American Civil War: April 1861-April 1865

By Jensen Cox

April 1861-April 1865. Four years during which a still poorly united people of just over 30 million souls, including 4 million black slaves, clashed continuously, divided into two unequal camps, each invoking his own definition of freedom. A war mobilizing 3 million combatants on a territory larger than Europe, seeing more than 10,000 separate military engagements, some of which have become the cornerstones of American memory, such as Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam or Gettysburg... In many respects, it is the first major contemporary conflict, drawing on all the resources of a nascent industrial modernity, involving all the living forces of the young American society, which in a few decades has passed from a conglomeration of emancipated colonies to a democratic nation undermined by its internal contradictions. With 750,000, perhaps 850,000 dead, it was by far the deadliest war in the history of the United States, having provoked 160 years of debate and controversy, like a distant but still very present echo. To understand this founding cataclysm, Jensen Cox finally offers the long-awaited great narrative on the American Civil War, nourished by primary sources and based on an impressive international bibliography. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flood
• Release date: Jul 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223457411

Jensen Cox

Jensen Cox is an esteemed author renowned for his profound insights and meticulous research in the fields of history and business. With an exceptional ability to weave captivating narratives and shed light on complex subjects, Jensen has established himself as a trusted authority in both disciplines. Through his thought-provoking works, he has consistently delivered invaluable knowledge and enriched the understanding of readers around the world.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Civil war, secession, rebellion,

between states, abolition...

America's Great War

April 1861 – April 1865. One hundred and sixty years ago. Four years during which a people still poorly united, undermined by its contradictions, of just over 30 million souls including four million black slaves, clashed continuously, divided into two unequal camps, each invoking its own definition of freedom, and this on a territory larger than Europe. A war mobilizing three million combatants, seeing more than 10,000 distinct and documented military engagements, including dozens of major pitched battles with resounding names across the Atlantic – Bull Run , Pea Ridge , Shiloh , Antietam , Chancellorsville , Gettysburg , Chickamauga , Cold Harbor ... –, bringing together up to 200,000 soldiers on the same battlefield; a war of a scale unique on the American continent, the only one approaching the standards of the greatest European confrontations; a war with political, economic, social, sociological, demographic and diplomatic implications of infinite complexity and with ramifications still so alive today. With 750,000, perhaps 850,000 dead, as we now know, it was by far the deadliest war in the history of the United States, even more than was long thought. It has generated more than 60,000 books, more than one a day since its end, of which a quarter, it is said, devoted to the only tutelary figure of Abraham Lincoln. , savior of the Union and emancipator of slaves, died a martyr on the very threshold of his term. A war that provoked a hundred and sixty years of historiographical debates that still never stop bouncing from controversy to controversy, a reference, like a distant but still very present echo, in every crisis of American democracy, down to the most recent. What could this simple volume claim – beyond language, given the relative superficiality of modern historiography in French, the essentials of which are compiled in the bibliography of this book – to bring back from this immense historical object that the across the Atlantic, among many other more or less evocative or oriented names, is generally called the American Civil War, but which was generally known, from the outset, in France and almost everywhere in Europe, like the Civil War? An easy answer would be that every author and every approach is different and legitimate; another that the historiography of the conflict, and the very forms of its study, have evolved considerably in recent years, favoring the war seen from below and highlighting the sociological prism – gender, culture, race... – , to the detriment of the politico-diplomatico-military dimensions that are often poorly known, little mastered or confused. Recent American historiography thus presents a proliferation of new issues on the conflict and its issues. But it often obscures its event dimension, and as a result, the, or rather the specific temporalities of a conflict too often perceived in a simplistic way as intrinsically unbalanced, articulated chronologically around the summer of 1863, that of the Battle of Gettysburg, polarized between the two capitals, Richmond and washington , separated by less than 200 kilometres, all along a geographic and ideological dividing line strictly separating slavery and abolitionism. How to explain, in such a simple diagram, that the war was able to last four years? How can one explain that a simple self-interested rebel slave-holding elite was able to organize and operate throughout this period an administration exercising all the sovereign prerogatives of a sovereign state over millions of inhabitants spread over millions of square kilometres, establishing in particular the very first form of universal conscription in American history?

