Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM

The War of Secession

April 1861 – The provisional Union Congress adopts an economic program modelled on John Calhouns 1816 program. This includes primarily: 1) Suspension of banks and mobilization of specie to loan against and pay interest on government bonds with, 2) Entering the produce market in relief of the planters, and to build a staple of produce to sell abroad, 3) Taxes on slaves and property, 4) Creation of a paid corps of tax assessors, 5) A program of foreign loan-taking and blockade-breaking, 6) Dissemination of presidential messages outlining the dangers threatening and the policies needed to counteract these.

Far Western Theatre, February-May 1862 – Confederate western offensive in Confederate Arizona Territory, Union New Mexico, Colorado and Nebraska territories. Confederate victories at Valverde, Glorietta Pass and Fort Lyon cut off Union overland connections with the Pacific States. Sioux and Mormon rebellions aided. Union defeats elsewhere mean the confederates manage to keep their own. Out west, Confederate forces manage to hold Tucson in the face of Union attacks.

Hampton Roads, March 1862 - CSS Virginia disables the Union monitor USS Monitor and sinks or takes captive five Union frigates in the Battle of Hampton Roads. Hampton News is occupied in the meantime, depriving the northern end of the Union blockade of its base. Confederate gunboats can pass out to wreak havoc, and blockade-breakers can steam in and out for a time. After a few weeks, another Union ironclad arrives, however, keeping the Virginia under control. As a result:

Transmississippi theatre, March-April 1862 – Major General Earl van Dorn drowns in a stream, leaving general Sterling Price in command of the army of the army of the West. The Confederates beat the Union Army of the South West in the battle of Pea Ridge, driving them out of Arkansas and taking Springfield in southern Missouri.

Eastern Theatre, March-July 1862 – The Peninsula campaign. Ends when Robert E Lee takes over command of the Army of Virginia, forcing the Union soldiers back and into evacuation.

Louisiana, April 1862 – The success of the CSS Virginia leads to prompt completion of the ironclad CSS Louisiana. She aids greatly in repelling the failed Union expedition against New Orleans by admiral Farragut, sinking 2 mortar boats and some 5 Union frigates in the process. Farragut dies when his ship blows up, and the expedition is aborted.

Western Theatre, April-May 1862 – The Union invasion up the Tennessee River ends in defeat in the Battle of Shiloh. General William T. Sherman killed along with some 7.000 other Union troops, while Major General Ulysses S. Grant is taken prisoner with most of the rest of the Army of the Tennessee, some 28.000 men in all. The Union Army of the Ohio under Major General Don Carlos Buell retreats back towards Nashville, but is beaten in a hard-fought battle at Franklin in May. The Confederates retake Nashville and move into southern Kentucky, installing the Confederate state government in Bowling Green.

Trans-Mississippi Theatre, July-October 1862 – Confederate campaign into central Missouri

Western Theatre, August-October 1862 – A confederate army under Bragg invades Kentucky, beats a Union army at Bardstown, and takes Louisville. Except for far-western Kentucky, the entire state is now in southern hands.

Eastern Theatre, September-October 1862 – The army of Northern Virginia captures 12.000 Union soldiers at Harpers Ferry, invades Maryland and moves up through the Cumberland Valley into Pennsylvania, burning the railroad bridges along the Susqehanna. There is a battle with McClellands Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg, which ends in a spectacular victory for the south. The Army of the Potomac for all purposes disintegrates, leaving the way open for the confederates to take Baltimore, threaten Washington, and send the cavalry raiding towards it. Under these circumstances, the northern congressional elections take place. They return a peace-democrat majority.

Eastern Theatre, November 1862 – A cavalry raid catches Lincoln in the open while he inspects the defenses at Fort Stephens. Running back to his coach, he is hit in the back of the head. He is dead within the hour. As the Union defenses of Washington collapse in the north, Jeb Stuarts cavalry streams through the hole to ransack the town. Burning among others the War Department and Secret Service Bureau, they take away the gold reserves of the Union as they depart. A week later, newly sworn-in president Hamlin, now relocated to Pittsburgh, as Washington has fallen, is presented by two offers: one of mediation presented by the ambassadors of Great Britain and France, accompanied by the threat of official recognition of the Confederacy, and one of peace negotiations presented by Confederate vice president stevens. Believing he can pull through, he refuses both. A few weeks later, the Confederacy is officially recognized by France and Great Britain, and the two powers begin convoying their merchantmen to and from southern harbors.

As there is now a peace-friendly congress coming in, everybody knows the war is over. President Hamlin also knows, that that congress will not be seated and sworn in until December of next year. As a consequence, he decides to stick it out and see whether he cant salvage the Union anyway.

