligerents in August 1914. [15] He told President Wilson that "refusal to loan to any belligerent would naturally tend to hasten a conclusion of the war." Wilson at first agreed, but then reversed himself when France argued that if it was legal to buy American goods then it was legal to take out credits on the purchase. [18]

J.P. Morgan issued loans to France including one in March 1915 and, following negotiations with the Anglo-French Financial Commission, another joint loan to Britain and France in October 1915, the latter amounting to US$500,000,000. [15] Although the stance of the U.S. government was that stopping such financial assistance could hasten the end of the war and therefore save lives, little was done to insure adherence to the ban on loans, in part due to pressure from Allied governments and American business interests. [15]

The American steel industry had faced difficulties and declining profits during the Recession of 1913–1914. [19] As war began in Europe, however, the increased demand for tools of war began a period of heightened productivity that alleviated many U.S. industrial companies from the low-growth environment of the recession. Bethlehem Steel took particular advantage of the increased demand for armaments abroad. Prior to American entrance into the war, these companies benefit from unrestricted commerce with sovereign customers abroad. After President Wilson issued his declaration of war, the companies were subjected to price controls created by the U.S. Trade Commission in order to insure that the U.S. military would have access to the necessary armaments. [19]

By the end of the war in 1918, Bethlehem Steel had produced 65,000 pounds of forged military products and 70 million pounds of armor plate, 1.1 billion pounds of steel for shells, and 20.1 million rounds of artillery ammunition for Britain and France. [20] Bethlehem Steel took advantage of the domestic armaments market and produced 60% of the American weaponry and 40% of the artillery shells used in the war. [20] Even with price controls and a lower profit margin on manufactured goods, the profits resulting from wartime sales expanded the company into the third largest manufacturing company in the country. Bethlehem Steel became the primary arms supplier for the United States and other allied powers again in 1939. [20]

Views of the elites Edit

Historians divide the views of American political and social leaders into four distinct groupings—the camps were mostly informal:

The first of these were the Non-Interventionists, a loosely affiliated and politically diverse anti-war movement which sought to keep the United States out of the war altogether. Members of this group tended to view the war as a clash between the imperialist and militaristic great powers of Europe, who were seen as corrupt and unworthy of support. Others were pacifists, who objected on moral grounds. Prominent leaders included Democrats like former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, industrialist Henry Ford and publisher William Randolph Hearst Republicans Robert M. La Follette, Senator from Wisconsin and George W. Norris, Senator from Nebraska and Progressive Party activist Jane Addams.

At the far-left end of the political spectrum the Socialists, led by their perennial candidate for President Eugene V. Debs and movement veterans like Victor L. Berger and Morris Hillquit, were staunch anti-militarists and opposed to any US intervention, branding the conflict as a "capitalist war" that American workers should avoid. However, after the US did join the war in April 1917, a schism developed between the anti-war Party majority and a pro-war faction of Socialist writers, journalists and intellectuals led by John Spargo, William English Walling and E. Haldeman-Julius. This group founded the rival Social Democratic League of America to promote the war effort among their fellow Socialists. [21]

Next were the more moderate Liberal-Internationalists. This bipartisan group reluctantly supported a declaration of war against Germany with the postwar goal of establishing collective international security institutions designed to peacefully resolve future conflicts between nations and to promote liberal democratic values more broadly. This groups' views were advocated by interest groups such as the League to Enforce Peace. Adherents included US President Woodrow Wilson, his influential advisor Edward M. House, former President William Howard Taft, famed inventor Alexander Graham Bell, Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch and Harvard University President Abbott Lawrence Lowell. [19]

Finally, there were the so-called Atlanticists. Ardently pro-Entente, they had championed American intervention in the war since the sinking of the Lusitania. Their primary political motivation was to prepare the US for a war with Germany and to forge an enduring military alliance with Great Britain. This group supported the Preparedness Movement and was strong among the Anglophile establishment it included former President Theodore Roosevelt, Major General Leonard Wood, prominent attorney and diplomat Joseph Hodges Choate, former Secretary of War Henry Stimson, journalist Walter Lippman and Senators Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr. of Massachusetts and Elihu Root of New York. [22]

Parties Edit

A surprising factor in the development of American public opinion was how little the political parties became involved. Wilson and the Democrats in 1916 campaigned on the slogan "He kept us out of war!", saying a Republican victory would mean war with both Mexico and Germany. His position probably was critical in winning the Western states. [23] Charles Evans Hughes, the GOP candidate, insisted on downplaying the war issue. [24]

The Socialist party talked peace. Socialist rhetoric declared the European conflict to be "an imperialist war". It won 2% of the 1916 vote for Eugene V. Debs, blamed the war on capitalism and pledged total opposition. "A bayonet", its propaganda said, "was a weapon with a worker at each end". [25] When war began, however, about half the Socialists, typified by Congressman Meyer London, supported the decision and sided with the pro-Allied efforts. The rest, led by Debs, remained ideological and die-hard opponents. [26] Many socialists came under investigation from the Espionage Act of 1917 and many suspected of treason were arrested, including Debs. This would only increase the Socialist's anti-war groups in resentment toward the American government. [27]

Workers, farmers, and African Americans Edit

The working class was relatively quiet and tended to divide along ethnic lines. At the beginning of the war, neither working men nor farmers took a large interest in the debates on war preparation. [28] [29] [30] Samuel Gompers, head of the AFL labor movement, denounced the war in 1914 as "unnatural, unjustified, and unholy", but by 1916 he was supporting Wilson's limited preparedness program, against the objections of Socialist union activists. In 1916 the labor unions supported Wilson on domestic issues and ignored the war question. [31]

The war at first disrupted the cotton market the Royal Navy blockaded shipments to Germany, and prices fell from 11 cents a pound to only 4 cents. By 1916, however, the British decided to bolster the price to 10 cents to avoid losing Southern support. The cotton growers seem to have moved from neutrality to intervention at about the same pace as the rest of the nation. [32] [33] Midwestern farmers generally opposed the war, especially those of German and Scandinavian descent. The Midwest became the stronghold of isolationism other remote rural areas also saw no need for war. [34]

The African-American community did not take a strong position one way or the other. A month after Congress declared war, W. E. B. Du Bois called on African-Americans to "fight shoulder to shoulder with the world to gain a world where war shall be no more". [35] Once the war began and black men were drafted, they worked to achieve equality. [36] Many had hoped the community's help in the war efforts abroad would earn civil rights at home. When such civil liberties were still not granted, many African-Americans grew tired of waiting for recognition of their rights as American citizens. [37]

South Edit

There was a strong antiwar element among poor rural whites in the South and border states. [38] In rural Missouri for example, distrust of powerful Eastern influences focused on the risk that Wall Street would lead America into war. [39] Across the South poor white farmers warned each other that "a rich man's war meant a poor man's fight," and they wanted nothing of it. [40] [41] Antiwar sentiment was strongest among Christians affiliated with the Churches of Christ, the Holiness movement and Pentecostal churches. [42] Congressman James Hay, Democrat of Virginia was the powerful chairman of the House Committee on Military Affairs. He repeatedly blocked prewar efforts to modernize and enlarge the army. Preparedness was not needed because Americans were already safe, he insisted in January 1915:

Isolated as we are, safe in our vastness, protected by a great navy, and possessed of an army sufficient for any emergency that may arise, we may disregard the lamentations and predictions of the militarists. [43]

Educated, urban, middle-class southerners generally supported entering the war, and many worked on mobilization committees. In contrast to this many rural southern whites opposed entering the war. [44] Those with more formal education were more in favor of entering the war and those in the south with less formal education were more likely to oppose entering the war. Letters to newspapers with spelling or grammatical errors were overwhelmingly letters which opposed entry into the war, whereas letters with no spelling or grammatical errors were overwhelming those which supported entry into the war. [45] When the war began Texas and Georgia led the southern states with volunteers. 1,404 from Texas, 1,397 from Georgia, 538 from Louisiana, 532 from Tennessee, 470 from Alabama, 353 from North Carolina, 316 from Florida, and 225 from South Carolina. [46] Every southern Senator voted in favor of entering the war except for Mississippi firebrand James K. Vardaman. [47] By coincidence, there were some regions of the south which were more heavily in favor of intervention than others. Georgia provided the most volunteers per capita out of any state in the union before conscription and had the highest portion of pro-British newspapers before America's entry into the war. There were five competing newspapers which covered the region of Southeast Georgia, all of whom were outspokenly Anglophilic during the decades preceding the war, and during the early phases of the war. All five of which also highlighted German atrocities during the rape of Belgium and the murder of Edith Cavell. Other magazines with nationwide distribution which were pro-British such as The Outlook and The Literary Digest had a disproportionately high distribution throughout every region of the state of Georgia as well as the region of northern Alabama in the area around Huntsville and Decatur (when the war began there were 470 volunteers from the state of Alabama, of these, over 400 came from Huntsville-Decatur region). [48] [49] [50] [51] Support for American entry into the war was also pronounced in central Tennessee. Letters to newspapers which expressed pro-British, anti-German or pro-interventionist sentiment were common. In between October of 1914 and April of 1917, letters about the war to newspapers from Tennessee included at least one of these three sentiments. In the Tennessee counties of Cheatham County, Robertson County, Sumner County, Wilson County, Rutherford County, Williamson County, Maury County, Marshall County, Bedford County, Coffee Couny and Cannon County over half of the letters contained all three of these elements. [52] In South Carolina there was support for America entering the war. Led by Governor Richard I. Manning, the cities of Greenville, Spartanburg, and Columbia had started lobbying for army training centers in their communities, for both economic and patriotic reasons, in preparation for American entry into the war. Similarly, Charleston had interned a German freighter in 1914, and when the freighter's skeleton crew tried to block Charleston harbor they were all arrested and imprisoned. From that point on Charleston was buzzing with "war fever." 1915, 1916 and early 1917 were all years when Charleston and the low country coastal counties to the south of Charleston, were all gripped by sentiment that was very "pro-British and anti-German." [53] [54] [55]