Difficult however, even by trying to limit our ambition essentially to the field of military history, to apprehend clearly such an object in all its complexity and dimensions, in the East as in the West, on land as on sea, in the front as in the rear, in the free regions as slaveholders, from the Unionist point of view, Confederate , Amerindian, Afro-American, from the battlefield as from command tents, ministries, or among civilian populations. This work does not therefore claim to be either a synthesis of global history or a compilation of the existing historiography, considerably enriched in recent years, including in a strongly political and polemical way, as illustrated in 2019 by the passes of weapons around the 1619 project published by the Washington Post and claiming to revisit in an ultra-critical way the main milestones of American national history, including the Civil War, from an essentially racialist angle. The English-speaking reader will be able to refer in particular to the 1,200 pages written by dozens of specialists in the Companion of the US Civil War 1 or to the recent works of Elizabeth Varon or Gary Gallagher 2 to have a good recent overview of this historiographical abundance deserving better than the simplifying caricatures that are too often made of it.

We have chosen here to adopt a simple form of overall chronological narrative, close to the operations, and a return to primary sources – press, testimonies, operation reports, newspapers and memoirs –; the war apprehended in turn from the point of view of Generals Grant , Lee or Sherman , cabinets of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis , but also of Mary Chestnut , sharp-eyed slave-owning aristocrat from South Carolina , by Régis de Trobriand , French-American officer in the Army of the Potomac actor and direct witness of four years of combat, of Frederick Douglass , a former slave who became a spokesperson for the emancipation of blacks, by John B. Jones , employee of the Richmond War Department , of Adam Gurowski , Polish aristocrat in exile and translator at the Washington State Department , by Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne , French journalist passing through or even a few simple anonymous Billy Yanks and Johnny Reb encountered in the camps and on the battlefields, like the soldiers Ambrose Hayward and Joshua Callaway found by Peter Carmichael 3 , or by Christopher Fleetwood , African American Free from Baltimore volunteered in 1863. It seemed useful to us to successively take the height or dive towards the surface to multiply dimensions that, for lack of works translated in great number, for lack of a real proximity of the French public with this conflict in apart from a few inevitably simplifying cultural objects, we generally misunderstand. The objective here will therefore be simply and modestly to paint a general picture of the conflict in its primarily military dimension, seeking to highlight in real time its twists and turns, while introducing as much as possible at the time so-called cross-cutting themes – institutions, organization, logistics, conscription, armament, tactics, naval warfare, etc. –, in order to better shed light on the workings, balances and issues.

It is no coincidence that the military campaigns of 1861-1863 may thus seem to the reader disjointed, confused, sometimes redundant, with regard to those of 1864-1865, conducted in parallel and in a more coordinated way, since it is precisely this evolution of strategic conceptions which marks the last part of the conflict. This form of story is therefore a bias, which some will no doubt reproach us for, but which still has, we believe, its own logic and its own virtues: The northern victory and the southern defeat in this war can only be understood if we take into account the contingency that weighed on each campaign, each battle, each election, each decision, at all times of the conflict, recalls James McPherson , the undisputed authority among civil war historians, who adds: "It is in a narrative framework that we are best able to present this phenomenon 4 . »

We also wanted to highlight for the interested or informed reader details, figures, facts little known or unknown, and particularly significant of this singular conflict. An example is the impressive constitution of a huge military training apparatus which, at least at the end of the war, will have nothing to envy in terms of skills to its professional equivalents. from across the Atlantic. The armies of Europe are machines, wrote General Ulysses S. Grant in his Memoirs:

The men are brave and the officers capable; but the majority of the soldiers in most of the nations of Europe come from a class of the population neither very intelligent nor very concerned with the struggle in which they are called upon to take part. Our armies were made up of men who could read, men who knew what they were fighting for, and who could not be compelled to serve as soldiers except in an emergency, when the safeguard of the nation was at stake.