He manages to arm twist a number of initiatives through the still-Republican congress, most notably freeing all slaves in Confederate-held territory (essentially all slave states safe northern and eastern Missouri, far-western Kentucky, eastern Maryland and Delaware), suspending Habeas Corpus, imposing a tariff on the export of grain to Great Britain and France and speeding up the draft. Western Virginia is also accepted into the Union as a state. Then he sends the Army of Pennsylvania, to a large degree reconstructed by pulling troops from the west, to retake Washington.

Eastern Theatre January-June 1863 – In a series of back-and-forth campaigns, the Union and confederate armies fight a series of battles that, while won by one or the other, are essentially indecisive, in that the south retains control over Washington and is able to bring enough supplies to keep it supplied. Instead, southern Pennsylvania and western Maryland get a taste of what it means to have a war going on in the neighbourhood. The back-and-forth ends in the spectacularly casualty-rich 2nd Gettysburg, with the Union army back across the Susquehanna, and Confederate cavalry raiding into Delaware and eastern Maryland.

Western Theatre February-May 1863 – With many union troops pulled out of the line and sent east, and with the approaching end of the war making the number of new recruits dwindle, the confederates use the opportunity presented to launch an offensive into what remains of occupied Tennessee and Kentucky, and southern Illinois. With cavalry raids into Indiana and Ohio drawing away Union troops, the confederates manage to bring into their possession the Paducah-Columbus-Cairo triangle, finally driving unionist troops out of Kentucky. Of the Confederate States, only Virginia and Missouri now have parts of their territories occupied.

Far Western Theatre, May-July 1863 – An initial Union push delivers the Confederates in the far West a defeat in the battle of Scotts Bluff, Nebraska Territory, thus reopening the eastern end of the Oregon Trail (the mormon Nauvoo Legion is still in possession of Forts Hall and Bridger), but ends with the defeat at Greeley, Colorado Territory. Likewise, a column of Californian troops are defeated and forced to retreat in the battle of Raft River. The Oregon Trail remains shut. In the south, incessant confederate cavalry raiding the lines of supply prevent the Californian column approaching Tucson from even making a determined attack. Likewise, a confederate column ranges south, into the Sonora province of a Mexico in turmoil, where it takes the port of Guaymas, thus opening up for blockade breaking ships coming in from the Pacific.

It is during the summer that things begin to unhinge in the north. A combination of the draft, taxes, inflation because of the steady production of greenbacks, arrests of war-opponents, the grain tariff making life hard for the farmers, and the fighting of a war to no end combines to produce a spectacular series of riots across the Union, underground agitation by pro-peace elements, and even the formation of posses of up to several hundred Copperhead activists, who threaten, beat, and occasionally kill pro-war agitators and draft board memebers. Only radicalized by the heavy-handed approach of the authorities, who arrest, imprison and exile any Copperheads they can lay their hands on, the summer of discontent reaches its climax in the twin outbreaks in Chicago and New York. In New York, it is primarily a revolt by poor Irishmen against the draft and the competition from poor negroes, but also an attack on the moneyed people that run the city. After almost a week of rioting, that produces some 200 dead, regular troops (the democratic leadership of the state refuses to use the militia) are brought in to restore order. In Chicago, it is a far more sinister plot by southern sacred agents and sympathizers, that sets some 4.000 confederate prisoners of war free and arms them with weapons from a local armory, then occupies the city. When a general uprising against the administration fails to occur as the confederate agents expect, most of the former prisoners manage to cobble together an armada of assorted boats and sails to Canada and internment along with a substantial number of southern sympathizers.

Though weathering the dissent in the Union, Hamlin knows that the end is approaching, as is the financing of the war. Bond sales have dried up, nobody wants to loan the government any more money for a war that is coming to an end, revenues from tariffs and taxes cant plug the holes, and the printing of greenbacks is creating an inflation that, while keeping the western farmers from open rebellion, creates considerable turmoil among the cityfolk, and makes the payments to drafted soldiers more of joke by the day, creating widespread draft evasion. As a result, everything is thrown into an all-out offensive towards regaining Washington, stripping all other fronts from the units needed to achieve this end, while the commanders in other theatres are to hold the line as good as possible.

It is even briefly discussed to broaden the war to make the people in the Union close ranks, maybe lure the southern states back into the Union, and else open up for a full Union assault upon the French/British blockade-breaking. Certainly, the prospects for such a move look better now than at any time prior, with tensions in Europe between Prussia and Russia on one side, and France and Great Britain on the other. There have even been cautious Russian feelers about acting in unison, and Russian naval squadrons have been dispatched to Union harbors in the Pacific and Atlantic. Ultimately, it is decided that the Union hardly needs another war to fight, with the current one being enough as it is. So an all-out push in the east it is.