German Americans Edit

German Americans by this time usually had only weak ties to Germany however, they were fearful of negative treatment they might receive if the United States entered the war (such mistreatment was already happening to German-descent citizens in Canada and Australia). Almost none called for intervening on Germany's side, instead calling for neutrality and speaking of the superiority of German culture. As more nations were drawn into the conflict, however, the English-languages press increasingly supporting Britain, while the German-American media called for neutrality while also defending Germany's position. Chicago's Germans worked to secure a complete embargo on all arms shipments to Europe. In 1916, large crowds in Chicago's Germania celebrated the Kaiser's birthday, something they had not done before the war. [56] German Americans in early 1917 still called for neutrality, but proclaimed that if a war came they would be loyal to the United States. By this point, they had been excluded almost entirely from national discourse on the subject. [57] German-American Socialists in Milwaukee, Wisconsin actively campaigned against entry into the war. [58]

Christian churches and pacifists Edit

Leaders of most religious groups (except the Episcopalians) tended to pacifism, as did leaders of the woman's movement. The Methodists and Quakers among others were vocal opponents of the war. [59] President Wilson, who was a devout Presbyterian, would often frame the war in terms of good and evil in an appeal for religious support of the war. [60]

A concerted effort was made by pacifists including Jane Addams, Oswald Garrison Villard, David Starr Jordan, Henry Ford, Lillian Wald, and Carrie Chapman Catt. Their goal was to encourage Wilson's efforts to mediate an end of the war by bringing the belligerents to the conference table. [61] Finally in 1917 Wilson convinced some of them that to be truly anti-war they needed to support what he promised would be "a war to end all wars". [62]

Once war was declared, the more liberal denominations, which had endorsed the Social Gospel, called for a war for righteousness that would help uplift all mankind. The theme—an aspect of American exceptionalism—was that God had chosen America as his tool to bring redemption to the world. [63]

American Catholic bishops maintained a general silence toward the issue of intervention. Millions of Catholics lived in both warring camps, and Catholic Americans tended to split on ethnic lines in their opinions toward American involvement in the war. At the time, heavily Catholic towns and cities in the East and Midwest often contained multiple parishes, each serving a single ethnic group, such as Irish, German, Italian, Polish, or English. American Catholics of Irish and German descent opposed intervention most strongly. Pope Benedict XV made several attempts to negotiate a peace. All of his efforts were rebuffed by both the Allies and the Germans, and throughout the war the Vatican maintained a policy of strict neutrality.

Jewish Americans Edit

In 1914–1916, there were few Jewish Americans in favor of American entry into the war. [ citation needed ] New York City, with its Jewish community numbering 1.5 million, was a center of antiwar activism, much of which was organized by labor unions which were primarily on the political left and therefore opposed to a war that they viewed to be a battle between several great powers. [64] [65]

Some Jewish communities worked together during the war years to provide relief to Jewish communities in Eastern Europe which were decimated by fighting, famine and scorched earth policies of the Russian and Austro-German armies. [66] [67]

Of greatest concern to Jewish Americans was the tsarist regime in Russia because it was notorious for tolerating and inciting pogroms and following anti-Semitic policies. As historian Joseph Rappaport reported through his study of Yiddish press during the war, "The pro-Germanism of America's immigrant Jews was an inevitable consequence of their Russophobia". [68] However the fall of the tsarist regime in March 1917 removed a major obstacle for many Jews who refused to support American entry into the war on the side of the Russian Empire. [69] The draft went smoothly in New York City, and left-wing opposition to the war largely collapsed when Zionists saw the possibility of using the war to demand a state of Israel. [70]

Irish-Americans Edit

The most effective domestic opponents of the war were Irish-American Catholics. They had little interest in the continent, but were neutral about helping the United Kingdom because it had recently enacted the Government of Ireland Act 1914, allowing Irish Home Rule. However, the Act was suspended until the war ended. John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) declared that Irish Volunteers should support America's pro-Allied war efforts first his political opponents argued that it was not the time to support Britain in its attempt to "strengthen and expand her empire". [71] The attacks on the IPP and pro-Allied press showed a firm belief that a German victory would hasten the achievement of an independent Irish state. Yet rather than proposing intervention on behalf of the Germans, Irish American leaders and organizations focused on demanding American neutrality. But the increased contact between militant Irish nationalists and German agents in the United States only fueled concerns of where the primary loyalties of Irish Americans lay. [72] Nevertheless, close to 1,000 Irish-born Americans died fighting with the U.S. armed forces in WWI. [73] The Easter Rising in Dublin in April 1916 was defeated within a week and its leaders executed by firing squad. The mainstream American press treated the uprising as foolish and misguided, and suspected it was largely created and planned by the Germans. Overall public opinion remained faithfully pro-Entente. [74]

Irish-Americans dominated the Democratic party in many large cities, and Wilson had to take account of their political viewpoints. Irish-American political efforts influenced the United States into defining its own objectives from the war separate from those of its allies, which were primarily (among other objectives) self-determination for the various nations and ethnic groups of Europe. The Irish-American community thought they had Wilson's promise to promote Irish independence in exchange for their support of his war policies, but after the war they were disappointed by his refusal to support them in 1919. [75] Wilson saw the Irish situation purely as an internal affair and did not perceive the dispute and the unrest in Ireland as the same scenario being faced by the various other nationalities in Europe (as a fall-out from World War I). [76] The progress of the Irish Race Conventions give a flavour of the differing and changing opinions during the war.

Pro-Allied immigrants Edit

Some British immigrants worked actively for intervention. London-born Samuel Insull, Chicago's leading industrialist, for example, enthusiastically provided money, propaganda, and means for volunteers to enter the British or Canadian armies. After the United States' entry, Insull directed the Illinois State Council of Defense, with responsibility for organizing the state's mobilization. [77]

Immigrants from eastern Europe usually cared more about politics in their homeland than politics in the United States. Spokesmen for Slavic immigrants hoped that an Allied victory would bring independence for their homelands. [78] Large numbers of Hungarian immigrants who were liberal and nationalist in sentiment, and sought an independent Hungary, separate from the Austro-Hungarian Empire lobbied in favor of the war and allied themselves with the Atlanticist or Anglophile portion of the population. This community was largely pro-British and anti-German in sentiment. [79] [80] [81] Albanian-Americans in communities such as Boston also campaigned for entry into the war and were overwhelmingly pro-British and anti-German, as well as hopeful the war would lead to an independent Albania which would be free from the Ottoman Empire. [82] The state of Wisconsin had the distinction of being the most isolationist state due to the large numbers of German-Americans, socialists, pacifists and others present in the state, however, the exception to this were pockets within the state such as the city of Green Bay. Green Bay had a large number of pro-Allied immigrants, including the largest Belgian immigrant community in the entire country, and for this reason anti-German sentiment and pro-war sentiment were both significantly higher in Green Bay than in the country as a whole. [83] There was a large Serbian-American community in Alaska which also was enthusiastically in favor of American entry into World War I. In the case of Alaska, which was at the time a territory, thousands of Serbian immigrants and Serbian-Americans volunteered early to join the United States Army shortly after the declaration of war, after the community had been outspokenly in favor of America's entry into the war before this. During the First World War, many Serbian Americans volunteered to fight overseas, with thousands coming from Alaska. [84] [85]

Popular pacifism Edit

Henry Ford supported the pacifist cause by sponsoring a large-scale private peace mission, with numerous activists and intellectuals aboard the "Peace Ship' (the ocean liner Oscar II). Ford chartered the ship in 1915 and invited prominent peace activists to join him to meet with leaders on both sides in Europe. He hoped to create enough publicity to prompt the belligerent nations to convene a peace conference and mediate an end to the war. The mission was widely mocked by the press, which wrote about the "Ship of Fools." Infighting between the activists, mockery by the press contingent aboard, and an outbreak of influenza marred the voyage. Four days after the ship arrived in neutral Norway, a beleaguered and physically ill Ford abandoned the mission and returned to the United States he had demonstrated that independent small efforts accomplished nothing. [87]

German agents Edit

On July 24, 1915, the German embassy's commercial attaché, Heinrich Albert, left his briefcase on a train in New York City, where an alert Secret Service agent, Frank Burke, snatched it up. [88] Wilson let the newspapers publish the contents, which indicated a systematic effort by Berlin to subsidize friendly newspapers and block British purchases of war materials. Berlin's top espionage agent, debonnaire Franz Rintelen von Kleist was spending millions to finance sabotage in Canada, stir up trouble between the United States and Mexico and to incite labor strikes. [89] Germany took the blame as Americans grew ever more worried about the vulnerability of a free society to subversion. Indeed, one of the main fears Americans of all stations had in 1916–1919 was that spies and saboteurs were everywhere. This sentiment played a major role in arousing fear of Germany, and suspicions regarding everyone of German descent who could not "prove" 100% loyalty. [90]