While the great European armies permanently had a plethora of officers who had been trained for a long time and steeped in centuries of tradition, consider that the tiny American army in 1860 had only a handful of generals, sometimes in their seventies, and traditions based on an episodic collective military history less than a century old. Never until 1861 had the United States mobilized more than a few tens of thousands of soldiers for its major conflicts; War of Independence, of 1812, Mexican War . In 1865, it will be several million men who will have served under the flags within armies equivalent in size to those of the great European wars of the XIX E century. The two camps will have named around a thousand generals in total, around 600 in the North, 400 in the South, from a few young brigadiers who were sometimes under 30 years old, placed at the head of a few hundred men to General Lee , briefly commanding the entire Confederate armies, and to Lieutenant General Grant , deciding the fate of half a million troops spread across fronts thousands of miles apart. Anecdotally, and to show how this conflict has been dissected from every angle, we note, amused or not, that 89% of southern generals and 92% of northerners will proudly display during the conflict the attributes considered virile of facial hair. more or less erratic and impressive, 36% of the former and 44% of the latter even opting for the complete formula, mustache, beard and sideburns 5 .

And since the chronology of events is evoked, the analysis of the limits of the conflict gives a very good indicator of the complexity and the immense memorial stakes attached to it. The American Civil War was in fact not the subject of any inaugural declaration of war in good and due form nor of a conclusive peace treaty, the victor not recognizing any legal existence to the vanquished. A unique war in that it constitutes both for the American people, beyond its moral aspects, an experience of victory, defeat, or liberation, depending on the point of view, and in all respects a political upheaval , economic and social on an unprecedented scale. It is traditionally started on April 12, 1861 with the bombardment of Fort Sumter , in Charleston Bay , Caroline from the south , by the Confederates and ending with the surrender of the remnants of the main Southern army, that of General Robert E. Lee , at Appomattox Courthouse, a tiny town in the Virginia hinterland, on April 9, 1865, six days before Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at the Ford Theater from washington . These seemingly self-evident limits are in fact rarely discussed, in that they underline the strictly insurrectional nature of the conflict, in which American national historiography has often confined it. But well beyond the simple rebellion in which we still seek to circumscribe it today, the Southern Confederation did indeed have an at least proto-national dimension that cannot be denied, constituting for four years the beginnings of an organized southern nation, based on a model of society and a well-defined geographical space, if not perfectly clear. Witness, for example, the impressions of Colonel of the Union Régis de Trobriand – Philippe Régis Denis de Keredern de Trobriand, by his full name –, baron of the Tours Empire who immigrated to New York in the 1840s and naturalized American, when in 1863 the Gettysburg campaign had him fight for the first time in the Free North proper, the state of Pennsylvania :

Here we were among our own. In speaking of the confederates, the inhabitants said the enemy or the rebels. It wasn't like Virginia anymore , where they said: our men, our army, thus identifying themselves with our adversaries. Also, crossing the Potomac , the army she seemed to have morally transformed herself. Generous indignation made all the strings of patriotism vibrate within her .

Echoing, John S. Mosby , a Virginian cavalry officer famous for his raids on the rear of the Union armies and yet became close to Ulysses S. Grant after the war , summed up his four years of struggle in a nutshell: "The South was my country. »

