Notes on
The Civil War

This most recent estimation of 698,000 wartime deaths was put forward by Joan Barceló, Jeffrey L. Jensen, Leonic Peisakhin, and Haoyu Zhai, “New Estimates of US Civil War Mortality from Full-Census Records,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121, no. 48 (2024): e2414919121, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1073/​pnas​.2414919121.[]

Proceedings of the Conventions at Charleston and Baltimore: Published by Order of the National Democratic Convention (Washington, DC, 1860).[]

William J. Cooper, We Have the War upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War , November 1860–April 1861 (Knopf, 2012), 14.[]

“A Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” January 9, 1861, Avalon Project, Yale Law School, http://​avalon​.law​.yale​.edu/​19th​_century/​csa​_scarsec​.asp.[]

Alexander Stephens, speech in Savannah, Georgia, delivered March 21, 1861, quoted in Henry Cleveland, Alexander Stephens, in Public and Private. With Letters and Speeches Before, During and Since the War (Philadelphia, 1866), 719.[]

“Declaration of the Immediate Causes.”[]

For Confederate nationalism and imperial goals, see Adrian Brettle, Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World (University of Virginia Press, 2000); Andrew F. Lang, A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Kevin Waite, West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (University of North Carolina Press, 2021).[]

See Jon L. Wakelyn, ed., Southern Unionist Pamphlets and the Civil War (University of Missouri Press, 1999).[]

Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom(Harvard University Press, 2009), 55–114; David Williams, I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era (Cambridge University Press, 2014).[]

Horace Greeley, The American Conflict: A History of the Great Rebellion in the United States of America, 1860–1864 , Volume 1 (Hartford, CT, 1864), 366–67.[]

Abraham Lincoln, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.[]

For Northern motivations, see Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Harvard University Press, 2011); Elizabeth R. Varon, Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2019); Lang, A Contest of Civilizations. For conservative Northerners and the Union war, see Adam I. P. Smith, The Stormy Present: Conservatism and the Problem of Slavery in Northern Politics, 1846–1865 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Jack Furniss, Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North (Louisiana State University Press, 2024).[]

Lincoln to Orville Browning, September 22, 1861, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.[]

For democratic activists, see W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Louisiana State University Press, 2013). For foreign powers, see Richard Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2001); Stève Sainlaude, France and the American Civil War: A Diplomatic History (University of North Carolina Press, 2019).[]

See David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon & Schuster, 2018); Brian M. Taylor, Fighting for Citizenship: Black Northerners and the Debate over Military Service in the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).[]

Excerpt from Benjamin F. Butler to Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, May 27, 1861, B-99 1861, Letters Received Irregular, Secretary of War, Record Group 107, National Archives, Washington, DC, http://​www​.freedmen​.umd​.edu/​Butler​.html. For Lincoln’s conservative war aims, see Daniel W. Crofts, Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Union (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). For a different interpretation of Lincoln as a willing and eager emancipator, see James Oakes, The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution(W. W. Norton, 2021); Kate Masur, Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement to Reconstruction (W. W. Norton, 2021).[]

“The Slave Question; Letter from Major-Gen. Butler on the Treatment of Fugitive Slaves,” New York Times , August 6, 1861.[]

See Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (Knopf, 2016); Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (University of North Carolina Press, 2018).[]

Glenn David Brasher, The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 81–83.[]

Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1997).[]

David K. Thomson, Bonds of War: How Civil War Financial Agents Sold the World on the Union (University of North Carolina Press, 2022).[]

See Mark E. Neely Jr., Lincoln and the Democrats: The Politics of Opposition in the Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2017); J. Matthew Gallman, The Cacophony of Politics: Northern Democrats and the American Civil War (University of Virginia Press, 2021); Furniss, Between Extremes.[]

For literacy rates within the armies, see Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), 304–6; Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Bobbs-Merrill, 1943), 335–37.[]

Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant, Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, 2023).[]

See Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver, An Environmental History of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).[]

For more on music in the Civil War, see Christian McWhirter, Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2012).[]

See Gary W. Gallagher, ed., The Richmond Campaign of 1862: The Peninsula Campaign and the Seven Days (University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Ethan S. Rafuse, McClellan’s War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union (Indiana University Press, 2005).[]

Steven E. Woodworth, ed., The Shiloh Campaign (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009).[]

See Andrew E. Masich, Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands: 1861–1867 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017); Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020); Waite, West of Slavery.[]

Alvin M. Josephy Jr., The Civil War in the American West (Knopf, 1992), 330.[]

Laurence M. Hauptman, Between Two Fires: American Indians in the Civil War (Simon & Schuster, 1996); Fay A. Yarbrough, Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country (University of North Carolina Press).[]

Robert Utley, The Indian Frontier 1846–1890 (University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 76.[]

“Treaty with the Sioux—Sisseton and Wahpeton Bands, 1851,” in Charles J. Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs: Law and Treaties , vol. 2 (Government Printing Office, 1904), 588–89.[]

Mary Butler Renville, A Thrilling Narrative of Indian Captivity: Dispatches from the Dakota War (University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 268n188.[]

Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (Cambridge University Press, 2004).[]

Gary Clayton Anderson, Massacre in Minnesota: The Dakota War of 1862, the Most Violent Ethnic Conflict in American History (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019).[]

Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Kansas University Press, 1998).[]

Brasher, The Peninsula Campaign.[]

See Stanley Harrold, American Abolitionism: Its Direct Political Impact from Colonial Times into Reconstruction (University of Virginia Press, 2019); Frank J. Cirillo, The Abolitionist Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union (Louisiana State University Press, 2023).[]

Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863, Presidential Proclamations, 1791–1991, Record Group 11, General Records of the United States Government, National Archives, Washington, DC.[]

Lincoln to Ulysses S. Grant, August 9, 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.[]

James Henry Gooding to Abraham Lincoln, September 28, 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.[]

James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, 1988), 862.[]

See Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (Penguin, 2012); Taylor, Fighting for Citizenship.[]

See Kevin Levin, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (University of North Carolina Press, 2019).[]

See Eugene C. Murdock, One Million Men: The Civil War Draft in the North (State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1971).[]

Ivar Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1991).[]

Laura Edwards, Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (University of Illinois Press, 2000), 85. Also see Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Harvard University Press, 2012).[]

Quoted in Heidi Schoof, Elizabeth Van Lew: Civil War Spy (Compass Books, 2006), 85.[]

Elizabeth Varon, Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, a Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy (Oxford University Press, 2003).[]

Shauna Devine, Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 70–71.[]

Emma Edwards, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army: Comprising the Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle-Fields (Hartford, CT, 1865), 6.[]

C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (Yale University Press, 1981), 85.[]

Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War , 158.[]

Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf, 2008).[]

Sally Randle Perry, November 30, 1867, Sally Randle Perry Diary, 1867–1868, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama.[]

LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (University of Georgia Press, 2000), 93–95.[]

Adam I. P. Smith, No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (Oxford University Press, 2006).[]

Presidential Elections, 1789–2008 (CQ, 2010), 135, 225.[]

Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address; endorsed by Lincoln, April 10, 1865, March 4, 1865, General Correspondence, 1837–1897, The Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, DC.[]

Books discussing the weeks and months after Appomattox as a time of uncertainty and upheaval include Elizabeth Varon, Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2013); and Caroline Janney, Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army After Appomattox (University of North Carolina Press, 2021).[]