By 1915, Americans were paying much more attention to the war. The sinking of the Lusitania had a strong effect on public opinion because of the deaths of American civilians. That year, a strong "Preparedness" movement emerged. [91] Proponents argued that the United States needed to immediately build up strong naval and land forces for defensive purposes an unspoken assumption was that America would fight sooner or later. General Leonard Wood (still on active duty after serving a term as Chief of Staff of the Army), former president Theodore Roosevelt, and former secretaries of war Elihu Root and Henry Stimson were the driving forces behind Preparedness, along with many of the nation's most prominent bankers, industrialists, lawyers and scions of prominent families. Indeed, there emerged an "Atlanticist" foreign policy establishment, a group of influential Americans drawn primarily from upper-class lawyers, bankers, academics, and politicians of the Northeast, committed to a strand of Anglophile internationalism. Representative was Paul D. Cravath, one of New York's foremost corporation lawyers. For Cravath, in his mid-fifties when the war began, the conflict served as an epiphany, sparking an interest in international affairs that dominated his remaining career. Fiercely Anglophile, he strongly supported American intervention in the war and hoped that close Anglo-American cooperation would be the guiding principle of postwar international organization. [92]

The Preparedness movement had a "realistic" philosophy of world affairs—they believed that economic strength and military muscle were more decisive than idealistic crusades focused on causes like democracy and national self-determination. Emphasizing over and over the weak state of national defenses, they showed that America's 100,000-man Army even augmented by the 112,000 National Guardsmen, was outnumbered 20 to one by Germany's army, which was drawn from a smaller population. Similarly in 1915, the armed forces of Britain and her Empire [93] ), France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Belgium, Japan and Greece were all larger and more experienced than the United States military, in many cases significantly so. [94]

Reform to them meant UMT or "universal military training". They proposed a national service program under which the 600,000 men who turned 18 every year would be required to spend six months in military training, and afterwards be assigned to reserve units. The small regular army would primarily be a training agency.

Antimilitarists complained the plan would make America resemble Germany (which required two years' active duty). Advocates retorted that military "service" was an essential duty of citizenship, and that without the commonality provided by such service the nation would splinter into antagonistic ethnic groups. One spokesman promised that UMT would become "a real melting pot, under which the fire is hot enough to fuse the elements into one common mass of Americanism". Furthermore, they promised, the discipline and training would make for a better paid work force. Hostility to military service was strong at the time, and the program failed to win approval. In World War II, when Stimson as Secretary of War proposed a similar program of universal peacetime service, he was defeated. [95]

Underscoring its commitment, the Preparedness movement set up and funded its own summer training camps at Plattsburgh, New York, and other sites, where 40,000 college alumni became physically fit, learned to march and shoot, and ultimately provided the cadre of a wartime officer corps. [96] Suggestions by labor unions that talented working-class youth be invited to Plattsburgh were ignored. The Preparedness movement was distant not only from the working classes but also from the middle-class leadership of most of small-town America. It had had little use for the National Guard, which it saw as politicized, localistic, poorly armed, ill trained, too inclined to idealistic crusading (as against Spain in 1898), and too lacking in understanding of world affairs. The National Guard on the other hand was securely rooted in state and local politics, with representation from a very broad cross section of American society. The Guard was one of the nation's few institutions that (in some northern states) accepted blacks on an equal footing.

The Democratic party saw the Preparedness movement as a threat. Roosevelt, Root and Wood were prospective Republican presidential candidates. More subtly, the Democrats were rooted in localism that appreciated the National Guard, and the voters were hostile to the rich and powerful in the first place. Working with the Democrats who controlled Congress, Wilson was able to sidetrack the Preparedness forces. Army and Navy leaders were forced to testify before Congress to the effect that the nation's military was in excellent shape.

In fact, neither the Army nor Navy was in shape for war. The Navy had fine ships but Wilson had been using them to threaten Mexico, and the fleet's readiness had suffered. The crews of the Texas and the New York, the two newest and largest battleships, had never fired a gun, and the morale of the sailors was low. In addition, it was outnumbered and outgunned when compared to the British and German navies. The Army and Navy air forces were tiny in size. Despite the flood of new weapons systems created by the British, Germans, French, Austro-Hungarians, Italians, and others in the war in Europe, the Army was paying scant attention. For example, it was making no studies of trench warfare, poison gas, heavy artillery, or tanks and was utterly unfamiliar with the rapid evolution of aerial warfare. The Democrats in Congress tried to cut the military budget in 1915. The Preparedness movement effectively exploited the surge of outrage over the Lusitania in May 1915, forcing the Democrats to promise some improvements to the military and naval forces. Wilson, less fearful of the Navy, embraced a long-term building program designed to make the fleet the equal of the Royal Navy by the mid-1920s, although this would not be achieved until World War II. "Realism" was at work here the admirals were Mahanians and they therefore wanted a surface fleet of heavy battleships second to none—that is, equal to Britain. The facts of submarine warfare (which necessitated destroyers, not battleships) and the possibilities of imminent war with Germany (or with Britain, for that matter), were simply ignored.

Wilson's program for the Army touched off a firestorm. [97] Secretary of War Lindley Garrison adopted many of the proposals of the Preparedness leaders, especially their emphasis on a large federal reserve and abandonment of the National Guard. Garrison's proposals not only outraged the localistic politicians of both parties, they also offended a strongly held belief shared by the liberal wing of the Progressive movement. They felt that warfare always had a hidden economic motivation. Specifically, they warned the chief warmongers were New York bankers (like J. P. Morgan) with millions at risk, profiteering munition makers (like Bethlehem Steel, which made armor, and DuPont, which made powder) and unspecified industrialists searching for global markets to control. Antiwar critics blasted them. These special interests were too powerful, especially, Senator La Follette noted, in the conservative wing of the Republican Party. The only road to peace was disarmament, reiterated Bryan.

Garrison's plan unleashed the fiercest battle in peacetime history over the relationship of military planning to national goals. [98] In peacetime, War Department arsenals and Navy yards manufactured nearly all munitions that lacked civilian uses, including warships, artillery, naval guns, and shells. Items available on the civilian market, such as food, horses, saddles, wagons, and uniforms were always purchased from civilian contractors. Armor plate (and after 1918, airplanes) was an exception that has caused unremitting controversy for a century. After World War II, the arsenals and Navy yards were much less important than giant civilian aircraft and electronics firms, which became the second half of the "military-industrial complex." Peace leaders like Jane Addams of Hull House and David Starr Jordan of Stanford redoubled their efforts, and now turned their voices against the president because he was "sowing the seeds of militarism, raising up a military and naval caste". Many ministers, professors, farm spokesmen, and labor union leaders joined in, with powerful support from Claude Kitchin and his band of four dozen southern Democrats in Congress who took control of the House Military Affairs Committee. [99] [100]

Wilson, in deep trouble, took his cause to the people in a major speaking tour in early 1916, a warmup for his reelection campaign that fall. [101] Wilson seems to have won over the middle classes, but had little impact on the largely ethnic working classes and the deeply isolationist farmers. Congress still refused to budge, so Wilson replaced Garrison as Secretary of War with Newton Baker, the Democratic mayor of Cleveland and an outspoken opponent of preparedness (Garrison kept quiet, but felt Wilson was "a man of high ideals but no principles"). The upshot was a compromise passed in May 1916, as the war raged on and Berlin was debating whether America was so weak it could be ignored. The Army was to double in size to 11,300 officers and 208,000 men, with no reserve, and a National Guard that would be enlarged in five years to 440,000 men. Summer camps on the Plattsburg model were authorized for new officers, and the government was given $20 million to build a nitrate plant of its own. Preparedness supporters were downcast, the antiwar people were jubilant: America would now be too weak to go to war.

The House gutted Wilson's naval plans as well, defeating a "big navy" plan by 189 to 183, and scuttling the battleships. However news arrived of the great sea battle between Britain and Germany, the Battle of Jutland. The battle was used by the navalists to argue for the primacy of seapower they then took control in the Senate, broke the House coalition, and authorized a rapid three-year buildup of all classes of warships. A new weapons system, naval aviation, received $3.5 million, and the government was authorized to build its own armor plate factory. [102] The very weakness of American military power encouraged Berlin to start its unrestricted submarine attacks in 1917. It knew this meant war with America, but it could discount the immediate risk because the U.S. Army was negligible and the new warships would not be at sea until 1919, by which time it believed the war would be over, with Germany victorious. The argument that armaments led to war was turned on its head: most Americans came to fear that failure to arm in 1916 made aggression against the U.S. more likely. [103]

Size of the military Edit

The United States had remained aloof from the arms race in which the European powers had engaged during the decades leading up to the war. The American army numbered slightly more than 100,000 active duty soldiers in 1916 by that time the French, British, Russian and German armies had all fought battles in which more than 10,000 men had been killed in one day, and fought campaigns in which total casualties had exceeded 200,000. In other words, the entire United States Army, as it stood on the eve of intervention, could be wiped out in a single week of the fighting that had characterized the war to date. Americans felt an increasing need for a military that could command respect. As one editor put it, "The best thing about a large army and a strong navy is that they make it so much easier to say just what we want to say in our diplomatic correspondence." Berlin thus far had backed down and apologized when Washington was angry, thus boosting American self-confidence. America's rights and America's honor increasingly came into focus. The slogan "Peace" gave way to "Peace with Honor". The Army remained unpopular, however. A recruiter in Indianapolis noted that, "The people here do not take the right attitude towards army life as a career, and if a man joins from here he often tries to go out on the quiet". The Preparedness movement used its easy access to the mass media to demonstrate that the War Department had no plans, no equipment, little training, no reserve, a laughable National Guard, and a wholly inadequate organization for war. At a time when European generals were directing field armies that numbered several corps, on combat fronts that stretched for dozens or hundreds of miles, no active duty American general officer had commanded more than a division. Motion pictures like The Battle Cry of Peace (1915) depicted invasions of the American homeland that demanded action. [104]