These traditional chronological milestones therefore mask others, which may also have a meaning. To consider only the most immediate, one could, with solid arguments, start the conflict with the first clear political break: the declaration of independence of the first secessionist state, South Carolina, on December 20, 1860 ; or with the first hostile cannon shot, fired as early as January 10, 1861; or again with the official formation of the Confederate government, rival of that of Washington , on February 4 of the same year, and this without even considering the secessionist rhetoric for which the election of Abraham Lincoln on November 9, 1860 would figure neither more nor less as a declaration of war against the southern states. Likewise, the surrender of General Robert E. Lee and the rest of his army on April 9, 1865, is only the salient and driving event in a succession of others that could rightly be claimed as markers of the end. of the conflict. We could thus extend it until the capture of the remnants of the Confederate government on May 10, 1865, which would give it a more political dimension, or even, to remain in a purely military logic, until the surrender of the last Confederate army constituted, that of General Kirby Smith's Transmississippi , signed on May 26, 1865, and why not of the last organized rebel force, the Indian cavalry brigade of General Cherokee Stand Watie , June 23, or even, by pulling the thread, until the surrender of the last warship at sea, Captain James Waddell's CSS Shenandoah , November 6, in Liverpool , symbolically carrying the extreme limits of the conflict from four to five full years. And if we are looking for an official political act on the part of the authorities in Washington decreeing the end of hostilities, we will still have to wait until the official declaration of President Andrew Johnson on August 20... 1866. One could even begin the story with the inaugural hostilities between slaveholders and abolitionists in Kansas bloody from 1854, and pushing the fires, through the raid of abolitionist activist John Brown at Harpers Ferry in October 1859 and the war itself, until 1877, to include the painful period of reconstruction marked by more or less latent hostilities prolonging the conflict on a political and racial ground, punctuated by the murderous violence of the Ku Klux Klan, from the humiliation of a military occupation and even real pitched battles. This is the case in Louisiana during the terrible Colfax massacre of April 1873 when dozens of black militiamen were killed by Confederate veterans, or during the battle of Liberty Place in September 1874, opposing New Orleans the paramilitary militia of the White League and the state militias as well as the local police. But if the extended account of a civil war 1854-1877 could be tempting and legitimate, it would definitely go far too far beyond our framework and our possibilities, and we can only invite the reader here to turn to the abundant developments of James McPherson on the origins of the conflict, or towards the works of Eric Foner, specialist of the Reconstruction period.

The fact remains that all these limits, from the most unifying to the most discussed, only present milestones that say nothing about the deep roots of the war, any more than its long-term consequences, nor its internal windings. It is quite true, writes James McPherson, in disagreement here with British military historian John Keegan, "that the Confederacy stood a chance of winning the war - not by conquering the North or destroying its armies, but by undermining Northern morale and its ability to conquer the South and destroy its armies. »

The image of a summer 1863 turning point of the conflict and beginning of the end with the capture of Vicksburg and the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg does not take into account these possibilities. The course of the Civil War was indeed not linear, with a phase of rise and fall of the rebellion, but rhythmic, seeing each year the Southern Confederacy on the point of dying before operating a spectacular recovery until it seemed able to wrest a compromise on its independence: this was the case during the summers of 1861 and 1862 after the two battles of Bull Run , in the spring of 1863 during the invasion of Pennsylvania , and again in the summer of 1864, when war-weariness reached its peak in the North and Confederate troops then suddenly appeared in front of Washington 7 .

Is history always written by the victors? The Civil War was able to invalidate this belief for a long time, so strong was an idealized vision of the vanquished, an interpretation based on the lost cause, the lost cause, its great captains almost sanctified, Lee and Jackson, his magnified feats of arms, and a romantic vision of the Old South obscuring the centrality - if not the very nature - of slavery as an overwhelming backdrop to a war that, admittedly, did not t is not entirely confined to it, as the historiography of recent years might suggest, but which would never have taken place without it. In terms of antagonistic memories, it is thus not insignificant, even if relatively anecdotal, that most of the great battles of the war inherited a double sectional denomination firmly anchored according to the memory of the two camps, the North often referring to nearby rivers and South to local toponyms. Thus, the First and Second Bull Run for the North, of the river of the same name, are the First and Second Manassas from the South, borrowing from the eponymous village where their device was based. For the North, the memory of the victory won on the Antietam River , where, for the first time, war photography began to make the nature of the war and the scale of the carnage tangible to the public, has generally supplanted the southern memory of the draw conceded in pain in front of the city of Sharpsburg . Shiloh , name of a simple church lost in the forest of Tennessee , is on the contrary a rare case of a southerner name having made people forget that of Pittsburg Landing, a landing stage on the Tennessee River given to it by the North, no doubt by playing with the simple evocative power of the name associated with the first great butchery of the war having deeply stay in mind. Sometimes, as in the case of the small Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg , a single name has imposed itself on both sides without us understanding, there either, the reason beyond the journalistic resonance.

