Confederate States Army - Prelude

Prelude

In the United States Presidential election of 1860, the Republican Party, with Abraham Lincoln as its Presidential candidate, campaigned against the expansion of slavery in the United States. The Democratic Party divided over this issue and split into Southern and Northern factions with each fielding a candidate, John C. Breckinridge and Stephen A. Douglas, respectively. A fourth candidate, Senator John Bell of Tennessee, was fielded by the Constitutional Union Party, mostly former Whigs and Know Nothings from the Upper South who favored the status quo. Lincoln won the election without winning the electoral votes in a single southern state. Lincoln did not propose federal laws against slavery where it already existed, but his general view of the matter was stated in his 1858 House Divided Speech, in which he had expressed a desire to "arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction." Lincoln proposed no immediate action against slavery during his campaign or upon his election. Nonetheless, the complex issue of slavery, as well as competing understandings of federalism, party politics, expansionism, sectionalism and social structures, tariffs, economics and general values brought to a head by Lincoln's election stirred violent passions and fears of abolition of slavery in the southern states. These factors soon led to the American Civil War.

Starting with South Carolina on December 20, 1860, seven Deep South states that permitted slavery purported to secede from the Union by February 1861. In addition to South Carolina, these States included Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. President James Buchanan stated that secession was unconstitutional and wrong but that the United States Constitution did not give the President or the United States Congress the power to stop it. By the time Lincoln took office as President on March 4, 1861, the seceding states had formed the Confederate States of America. These states soon began to seize federal property, including most federal forts, within their borders. Lincoln was determined to hold the forts remaining under federal control when he took office, including Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, in furtherance of the overall goal of preserving the union of all the states. He considered secession to be illegal, as did Buchanan, but he also thought it constituted rebellion against the duly constituted government of the United States which he had the authority and the duty to oppose and suppress. By the time Lincoln was sworn in as President, the incompatible positions of the parties were fixed and irreconcilable and the Provisional Confederate Congress had authorized the organization of a large Provisional Army of the Confederate States (PACS). Civil war had become inevitable.

Under orders from Confederate States President Jefferson Davis, troops controlled by the Confederate government under the command of General P. G. T. Beauregard bombarded Fort Sumter on April 12–13, 1861, forcing its capitulation on April 14, 1861 before it could be reinforced and resupplied. Northerners, including Westerners, rallied behind Lincoln's call on April 15, 1861 for all the states to send troops to recapture the forts from the secessionists, to put down the rebellion and to preserve the Union intact. Four states in the upper South (Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina and Virginia) also permitted slavery but previously had rejected overtures to join the Confederacy. These states now refused Lincoln's call to send forces against their neighbor slave states, promptly declared their secession from the United States and joined the Confederate States. After the fall of Fort Sumter and the secession of the Upper South states, both the United States and the Confederate States began in earnest to raise large, mostly volunteer, armies with the objectives of putting down the rebellion and preserving the union, on the one hand, or of establishing independence from the United States, on the other hand.