Navy Edit

The readiness and capability of the U.S. Navy was a matter of controversy. The press at the time reported that the only thing the military was ready for was an enemy fleet attempting to seize New York harbor—at a time when the German battle fleet was penned up by the Royal Navy. The Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels was a journalist with pacifist leanings. [105] He had built up the educational resources of the Navy and made its Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island an essential experience for would-be admirals. However, he alienated the officer corps with his moralistic reforms, including no wine in the officers' mess, no hazing at the Naval Academy, and more chaplains and YMCAs. Daniels, as a newspaperman, knew the value of publicity. In 1915 he set up the Naval Consulting Board headed by Thomas Edison to obtain the advice and expertise of leading scientists, engineers, and industrialists. It popularized technology, naval expansion, and military preparedness, and was well covered in the media. [106] But according to Coletta he ignored the nation's strategic needs, and disdaining the advice of its experts, Daniels suspended meetings of the Joint Army and Navy Board for two years because it was giving unwelcome advice, chopped in half the General Board's recommendations for new ships, reduced the authority of officers in the Navy yards where ships were built and repaired, and ignored the administrative chaos in his department. Bradley Fiske, one of the most innovative admirals in American naval history, in 1914 was Daniels' top aide he recommended a reorganization that would prepare for war, but Daniels refused. Instead he replaced Fiske in 1915 and brought in for the new post of Chief of Naval Operations an unknown captain, William Benson. Chosen for his compliance, Benson proved to be a wily bureaucrat who was more interested in preparing the U.S. Navy for the possibility of an eventual showdown with Britain than an immediate one with Germany. Benson told Sims he "would as soon fight the British as the Germans". Proposals to send observers to Europe were blocked, leaving the Navy in the dark about the success of the German submarine campaign. Admiral William Sims charged after the war that in April 1917, only ten percent of the Navy's warships were fully manned the rest lacked 43% of their seamen. Light antisubmarine ships were few in number, as if Daniels had been unaware of the German submarine menace that had been the focus of foreign policy for two years. The Navy's only warfighting plan, the "Black Plan" assumed the Royal Navy did not exist and that German battleships were moving freely about the Atlantic and the Caribbean and threatening the Panama Canal. Daniels' tenure would have been even less successful save for the energetic efforts of Assistant Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt, who effectively ran the Department. [105] His most recent biographer concludes that, "it is true that Daniels had not prepared the navy for the war it would have to fight." [107]

By 1916 a new factor was emerging—a sense of national self-interest and American nationalism. The unbelievable casualty figures in Europe were sobering—two vast battles caused over one million casualties each. Clearly this war would be a decisive episode in the history of the world. Every effort to find a peaceful solution was frustrated.

Decision making Edit

Kendrick Clements claims bureaucratic decision-making was one of the main sources pushing the United States to declaring war on Germany and aligning itself with the Allies. He cites the State Department's demand that Germany's submarines obey outdated 18th century sailing laws as one of the first missteps by the United States bureaucracy regarding the war. By doing so, the United States had essentially given Germany the choice of whether or not the U.S. would enter the war. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan spent most of the fall of 1914 out of contact with the State Department, leaving the more conservative Robert Lansing with the ability to shape American foreign policy at the time. One of these decisions was made in response to British protests that the Germans were using U.S. radio towers to send messages to their warships. Immediately prior to the war starting in 1914, Britain had cut all cable communications leading out of Germany, including the trans-Atlantic cable. The US Government permitted German embassies to use the US cable lines for "proper" diplomatic business. Germany argued that usage of the towers was necessary to allow efficient contact between the U.S. and Germany. Lansing responded by requiring both sides to give the U.S. Navy copies of the messages they sent over the towers. The French and British were still able to use the cables, ensuring that Germany would be the only belligerent required to provide the U.S. with their messages. This and other seemingly small decisions made by Lansing during this time would eventually stack up, shifting American support towards the Allies. [108]

Zimmermann Telegram Edit

Once Germany had decided on unrestricted submarine warfare in January 1917 it tried to line up new allies, especially Mexico. Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign minister, sent the Zimmermann Telegram to Mexico on January 16, 1917. Zimmermann invited Mexico (knowing their resentment towards America since the 1848 Mexican Cession) to join in a war against the United States if the United States declared war on Germany. Germany promised to pay for Mexico's costs and to help it recover the territory forcibly annexed by the United States in 1848. These territories included the present day states of California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, about half of New Mexico and a quarter of Colorado. British intelligence intercepted and decoded the telegram and passed it to the Wilson administration. The White House would release it to the press on March 1. Anger grew further as the Germans began sinking American ships, even as isolationists in the Senate launched a filibuster to block legislation for arming American merchant ships to defend themselves. [109] [110]

Sinking of American merchant ships Edit

In early 1917, Kaiser Wilhelm II forced the issue. His declared decision on 31 January 1917 to target neutral shipping in a designated war-zone [111] became the immediate cause of the entry of the United States into the war. [112] Kaiser Wilhelm II sunk ten American merchant ships from February 3, 1917 through April 4, 1917 (but news about the schooner Marguerite didn't arrive til after Wilson signed the declaration of war). [113] Outraged public opinion now overwhelmingly supported Wilson when he asked Congress for a declaration of war on April 2, 1917. [114] It was voted approved by a Joint Session (not merely the Senate) on April 6, 1917 & Wilson signed it the following afternoon.

American-Registered ships sunk February 3, 1917-April 4, 1917 [115]

Ship name	Type	Date	US killed	Total killed	Location	Owner	Sunk by
Housatonic	Freighter	Feb 3	0	0	Off Scilly Isles	Housatonic Co.	U-53 Hans Rose
Lyman M. Law	Schooner	Feb 12	0	0	Off Sardinia	George A. Cardine Syndicate	U-35 Von Arnauld
Algonquin	Freighter	Mar 12	0	0	Off Scilly Isles	American Star Line	U-62 Ernst Hashagen
Vigilancia	Freighter	Mar 16	6	15	Off Plymouth	Gaston, Williams & Wigmore	U-70 Otto Wunsch
City of Memphis	Freighter	Mar 17	0	0	Off Ireland	Ocean Steamship Company	UC-66 Herbert Pustkuchen
Illinois	Tanker	Mar 17	0	0	Off Alderney	Texaco	UC-21 R. Saltzwedel
Healdton	Tanker	Mar 21	7	21	Off Holland	Standard Oil	Mine
Aztec	Freighter	Apr 1	11	28	Off Brest	Oriental Navigation	U-46 Leo Hillebrand
Marguerite	Schooner	Apr 4	0	0	Off Sardinia	William Chase	U-35 Von Arnauld
Missourian	Freighter	Apr 4	0	0	Mediterranean Sea	American-Hawaiian Line	U-52 Hans Walther

Historians such as Ernest R. May have approached the process of American entry into the war as a study in how public opinion changed radically in three years' time. In 1914 most Americans called for neutrality, seeing the war as a dreadful mistake and were determined to stay out. By 1917 the same public felt just as strongly that going to war was both necessary and wise. Military leaders had little to say during this debate, and military considerations were seldom raised. The decisive questions dealt with morality and visions of the future. The prevailing attitude was that America possessed a superior moral position as the only great nation devoted to the principles of freedom and democracy. By staying aloof from the squabbles of reactionary empires, it could preserve those ideals—sooner or later the rest of the world would come to appreciate and adopt them. In 1917 this very long-run program faced the severe danger that in the short run powerful forces adverse to democracy and freedom would triumph. Strong support for moralism came from religious leaders, women (led by Jane Addams), and from public figures like long-time Democratic leader William Jennings Bryan, the Secretary of State from 1913 to 1916. The most important moralist of all was President Woodrow Wilson—the man who dominated decision making so totally that the war has been labeled, from an American perspective, "Wilson's War". [116]

In 1917 Wilson won the support of most of the moralists by proclaiming "a war to make the world safe for democracy." If they truly believed in their ideals, he explained, now was the time to fight. The question then became whether Americans would fight for what they deeply believed in, and the answer turned out to be a resounding "Yes". [117] Some of this attitude was mobilised by the Spirit of 1917, which evoked the Spirit of '76.

Antiwar activists at the time and in the 1930s, alleged that beneath the veneer of moralism and idealism there must have been ulterior motives. Some suggested a conspiracy on the part of New York City bankers holding $3 billion of war loans to the Allies, or steel and chemical firms selling munitions to the Allies. [118] The interpretation was popular among left-wing Progressives (led by Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin) and among the "agrarian" wing of the Democratic party—including the chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee of the House. He strenuously opposed war, and when it came he rewrote the tax laws to make sure the rich paid the most. (In the 1930s neutrality laws were passed to prevent financial entanglements from dragging the nation into a war.) In 1915, Bryan thought that Wilson's pro-British sentiments had unduly influenced his policies, so he became the first Secretary of State ever to resign in protest. [119]

However, historian Harold C. Syrett argues that business supported neutrality. [120] Other historians state that the pro-war element was animated not by profit but by disgust with what Germany actually did, especially in Belgium, and the threat it represented to American ideals. Belgium kept the public's sympathy as the Germans executed civilians, [121] and English nurse Edith Cavell. American engineer Herbert Hoover led a private relief effort that won wide support. Compounding the Belgium atrocities were new weapons that Americans found repugnant, like poison gas and the aerial bombardment of innocent civilians as Zeppelins dropped bombs on London. [116] Even anti-war spokesmen did not claim that Germany was innocent, and pro-German scripts were poorly received. [122]

Randolph Bourne criticized the moralist philosophy claiming it was a justification by American intellectual and power elites, like President Wilson, for going to war unnecessarily. He argues that the push for war started with the Preparedness movement, fueled by big business. While big business would not push much further than Preparedness, benefitting the most from neutrality, the movement would eventually evolve into a war-cry, led by war-hawk intellectuals under the guise of moralism. Bourne believes elites knew full well what going to war would entail and the price in American lives it would cost. If American elites could portray the United States' role in the war as noble, they could convince the generally isolationist American public war would be acceptable. [123]

Above all, American attitudes towards Germany focused on the U-boats (submarines), which sank the Lusitania in 1915 and other passenger ships "without warning". [124] [125] [126] That appeared to Americans as an unacceptable challenge to America's rights as a neutral country, and as an unforgivable affront to humanity. After repeated diplomatic protests, Germany agreed to stop. But in 1917 the Germany military leadership decided that "military necessity" dictated the unrestricted use of their submarines. The Kaiser's advisors felt America was enormously powerful economically but too weak militarily to make a difference.