But the memorial implications of war obviously go well beyond the battlefield. In many respects, it is first and foremost the first major contemporary conflict, drawing on all the resources of a nascent industrial modernity, involving and mobilizing in one way or another all the living forces of the young society. American passed in a few decades from the stage of a conglomerate of emancipated colonies to a decentralized democratic proto-nation in search of balance between its stated principles and its lived realities; a continuous struggle of four years disputed on sea as on land on an almost continental scale, implementing the most modern armaments and equipment of the moment, mobilizing millions of men and almost all - at least in the South - available resources; a war, finally, worthy of the hecatombs of the following century in Europe, the largest in history on the American continent, causing the death of approximately 2.5% of the population of the United States, and even more without considering than the white population, the most directly involved. A war in which for the first time, at least on this scale, the railway, the telegraph, battleships, and even the submarine and the machine gun were used. On the military level, the visible evolution of the conditions of combat between 1861 and 1865 announces, for who wants to see it, but there are few then, the sacrifices, the hecatombs and the dead ends of the future world wars in Europe, while introducing a strong dimension of political ideology.

Military operations have an enormous impact on the perception and conduct of war, as well as on its real stakes. Absolutely no one at the beginning of the year 1861 envisaged armies of several hundred thousand men and hecatombs such as Shiloh , Antietam , Gettysburg or Cold Harbor . No one in 1861 considered Sherman's black roads , ravaging the Deep South by systematically destroying properties and goods, nor the degree of violence that the conflict will gradually reach. Finally, no one can imagine the extent of the economic and social upheavals caused by the war, beginning with the massive participation of African-Americans in their own emancipation by arms, the total abolition of slavery without any compensation for the owners. It was on the battlefield of Shiloh (April 1862) that Ulysses S. Grant , until then convinced that a major confrontation would be enough to settle the quarrel and extinguish the rebellion, truly measures the extent of the conflict and the mountain that will have to be climbed, the previously unthinkable means and destruction that will have to be put in place. working to defeat the South. It's by his victory at Bull Run in 1861, then those of Lee of 1862-1863, that the whole South gains the confidence necessary for a prolongation of the conflict, incites to think of a possible decisive victory by invading the North, and nourishes a spirit of resistance which lasts at least until the beginning of the year 1865.

It was in the middle of the war and once the constitutional euphemisms - the law of the States - mentioned by the Comte de Paris had been overcome. , veiling for a time the deep causes of the North-South antagonism - slavery and its perpetuation -, that we take the measure of the life-and-death struggle that has begun, and of the profound transformation of the society that will result from its outcome, starting with the fate of the four million African-Americans. The North was directly and indirectly involved in slavery and the slave economy, recalls historian Marc Ross. Confronting these truths is difficult... for the United States and its citizens . »