Western theatre, August-December 1863 – The late summer and fall of 1863 sees a protracted series of cavalry raids into southern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, just to keep the Union off-balance and tie down troops. In the process, they tear up railroad track and destroy telegraph wires, delaying the intervention of regular troops and thus creating the general impression that the Union is more concerned with eastern problems than western ones.

TransMississippi theatre, August-November – Under Carl Schurz, mainly German union troops fight delaying actions against the advancing confederate Missourian troops, maintaining the region around Saint Louis as Union territory to begin with. By October, he is ordered to give up more of his troops, and is pushed back across the Mississippi by superior confederate numbers. Saint Louis is lost, and thousands of western Missouri's German population flee to Illinois.

Eastern Theatre, August-December 1863 - Under Ulysses S Grant (liberated from southern captivity by a prisoner swap during the spring), the Army of Pennsylvania goes on to pound the confederate troops in southern Pennsylvania, western Maryland and northern Virginia. Far from all battles are victories, but the casualties induced upon the confederates are enough to throw them back into Virginia and lay siege to Washington by early October. The siege proves even costlier, though. A southern sympathizer in the Union has sold the rights to his revolutionary new rapid-fire weapon, named after himself as the Gatling gun, to the confederates, and it is at Washington that they see their first widespread use. Coupled with widespread minefields – a southern specialty – and the normal array of weaponry at the disposal of a defending force, the storm on forts Stevens, Slocum and Totten in mid-November is a costly failure, forcing another try to be postponed to early December. In a fit of rage, Grant blames it on the Jewish merchants doing all they can to earn money on the back of the (now renamed) Army of Maryland, and by special order banishes all Jews from his department.

Embarrassed by both his generals defeat in front of Washington (further compounded by a rebellion that breaks out in eastern Maryland) and by the anti-Semitic order, president Hamlin dismisses Ulysses S. Grant and quickly replaces him with Major General Franz Sigel, ignoring pleas by Grant to have a final go at the Washington defenses. By early December, congress convenes and forces and end to union warfare. A southern offer of peace negotiations is accepted, and these do start early in 1864, but drag out endlessly, because president Hamlen refuses to agree to the peace treaty that is finally agreed upon. As a consequence, congress keeps prolonging its session to make sure he does not restart the war once they have returned home to their states, and they thus have all the time on their hands that they could wish for, in which to remove every semblance of the Republicans (or Unionists) ever having been in power. The building of the trans-continental railroad (anyhow stalled because of lack of funds) is thus stopped, tariffs lowered and taxes abolished. When Hamlin still wont budge, the democratic-controlled states begin a move to push through the 13th amendment (already ratified by Illinois in 1861), banning the Union from interfering in the domestic institution of the member states:

ARTICLE THIRTEEN, No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State

Though designed pre-war to console the southern slaveowners, the democrats are now using it to protect states´ rights.

By the end of Hamlins term, nine more northwestern and Atlantic states have ratified, as have California and Connecticut, bringing it to a point where it is only 2 ratifications short of being enacted.

With the presidential elections, the question becomes moot, however. Thanks to a split in the Union Party (the Radicals, feeling betrayed, nominate Fremont as their presidential candidate), the democrats wimp out – if barely, and sign the peace treaty.

While some issues have been fought over ferociously, the end result is that the old slave states are accepted as going their own way, with the exception of Delaware. Major stumbling blocks are the fates of Washington D.C. and those Unionist parts of Virginia, Maryland and Missouri still in Union hands.

With considerable pressure having been exerted, the three state governments agree to cede parts of their territory, though, joining the easternmost 4 counties of Maryland and the northernmost 25 counties of the so-called state of Western Virginia with the Union.

In Missouri, while the northernmost 29 counties are ceded to the Union, nothing less of a resumption of war and total defeat can get Missouri to cede St. Louis and surroundings. It stays at that.

Otherwise, the the confederate troops evacuate New Mexico, Colorado and Nebraska Territories, with the exception of the Confederate territory of Arizona. By 1865, the wish of the southern part of California, now made the separate state of Colorado, is also granted, and she joins the Confederacy.

Financially, the south accepts its part of the pre-war debt, and agrees to not lay any punitive tariffs upon northern goods going down the Mississippi. The south is unable to make the north return the thousands of slaves that have used the period of peace negotiations to flee their masters for the Union, though, and is also unable to make an agreement that would give compensation to the owners of fleeing slaves.

Thus, after two and a half years of fighting and another fourteen months of political and diplomatic wrangling, the War of Southern Independence finally comes to an end.

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