Twenty years after World War I ended, 70% of Americans polled believed that American participation in the war had been a mistake. [127]

Germany Edit

On April 2, 1917, Wilson asked a special joint session of Congress to declare war on the German Empire, stating, "We have no selfish ends to serve". [128] To make the conflict seem like a better idea, he painted the conflict idealistically, stating that the war would "make the world safe for democracy" and later that it would be a "war to end war". The United States had a moral responsibility to enter the war, Wilson proclaimed. The future of the world was being determined on the battlefield, and American national interest demanded a voice. Wilson's definition of the situation won wide acclaim, and, indeed, has shaped America's role in world and military affairs ever since. Wilson believed that if the Central Powers won, the consequences would be bad for the United States. Germany would have dominated the continent and perhaps would gain control of the seas as well. Latin America could well have fallen under Berlin's control. The dream of spreading democracy, liberalism, and independence would have been shattered. On the other hand, if the Allies had won without help, there was a danger they would carve up the world without regard to American commercial interests. They were already planning to use government subsidies, tariff walls, and controlled markets to counter the competition posed by American businessmen. The solution was a third route, a "peace without victory", according to Wilson. [129]

On April 6, 1917, Congress declared war. In the Senate, the resolution passed 82 to 6, with Senators Harry Lane, William J. Stone, James Vardaman, Asle Gronna, Robert M. La Follette, Sr., and George W. Norris voting against it. In the House, the declaration passed 373 to 50, with Claude Kitchin, a senior Democrat, notably opposing it. Another opponent was Jeannette Rankin, who alone voted against entry into both World War I and World War II. Nearly all of the opposition came from the West and the Midwest. [130]

Austria-Hungary Edit

The United States Senate, in a 74 to 0 vote, declared war on Austria-Hungary on December 7, 1917, citing Austria-Hungary's severing of diplomatic relations with the United States, its use of unrestricted submarine warfare and its alliance with Germany. [131] The declaration passed in the United States House of Representatives by a vote of 365 to 1. [132]

President Wilson also came under pressure from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and from former President Theodore Roosevelt, who demanded a declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria, as Germany's allies. President Wilson drafted a statement to Congress in December 1917 which said "I. recommend that Congress immediately declare the United States in a state of war with Austria-Hungary, with Turkey and with Bulgaria". However, after further consultations, the decision to go to war against Germany's other allies was postponed. [133]

MILITARY STALEMATE

The military forces of the Confederacy and the Union battled in 1861 and early 1862 without either side gaining the upper hand. The majority of military leaders on both sides had received the same military education and often knew one another personally, either from their time as students at West Point or as commanding officers in the Mexican-American War. This familiarity allowed them to anticipate each other’s strategies. Both sides believed in the use of concentrated armies charged with taking the capital city of the enemy. For the Union, this meant the capture of the Confederate capital in Richmond, Virginia, whereas Washington, DC, stood as the prize for Confederate forces. After hopes of a quick victory faded at Bull Run, the months dragged on without any major movement on either side ([link]).

General George B. McClellan, the general in chief of the army, responsible for overall control of Union land forces, proved especially reluctant to engage in battle with the Confederates. In direct command of the Army of the Potomac , the Union fighting force operating outside Washington, DC, McClellan believed, incorrectly, that Confederate forces were too strong to defeat and was reluctant to risk his troops in battle. His cautious nature made him popular with his men but not with the president or Congress. By 1862, however, both President Lincoln and the new Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had tired of waiting. The Union put forward a new effort to bolster troop strength, enlisting one million men to serve for three-year stints in the Army of the Potomac. In January 1862, Lincoln and Stanton ordered McClellan to invade the Confederacy with the goal of capturing Richmond.

To that end, General McClellan slowly moved 100,000 soldiers of the Army of the Potomac toward Richmond but stopped a few miles outside the city. As he did so, a Confederate force led by Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson moved north to take Washington, DC. To fend off Jackson’s attack, somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of McClellan’s soldiers, led by Major General Irvin McDowell, returned to defend the nation’s capital, a move that Jackson hoped would leave the remaining troops near Richmond more vulnerable. Having succeeding in drawing off a sizable portion of the Union force, he joined General Lee to launch an attack on McClellan’s remaining soldiers near Richmond. From June 25 to July 1, 1862, the two sides engaged in the brutal Seven Days Battles that killed or wounded almost twenty thousand Confederate and ten thousand Union soldiers. McClellan’s army finally returned north, having failed to take Richmond.

General Lee, flush from his success at keeping McClellan out of Richmond, tried to capitalize on the Union’s failure by taking the fighting northward. He moved his forces into northern Virginia, where, at the Second Battle of Bull Run, the Confederates again defeated the Union forces. Lee then pressed into Maryland, where his troops met the much larger Union forces near Sharpsburg, at Antietam Creek. The ensuing one-day battle on September 17, 1862, led to a tremendous loss of life. Although there are varying opinions about the total number of deaths, eight thousand soldiers were killed or wounded, more than on any other single day of combat. Once again, McClellan, mistakenly believing that the Confederate troops outnumbered his own, held back a significant portion of his forces. Lee withdrew from the field first, but McClellan, fearing he was outnumbered, refused to pursue him.

The Union army’s inability to destroy Lee’s army at Antietam made it clear to Lincoln that McClellan would never win the war, and the president was forced to seek a replacement. Lincoln wanted someone who could deliver a decisive Union victory. He also personally disliked McClellan, who referred to the president as a “baboon” and a “gorilla,” and constantly criticized his decisions. Lincoln chose General Ambrose E. Burnside to replace McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac, but Burnside’s efforts to push into Virginia failed in December 1862, as Confederates held their position at Fredericksburg and devastated Burnside’s forces with heavy artillery fire. The Union’s defeat at Fredericksburg harmed morale in the North but bolstered Confederate spirits. By the end of 1862, the Confederates were still holding their ground in Virginia. Burnside’s failure led Lincoln to make another change in leadership, and Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker took over command of the Army of the Potomac in January 1863.

General Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the West , operating in Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Mississippi River Valley, had been more successful. In the western campaign, the goal of both the Union and the Confederacy was to gain control of the major rivers in the west, especially the Mississippi. If the Union could control the Mississippi, the Confederacy would be split in two. The fighting in this campaign initially centered in Tennessee, where Union forces commanded by Grant pushed Confederate troops back and gained control of the state. The major battle in the western theater took place at Pittsburgh Landing, Tennessee, on April 6 and 7, 1862. Grant’s army was camped on the west side of the Tennessee River near a small log church called Shiloh, which gave the battle its name. On Sunday morning, April 6, Confederate forces under General Albert Sidney Johnston attacked Grant’s encampment with the goal of separating them from their supply line on the Tennessee River and driving them into the swamps on the river’s western side, where they could be destroyed. Union general William Tecumseh Sherman tried to rally the Union forces as Grant, who had been convalescing from an injured leg when the attack began and was unable to walk without crutches, called for reinforcements and tried to mount a defense. Many of Union troops fled in terror.

Unfortunately for the Confederates, Johnston was killed on the afternoon of the first day. Leadership of the Southern forces fell to General P. G. T. Beauregard, who ordered an assault at the end of that day. This assault was so desperate that one of the two attacking columns did not even have ammunition. Heavily reinforced Union forces counterattacked the next day, and the Confederate forces were routed. Grant had maintained the Union foothold in the western part of the Confederacy. The North could now concentrate on its efforts to gain control of the Mississippi River, splitting the Confederacy in two and depriving it of its most important water route.

Read a first-hand account from a Confederate soldier at the Battle at Shiloh, followed by the perspective of a Union soldier at the same battle.

In the spring and summer of 1862, the Union was successful in gaining control of part of the Mississippi River. In April 1862, the Union navy under Admiral David Farragut fought its way past the forts that guarded New Orleans and fired naval guns upon the below-sea-level city. When it became obvious that New Orleans could no longer be defended, Confederate major general Marshall Lovell sent his artillery upriver to Vicksburg, Mississippi. Armed civilians in New Orleans fought the Union forces that entered the city. They also destroyed ships and military supplies that might be used by the Union. Upriver, Union naval forces also bombarded Fort Pillow, forty miles from Memphis, Tennessee, a Southern industrial center and one of the largest cities in the Confederacy. On June 4, 1862, the Confederate defenders abandoned the fort. On June 6, Memphis fell to the Union after the ships defending it were destroyed.

BALANCE SHEET: THE UNION AND THE CONFEDERACY

As it became clearer that the Union would not be dealing with an easily quashed rebellion, the two sides assessed their strengths and weaknesses. At the onset on the war, in 1861 and 1862, they stood as relatively equal combatants.