It is true that from this point of view, the ambiguities of the Union as well as the active role played by African-Americans in their own emancipation have long been neglected, or limited to the patriotic evocation of black troops. While the outcome of the war and the abolition of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment remain frozen as a high point in American history, they should not hide the profound failure of the period following the war, that of reconstruction and the legacy of a century of segregation, the consequences of which have not finished working in depth on American society in the 21st century , where legal equality has never been able to give birth of a real amalgam between the communities. What also played out, beyond the question of the emancipation of African-Americans, and its consequences, which were never really settled, or the war itself causing the lasting ruin of the South, was the to become a nation destined to transform in a few decades into a dominant world power, and this for at least a century. By seeking independence by arms to preserve its model of society, the minority South had precipitated its abrupt end, transferring the legitimacy of the nation to a rapidly expanding North, and with it the reins of a manifest destiny which , year after year, would lead on the way that we know. Even the Mexico crushed in 1848 had obtained compensation for its lost territories, and until the assumption of its debts by the American government. In 1865, all the wealth accumulated by the South, and based overwhelmingly on slavery, disappeared in one breath. The short-lived Confederate dollar, already deeply devalued, simply doesn't exist anymore, Treasury bills aren't even worth the paper they're printed on. Notwithstanding the earth and the men, the ruin is instantaneous and total, digging deep and irreconcilable community caesuras.

CHAPTER 1

Antebellum

The North, the South, the particular institution and the simmering conflict

"Slavery did not create interests in the South contrary to those of the North; but he modified the characters of the inhabitants of the South, and gave them different habits. »

A LEXIS DE T OCQUEVILLE , 1835

"Slavery is not a black problem or a white problem.

It's an American problem. »

FATH DAVIS RUFFINS, 2006

North and South; Yankeeland versus Dixieland ... If the caesura is clearly visible in the eyes of contemporaries, it is however only a simplification of American realities of the heart of the XIX th century, much more intertwined and complex. In a country that was designated until the war in the plural – United States are... – with a turbulent but recent history, already massive immigration and a constantly changing territory, there are many internal borders. , emphasizes James McPherson. The most obvious are those of the different states, each with its own history, institutions, habits, and identity, often older – for the old thirteen colonies at least – than the federal government which united them under the banner starry. If the South and the North see each other more and more as distant neighbours, with these Border States between the two worlds, where slavery is on the decline and solidarity is shared, the « Midwestern rural, if not still pioneering, that of Illinois , from Indiana , from Ohio , from Minnesota , is hardly less foreign to the Puritan Northeast and to the nascent New York gigantism than to the cotton South with which it trades via the mighty Mississippi River. .

The importance of this ensemble, too often perceived as monolithic, which is called the South in the history of the United States, at least until the Civil War, is often overlooked today. Largely marginalized and irretrievably associated with unflattering images from the era of slavery or racial segregation, such as those of " rednecks today, most regions of the South offer the portrait of countryside left on the margins of the dynamism and American power, represented by the east coast and New York on one side, California and Los Angeles the other. It was not the same until the 1850s. Among the thirteen original colonies, at the crossroads of the Puritan, pioneer, financial and agrarian Americas, the great Commonwealth of Virginie, from the first English colony and described as Mother of the States, was for a long time an undisputed figurehead there, having seen the birth of four of the first five American presidents, starting with the two Founding Fathers. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson , whose undeniable aura then found very little competition north of the famous Mason-Dixon line, with the doubtless exception of the Bostonian Benjamin Franklin . A slave state, although the institution there was in sharp decline in 1860, old Virginia was the homeland of the FFV", First Families of Virginia , claiming ancestry within the Horsemen of the English Revolution and giving the tone of the southern sweet life. richmond is its heart, a legacy of the first English settlements of the early 17th century and the legendary gesture of John Smith and Pocahontas ; Norfolk , "to the port covered with ships displaying the flags of all nations, whose society was that of the world , its door on the ocean. This picture-postcard vision of colonnaded homes and blooming gardens is closely associated with Virginia, making it a reference and arbiter between the sections" of the country, and is enhanced by its role in the settlement of the West. . In Kentucky , as in Missouri , we often proudly claim an Old South heritage in general, Virginian in particular.

The poison of the particular institution

Geographical, economic, mental borders; racial borders too, and, above all, excluding from political rights, in the land of freedom and egalitarian citizenship, the African-Americans imported since the 17th century as slaves , and the Amerindians, who have populated the places for millennia. This is another essential aspect of this increasingly misnamed United States. Where does racism start? South... of the Canadian border, Malcolm X 2 would say one day . In his De la democratie en Amérique , the first volume of which appeared in France in 1835 and which was to have an enormous influence on both shores of the Atlantic, Alexis de Tocqueville observes with exceptional acuity a young nation in the making, cemented at the same time by a history, principles and common interests, but where, already, two types of citizens are distinguished, obviously white, if not two peoples; those of the North and those of the South, placed on trajectories tending to diverge.