The Confederates had the advantage of being able to wage a defensive war, rather than an offensive one. They had to protect and preserve their new boundaries, but they did not have to be the aggressors against the Union. The war would be fought primarily in the South, which gave the Confederates the advantages of the knowledge of the terrain and the support of the civilian population. Further, the vast coastline from Texas to Virginia offered ample opportunities to evade the Union blockade. And with the addition of the Upper South states, especially Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, the Confederacy gained a much larger share of natural resources and industrial might than the Deep South states could muster.

Still, the Confederacy had disadvantages. The South’s economy depended heavily on the export of cotton, but with the naval blockade, the flow of cotton to England, the region’s primary importer, came to an end. The blockade also made it difficult to import manufactured goods. Although the secession of the Upper South added some industrial assets to the Confederacy, overall, the South lacked substantive industry or an extensive railroad infrastructure to move men and supplies. To deal with the lack of commerce and the resulting lack of funds, the Confederate government began printing paper money, leading to runaway inflation. The advantage that came from fighting on home territory quickly turned to a disadvantage when Confederate armies were defeated and Union forces destroyed Southern farms and towns, and forced Southern civilians to take to the road as refugees. Finally, the population of the South stood at fewer than nine million people, of whom nearly four million were black slaves, compared to over twenty million residents in the North. These limited numbers became a major factor as the war dragged on and the death toll rose.

The Confederacy started printing paper money at an accelerated rate, causing runaway inflation and an economy in which formerly well-off people were unable to purchase food.

The Union side held many advantages as well. Its larger population, bolstered by continued immigration from Europe throughout the 1860s, gave it greater manpower reserves to draw upon. The North’s greater industrial capabilities and extensive railroad grid made it far better able to mobilize men and supplies for the war effort. The Industrial Revolution and the transportation revolution, beginning in the 1820s and continuing over the next several decades, had transformed the North. Throughout the war, the North was able to produce more war materials and move goods more quickly than the South. Furthermore, the farms of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the Old Northwest, and the prairie states supplied Northern civilians and Union troops with abundant food throughout the war. Food shortages and hungry civilians were common in the South, where the best land was devoted to raising cotton, but not in the North.

Unlike the South, however, which could hunker down to defend itself and needed to maintain relatively short supply lines, the North had to go forth and conquer. Union armies had to establish long supply lines, and Union soldiers had to fight on unfamiliar ground and contend with a hostile civilian population off the battlefield. Furthermore, to restore the Union—Lincoln’s overriding goal, in 1861—the United States, after defeating the Southern forces, would then need to pacify a conquered Confederacy, an area of over half a million square miles with nearly nine million residents. In short, although it had better resources and a larger population, the Union faced a daunting task against the well-positioned Confederacy.

BALANCE SHEET: THE UNION AND THE CONFEDERACY

As it became clearer that the Union would not be dealing with an easily quashed rebellion, the two sides assessed their strengths and weaknesses. At the onset on the war, in 1861 and 1862, they stood as relatively equal combatants.

The Confederates had the advantage of being able to wage a defensive war, rather than an offensive one. They had to protect and preserve their new boundaries, but they did not have to be the aggressors against the Union. The war would be fought primarily in the South, which gave the Confederates the advantages of the knowledge of the terrain and the support of the civilian population. Further, the vast coastline from Texas to Virginia offered ample opportunities to evade the Union blockade. And with the addition of the Upper South states, especially Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, the Confederacy gained a much larger share of natural resources and industrial might than the Deep South states could muster.

Still, the Confederacy had disadvantages. The South’s economy depended heavily on the export of cotton, but with the naval blockade, the flow of cotton to England, the region’s primary importer, came to an end. The blockade also made it difficult to import manufactured goods. Although the secession of the Upper South added some industrial assets to the Confederacy, overall, the South lacked substantive industry or an extensive railroad infrastructure to move men and supplies. To deal with the lack of commerce and the resulting lack of funds, the Confederate government began printing paper money, leading to runaway inflation (Figure). The advantage that came from fighting on home territory quickly turned to a disadvantage when Confederate armies were defeated and Union forces destroyed Southern farms and towns, and forced Southern civilians to take to the road as refugees. Finally, the population of the South stood at fewer than nine million people, of whom nearly four million were black slaves, compared to over twenty million residents in the North. These limited numbers became a major factor as the war dragged on and the death toll rose.

The Confederacy started printing paper money at an accelerated rate, causing runaway inflation and an economy in which formerly well-off people were unable to purchase food.

The Union side held many advantages as well. Its larger population, bolstered by continued immigration from Europe throughout the 1860s, gave it greater manpower reserves to draw upon. The North’s greater industrial capabilities and extensive railroad grid made it far better able to mobilize men and supplies for the war effort. The Industrial Revolution and the transportation revolution, beginning in the 1820s and continuing over the next several decades, had transformed the North. Throughout the war, the North was able to produce more war materials and move goods more quickly than the South. Furthermore, the farms of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the Old Northwest, and the prairie states supplied Northern civilians and Union troops with abundant food throughout the war. Food shortages and hungry civilians were common in the South, where the best land was devoted to raising cotton, but not in the North.

Unlike the South, however, which could hunker down to defend itself and needed to maintain relatively short supply lines, the North had to go forth and conquer. Union armies had to establish long supply lines, and Union soldiers had to fight on unfamiliar ground and contend with a hostile civilian population off the battlefield. Furthermore, to restore the Union—Lincoln’s overriding goal, in 1861—the United States, after defeating the Southern forces, would then need to pacify a conquered Confederacy, an area of over half a million square miles with nearly nine million residents. In short, although it had better resources and a larger population, the Union faced a daunting task against the well-positioned Confederacy.

President Wilson asks for declaration of war

On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asks Congress to send U.S. troops into battle against Germany in World War I. In his address to Congress that day, Wilson lamented it is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war. Four days later, Congress obliged and declared war on Germany.

In February and March 1917, Germany, embroiled in war with Britain, France and Russia, increased its attacks on neutral shipping in the Atlantic and offered, in the form of the so-called Zimmermann Telegram, to help Mexico regain Texas, New Mexico and Arizona if it would join Germany in a war against the United States. The public outcry against Germany buoyed President Wilson in asking Congress to abandon America’s neutrality to make the world safe for democracy.

Wilson went on to lead what was at the time the largest war-mobilization effort in the country’s history. At first, Wilson asked only for volunteer soldiers, but soon realized voluntary enlistment would not raise a sufficient number of troops and signed the Selective Service Act in May 1917. The Selective Service Act required men between 21 and 35 years of age to register for the draft, increasing the size of the army from 200,000 troops to 4 million by the end of the war. One of the infantrymen who volunteered for active duty was future President Harry S. Truman.

2 Answers 2

As you have pointed out, good stats are hard to find and all but impossible to interpret properly. With so many materials having dual applications, teasing out meaningful numbers from what data we have is challenging.

So . . . when primary numbers are insufficient, the clever historian looks for secondary indicators for which good numbers exist. Labor mobility is a good example - the more the economic change, the more labor turnover we would expect. Labor migration would be the ultimate expression of this phenomenon. On this question: Has there ever been a mass migration of factories comparable to the USSR's in WW2? , the point was brought up that American population shifts during WWII were comparable to those in the Soviet Union, which gives some indication of the magnitude of America's degree of industrial mobilization.

Another indication that you might research would be infrastructure changes - in particular, ports and air facilities. And here, what you really hope to find is evidence of infrastructure that was built and abandoned or allowed to decay. Of course, all your statistics should be measured against pre- and/or post-war activity.

A second-order effect that would be worth looking at is changes in college enrollments by major. Colleges tend to keep that sort of data around, and it should be a good proxy for economic restructuring.

I'm sure that others can come up with ideas in the same vein, and perhaps can direct you to actual numbers.

One measure of this in "positive" terms is labor force changes (the sum of civilian employment plus military). The NBER measured this for four countries between 1939-1945. The results can be summed up as follows:

1. U.S. Rose from 46.4 million in 1940 to 65.8 million in 1945.
   
2. Britain. Rose from 21.7 million in 1939 to 24.5 million in 1945.
   
3. Canada. Rose from 4.4 million in 1939 to 5.3 million in 1945.
   
4. Germany. Barely rose from 40.5 million in 1939 to 41.4 million in 1944.

Three countries are noteworthy. The Soviet Union is conspicuous by its absence from this study (no reliable data).

Germany's "employment" barely rose during the war, in absolute terms by only as much as Canada's, even though Germany's labor force was ten times larger. Labor was shifted out of the civilian sector to the military on almost a one to one basis during the war, meaning that the civilian labor force dropped nearly 40%. Germany had been the first out of the Depression and was closest to full employment by 1939, but failed to mobilize the labor force, notably women, during the war. Efficiency gains meant that "positive" production (in total) did not drop, but neither did the labor situation allow for as much growth as in other countries. Small wonder that Germany could not afford a long war.

The U.S. was the polar opposite case. It was the most depressed, and had the highest unemployment rate in 1939. Its labor force expansion of nearly 20 million was divided about 60-40 between military and civilian. The country put its unemployed men in uniform, and mobilized a large number of women, more in percentage and absolute terms than any other country, with the possible exception of the Soviet Union, not reported.

This article details how the wartime employment of American women started during the First World War (even though America joined the war late), and suggests that the same happened in Britain (to a lesser extent). The idea never "caught on" in Germany, which relegated women to "Kinder Kuche und Kirche,", and handicapped Germany in both World Wars.

Because of the British blockade, there was also a greater "negative" mobilization in Germany during World War I. For instance the supply of nitrates from Chile was cut off, and Germany had to scramble to produce them artifically from nitrogen in the air (the Haber process).There were also food shortages that led to starvation at the end of the war. With the notable exception of Russia, the allies did not suffer to the same degree. Until the very end of the war, Germany did not suffer as much in World War II because the Nazis had taken care to stockpile (and plunder) a lot of essential items.

15.3 1863: The Changing Nature of the War

Wars have their own logic they last far longer than anyone anticipates at the beginning of hostilities. As they drag on, the energy and zeal that marked the entry into warfare often wane, as losses increase and people on both sides suffer the tolls of war. The American Civil War is a case study of this characteristic of modern war.

Although Northerners and Southerners both anticipated that the battle between the Confederacy and the Union would be settled quickly, it soon became clear to all that there was no resolution in sight. The longer the war continued, the more it began to affect life in both the North and the South. Increased need for manpower, the issue of slavery, and the ongoing challenges of keeping the war effort going changed the way life on both sides as the conflict progressed.

MASS MOBILIZATION

By late 1862, the course of the war had changed to take on the characteristics of total war , in which armies attempt to demoralize the enemy by both striking military targets and disrupting their opponent’s ability to wage war through destruction of their resources. In this type of war, armies often make no distinction between civilian and military targets. Both the Union and Confederate forces moved toward total war, although neither side ever entirely abolished the distinction between military and civilian. Total war also requires governments to mobilize all resources, extending their reach into their citizens’ lives as never before. Another reality of war that became apparent in 1862 and beyond was the influence of combat on the size and scope of government. Both the Confederacy and the Union governments had to continue to grow in order to manage the logistics of recruiting men and maintaining, feeding, and equipping an army.

Confederate Mobilization

The Confederate government in Richmond, Virginia, exercised sweeping powers to ensure victory, in stark contradiction to the states’ rights sentiments held by many Southern leaders. The initial emotional outburst of enthusiasm for war in the Confederacy waned, and the Confederate government instituted a military draft in April 1862. Under the terms of the draft, all men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five would serve three years. The draft had a different effect on men of different socioeconomic classes. One loophole permitted men to hire substitutes instead of serving in the Confederate army. This provision favored the wealthy over the poor, and led to much resentment and resistance. Exercising its power over the states, the Confederate Congress denied state efforts to circumvent the draft.

In order to fund the war, the Confederate government also took over the South’s economy. The government ran Southern industry and built substantial transportation and industrial infrastructure to make the weapons of war. Over the objections of slaveholders, it impressed enslaved people, seizing these enslaved workers from their owners and forcing them to work on fortifications and rail lines. Concerned about the resistance to and unhappiness with the government measures, in 1862, the Confederate Congress gave President Davis the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus , the right of those arrested to be brought before a judge or court to determine whether there is cause to hold the prisoner. With a stated goal of bolstering national security in the fledgling republic, this change meant that the Confederacy could arrest and detain indefinitely any suspected enemy without giving a reason. This growth of the Confederate central government stood as a glaring contradiction to the earlier states’ rights argument of pro-Confederate advocates.

The war efforts were costing the new nation dearly. Nevertheless, the Confederate Congress heeded the pleas of wealthy plantation owners and refused to place a tax on enslaved people or cotton, despite the Confederacy’s desperate need for the revenue that such a tax would have raised. Instead, the Confederacy drafted a taxation plan that kept the Southern elite happy but in no way met the needs of the war. The government also resorted to printing immense amounts of paper money, which quickly led to runaway inflation. Food prices soared, and poor, White Southerners faced starvation. In April 1863, thousands of hungry people rioted in Richmond, Virginia (Figure 15.10). Many of the rioters were mothers who could not feed their children. The riot ended when President Davis threatened to have Confederate forces open fire on the crowds.

One of the reasons that the Confederacy was so economically devastated was its ill-advised gamble that cotton sales would continue during the war. The government had high hopes that Great Britain and France, which both used cotton as the raw material in their textile mills, would ensure the South’s economic strength—and therefore victory in the war—by continuing to buy. Furthermore, the Confederate government hoped that Great Britain and France would make loans to their new nation in order to ensure the continued flow of raw materials. These hopes were never realized. Great Britain in particular did not wish to risk war with the United States, which would have meant the invasion of Canada. The United States was also a major source of grain for Britain and an important purchaser of British goods. Furthermore, the blockade made Southern trade with Europe difficult. Instead, Great Britain, the major consumer of American cotton, found alternate sources in India and Egypt, leaving the South without the income or alliance it had anticipated.

Dissent within the Confederacy also affected the South’s ability to fight the war. Confederate politicians disagreed over the amount of power that the central government should be allowed to exercise. Many states’ rights advocates, who favored a weak central government and supported the sovereignty of individual states, resented President Davis’s efforts to conscript troops, impose taxation to pay for the war, and requisition necessary resources. Governors in the Confederate states often proved reluctant to provide supplies or troops for the use of the Confederate government. Even Jefferson Davis’s vice president Alexander Stephens opposed conscription, the seizure of enslaved property to work for the Confederacy, and suspension of habeas corpus. Class divisions also divided Confederates. Poor White people resented the ability of wealthy slaveholders to excuse themselves from military service. Racial tensions plagued the South as well. On those occasions when free Black people volunteered to serve in the Confederate army, they were turned away, and enslaved African Americans were regarded with fear and suspicion, as White people whispered among themselves about the possibility of insurrections by enslaved people.

Union Mobilization

Mobilization for war proved to be easier in the North than it was in the South. During the war, the federal government in Washington, DC, like its Southern counterpart, undertook a wide range of efforts to ensure its victory over the Confederacy. To fund the war effort and finance the expansion of Union infrastructure, Republicans in Congress drastically expanded government activism, impacting citizens’ everyday lives through measures such as new types of taxation. The government also contracted with major suppliers of food, weapons, and other needed materials. Virtually every sector of the Northern economy became linked to the war effort.

In keeping with their longstanding objective of keeping slavery out of the newly settled western territories, the Republicans in Congress (the dominant party) passed several measures in 1862. First, the Homestead Act provided generous inducements for Northerners to relocate and farm in the West. Settlers could lay claim to 160 acres of federal land by residing on the property for five years and improving it. The act not only motivated free-labor farmers to move west, but it also aimed to increase agricultural output for the war effort. The federal government also turned its attention to creating a transcontinental railroad to facilitate the movement of people and goods across the country. Congress chartered two companies, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, and provided generous funds for these two businesses to connect the country by rail.

The Republican emphasis on free labor, rather than enslaved labor, also influenced the 1862 Land Grant College Act, commonly known as the Morrill Act after its author, Vermont Republican senator Justin Smith Morrill. The measure provided for the creation of agricultural colleges, funded through federal grants, to teach the latest agricultural techniques. Each state in the Union would be granted thirty thousand acres of federal land for the use of these institutions of higher education.

Congress paid for the war using several strategies. They levied a tax on the income of the wealthy, as well as a tax on all inheritances. They also put high tariffs in place. Finally, they passed two National Bank Acts, one in 1863 and one in 1864, calling on the U.S. Treasury to issue war bonds and on Union banks to buy the bonds. A Union campaign to convince individuals to buy the bonds helped increase sales. The Republicans also passed the Legal Tender Act of 1862, calling for paper money—known as greenbacks —to be printed Figure 15.11). Some $150 million worth of greenbacks became legal tender, and the Northern economy boomed, although high inflation also resulted.

Like the Confederacy, the Union turned to conscription to provide the troops needed for the war. In March 1863, Congress passed the Enrollment Act, requiring all unmarried men between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, and all married men between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five—including immigrants who had filed for citizenship—to register with the Union to fight in the Civil War. All who registered were subject to military service, and draftees were selected by a lottery system (Figure 15.12). As in the South, a loophole in the law allowed individuals to hire substitutes if they could afford it. Others could avoid enlistment by paying $300 to the federal government. In keeping with the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, African Americans were not citizens and were therefore exempt from the draft.

Like the Confederacy, the Union also took the step of suspending habeas corpus rights, so those suspected of pro-Confederate sympathies could be arrested and held without being given the reason. Lincoln had selectively suspended the writ of habeas corpus in the slave state of Maryland, home to many Confederate sympathizers, in 1861 and 1862, in an effort to ensure that the Union capital would be safe. In March 1863, he signed into law the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, giving him the power to detain suspected Confederate operatives throughout the Union. The Lincoln administration also closed down three hundred newspapers as a national security measure during the war.

In both the North and the South, the Civil War dramatically increased the power of the belligerent governments. Breaking all past precedents in American history, both the Confederacy and the Union employed the power of their central governments to mobilize resources and citizens.

Women’s Mobilization

As men on both sides mobilized for the war, so did women. In both the North and the South, women were forced to take over farms and businesses abandoned by their husbands as they left for war. Women organized themselves into ladies’ aid societies to sew uniforms, knit socks, and raise money to purchase necessities for the troops. In the South, women took wounded soldiers into their homes to nurse. In the North, women volunteered for the United States Sanitary Commission, which formed in June 1861. They inspected military camps with the goal of improving cleanliness and reducing the number of soldiers who died from disease, the most common cause of death in the war. They also raised money to buy medical supplies and helped with the injured. Other women found jobs in the Union army as cooks and laundresses. Thousands volunteered to care for the sick and wounded in response to a call by reformer Dorothea Dix, who was placed in charge of the Union army’s nurses. According to rumor, Dix sought respectable women over the age of thirty who were “plain almost to repulsion in dress” and thus could be trusted not to form romantic liaisons with soldiers. Women on both sides also acted as spies and, disguised as men, engaged in combat.

EMANCIPATION

Early in the war, President Lincoln approached the issue of slavery cautiously. While he disapproved of slavery personally, he did not believe that he had the authority to abolish it. Furthermore, he feared that making the abolition of slavery an objective of the war would cause the border slave states to join the Confederacy. His one objective in 1861 and 1862 was to restore the Union.

Defining American

Lincoln’s Evolving Thoughts on Slavery

President Lincoln wrote the following letter to newspaper editor Horace Greeley on August 22, 1862. In it, Lincoln states his position on slavery, which is notable for being a middle-of-the-road stance. Lincoln’s later public speeches on the issue take the more strident antislavery tone for which he is remembered.

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save Slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy Slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about Slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union, and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views. I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men, everywhere, could be free. Yours, A. LINCOLN.

How would you characterize Lincoln’s public position in August 1862? What was he prepared to do for enslaved people, and under what conditions?

Since the beginning of the war, thousands of enslaved people had fled to the safety of Union lines. In May 1861, Union general Benjamin Butler and others labeled these refugees from slavery contrabands . Butler reasoned that since Southern states had left the United States, he was not obliged to follow federal fugitive slave laws. Escaped enslaved people who made it through the Union lines were shielded by the U.S. military and not returned to slavery. The intent was not only to assist them but also to deprive the South of a valuable source of manpower.

Congress began to define the status of formerly enslaved people in 1861 and 1862. In August 1861, legislators approved the Confiscation Act of 1861, empowering the Union to seize property, including the enslaved, used by the Confederacy. The Republican-dominated Congress took additional steps, abolishing slavery in Washington, DC, in April 1862. Congress passed a second Confiscation Act in July 1862, which extended freedom to escaped enslaved people and those captured by Union armies. In that month, Congress also addressed the issue of slavery in the West, banning the practice in the territories. This federal law made the 1846 Wilmot Proviso and the dreams of the Free-Soil Party a reality. However, even as the Union government took steps to aid enslaved individuals and to limit the practice of slavery, it passed no measure to address the institution of slavery as a whole.

Lincoln moved slowly and cautiously on the issue of abolition. His primary concern was the cohesion of the Union and the bringing of the Southern states back into the fold. However, as the war dragged on and many thousands of contrabands made their way north, Republicans in Congress continued to call for the end of slavery. Throughout his political career, Lincoln’s plans for formerly enslaved people had been to send them to Liberia. As late as August 1862, he had hoped to interest African Americans in building a colony for formerly enslaved people in Central America, an idea that found favor neither with Black leaders nor with abolitionists, and thus was abandoned by Lincoln. Responding to Congressional demands for an end to slavery, Lincoln presented an ultimatum to the Confederates on September 22, 1862, shortly after the Confederate retreat at Antietam. He gave the Confederate states until January 1, 1863, to rejoin the Union. If they did, slavery would continue in the slave states. If they refused to rejoin, however, the war would continue and all of the enslaved would be freed at its conclusion. The Confederacy took no action. It had committed itself to maintaining its independence and had no interest in the president’s ultimatum.

On January 1, 1863, Lincoln made good on his promise and signed the Emancipation Proclamation . It stated “That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” The proclamation did not immediately free the those enslaved in the Confederate states. Although they were in rebellion against the United States, the lack of the Union army’s presence in such areas meant that the president’s directive could not be enforced. The proclamation also did not free those enslaved in the border states, because these states were not, by definition, in rebellion. Lincoln relied on his powers as commander-in-chief in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. He knew the proclamation could be easily challenged in court, but by excluding the territories still outside his control, slaveholders and slave governments could not sue him. Moreover, slave states in the Union, such as Kentucky, could not sue because the proclamation did not apply to them. Slaveholders in Kentucky knew full well that if the institution were abolished throughout the South, it would not survive in a handful of border territories. Despite the limits of the proclamation, Lincoln dramatically shifted the objective of the war increasingly toward ending slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation became a monumental step forward on the road to changing the character of the United States.

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Read through the full text of the Emancipation Proclamation at the National Archives website.

The proclamation generated quick and dramatic reactions. The news created euphoria among enslaved people, as it signaled the eventual end of their bondage. Predictably, Confederate leaders raged against the proclamation, reinforcing their commitment to fight to maintain slavery, the foundation of the Confederacy. In the North, opinions split widely on the issue. Abolitionists praised Lincoln’s actions, which they saw as the fulfillment of their long campaign to strike down an immoral institution. But other Northerners, especially Irish, working-class, urban dwellers loyal to the Democratic Party and others with racist beliefs, hated the new goal of emancipation and found the idea of freed slaves repugnant. At its core, much of this racism had an economic foundation: Many Northerners feared competing with emancipated people for scarce jobs.

In New York City, the Emancipation Proclamation, combined with unhappiness over the Union draft, which began in March 1863, fanned the flames of White racism. Many New Yorkers supported the Confederacy for business reasons, and, in 1861, the city’s mayor actually suggested that New York City leave the Union. On July 13, 1863, two days after the first draft lottery took place, this racial hatred erupted into violence. A volunteer fire company whose commander had been drafted initiated a riot, and the violence spread quickly across the city. The rioters chose targets associated either with the Union army or with African Americans. An armory was destroyed, as was a Brooks Brothers’ store, which supplied uniforms to the army. White mobs attacked and killed Black New Yorkers and destroyed an African American orphanage (Figure 15.13). On the fourth day of the riots, federal troops dispatched by Lincoln arrived in the city and ended the violence. Millions of dollars in property had been destroyed. More than one hundred people died, approximately one thousand were left injured, and about one-fifth of the city’s African American population fled New York in fear.

UNION ADVANCES

The war in the west continued in favor of the North in 1863. At the start of the year, Union forces controlled much of the Mississippi River. In the spring and summer of 1862, they had captured New Orleans—the most important port in the Confederacy, through which cotton harvested from all the Southern states was exported—and Memphis. Grant had then attempted to capture Vicksburg, Mississippi, a commercial center on the bluffs above the Mississippi River. Once Vicksburg fell, the Union would have won complete control over the river. A military bombardment that summer failed to force a Confederate surrender. An assault by land forces also failed in December 1862.

In April 1863, the Union began a final attempt to capture Vicksburg. On July 3, after more than a month of a Union siege, during which Vicksburg’s residents hid in caves to protect themselves from the bombardment and ate their pets to stay alive, Grant finally achieved his objective. The trapped Confederate forces surrendered. The Union had succeeded in capturing Vicksburg and splitting the Confederacy (Figure 15.14). This victory inflicted a serious blow to the Southern war effort.

As Grant and his forces pounded Vicksburg, Confederate strategists, at the urging of General Lee, who had defeated a larger Union army at Chancellorsville, Virginia, in May 1863, decided on a bold plan to invade the North. Leaders hoped this invasion would force the Union to send troops engaged in the Vicksburg campaign east, thus weakening their power over the Mississippi. Further, they hoped the aggressive action of pushing north would weaken the Union’s resolve to fight. Lee also hoped that a significant Confederate victory in the North would convince Great Britain and France to extend support to Jefferson Davis’s government and encourage the North to negotiate peace.

Beginning in June 1863, General Lee began to move the Army of Northern Virginia north through Maryland. The Union army—the Army of the Potomac—traveled east to end up alongside the Confederate forces. The two armies met at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where Confederate forces had gone to secure supplies. The resulting battle lasted three days, July 1–3 (Figure 15.15) and remains the biggest and costliest battle ever fought in North America. The climax of the Battle of Gettysburg occurred on the third day. In the morning, after a fight lasting several hours, Union forces fought back a Confederate attack on Culp’s Hill, one of the Union’s defensive positions. To regain a perceived advantage and secure victory, Lee ordered a frontal assault, known as Pickett’s Charge (for Confederate general George Pickett), against the center of the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge. Approximately fifteen thousand Confederate soldiers took part, and more than half lost their lives, as they advanced nearly a mile across an open field to attack the entrenched Union forces. In all, more than a third of the Army of Northern Virginia had been lost, and on the evening of July 4, Lee and his men slipped away in the rain. General George Meade did not pursue them. Both sides suffered staggering losses. Total casualties numbered around twenty-three thousand for the Union and some twenty-eight thousand among the Confederates. With its defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, both on the same day, the Confederacy lost its momentum. The tide had turned in favor of the Union in both the east and the west.

Following the Battle of Gettysburg, the bodies of those who had fallen were hastily buried. Attorney David Wills, a resident of Gettysburg, campaigned for the creation of a national cemetery on the site of the battlefield, and the governor of Pennsylvania tasked him with creating it. President Lincoln was invited to attend the cemetery’s dedication. After the featured orator had delivered a two-hour speech, Lincoln addressed the crowd for several minutes. In his speech, known as the Gettysburg Address , which he had finished writing while a guest in David Wills’ home the day before the dedication, Lincoln invoked the Founding Fathers and the spirit of the American Revolution. The Union soldiers who had died at Gettysburg, he proclaimed, had died not only to preserve the Union, but also to guarantee freedom and equality for all.

Defining American

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

Several months after the battle at Gettysburg, Lincoln traveled to Pennsylvania and, speaking to an audience at the dedication of the new Soldiers’ National Ceremony near the site of the battle, he delivered his now-famous Gettysburg Address to commemorate the turning point of the war and the soldiers whose sacrifices had made it possible. The two-minute speech was politely received at the time, although press reactions split along party lines. Upon receiving a letter of congratulations from Massachusetts politician and orator William Everett, whose speech at the ceremony had lasted for two hours, Lincoln said he was glad to know that his brief address, now virtually immortal, was not “a total failure.”

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. It is for us the living . . . to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
—Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863

What did Lincoln mean by “a new birth of freedom”? What did he mean when he said “a government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”?

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Acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns has created a documentary about a small boys’ school in Vermont where students memorize the Gettysburg Address. It explores the value the address has in these boys’ lives, and why the words still matter.

Watch the video: Mobilization for War Presentation