The South American, from birth, finds himself invested with a kind of domestic dictatorship... Education therefore tends powerfully to make [of him] a haughty man, prompt, irascible, violent, ardent in his desires, impatient of obstacles. ; but easy to discourage if he cannot triumph at the first attempt... [He] is more spontaneous, more spiritual, more open, more generous, more intellectual and more brilliant [...]. The North American [...] is reduced to providing for all his needs himself [...], he therefore learns early to know exactly for himself the limit of his power [...]. He is therefore patient, tolerant, slow to act, and persevering in his plans [...], more active, more reasonable, more enlightened and more skilful 3 .

And to drop the word slavery, the cause of this divergence; a word so simple and so tragic, that generations of Americans whites will admit only with great difficulty as the root cause of their civil war, or that they will refer to the exclusive responsibility of the South and its ephemeral four-year Confederation, forgetting at least two centuries of colonial history and shared nationality, followed by a century of segregation, then decades of equal rights which might have seemed certain but whose first decades of the 21st century seem to demonstrate the imperfection, if not the outright failure, shattering in passing the myth of the American melting pot that the world seemed to envy.

Northerners, southerners... A third people therefore has no voice in the matter but suffers the most unworthy of conditions, and does not escape the inevitably biased gaze of the passing traveller: The slave is a servant who does not argue and submit to everything without murmuring, continues Tocqueville; sometimes he assassinates his master, but he never resists him. » There were less than 700,000 slaves in 1790, 18% of the population, including 40,000 within seven northern states, Massachusetts alone being genuinely free; there were two million at the time Tocqueville wrote, and they were nearly four million in 1860, 13% of the country's population, a third of that of the South, despite a half-century ban on the slave trade, invalidating the certainties of all those advocating a gradual and natural extinction of the institution. And, where some blacks are free, emancipation does not mean equal rights. Everywhere remains the imprint, more or less profound, of inequality between races. If the small handful of slaves listed in Vermont disappeared before 1800, in Rhode Island , which was the first to officially abolish slavery, in 1774, the 1790 census still counts nearly a thousand, and the last five did not disappear until the 1840s, the fault of the gradual abolition laws. On this date, there is no longer a single slave either in the State of New York. , but the right to vote is granted to black men only on the condition of having an estate of at least 250 dollars – 8,000 current dollars –, of residing in the State for three years and in the district since a year. Two hundred and twenty-two slaves were still counted in 1850 in New Jersey , up from 19,000 at the height of the institution around 1810. In Pennsylvania , as in Connecticut , where it was never firmly established, residual slavery did not disappear there as completely as in the 1850s. In Massachusetts, slavery never really took root, and it was officially abolished, as well as the slave trade, from 1788. And yet, even in this bastion of abolitionism where less than 7,000 blacks lived for 420,000 inhabitants in 1810, interracial marriages were prohibited for several decades and, until 1842, railroads routinely and openly practice racial segregation. Several cities, starting with Boston , prohibit mixed education. This segregationist legislation was not repealed until 1855, but it would, paradoxically, lay the foundations for the Jim Crow laws that would prevail in the post-war South, shrouded in the alibi of a principle of equality (separate but equal). To be free from slavery, Oregon's first constitution (1857) is thus no less radical in prohibiting the stay, neither more nor less, of blacks on its territory. Even free, the North was therefore often far from being the haven hoped for by the ever-increasing number of fugitive slaves using the underground railway of abolitionist organizations. In 1860, there were only about 250,000 free blacks in the North, as many as in the South, frequently socially relegated, under the hostile gaze of recent Irish immigrants, no less poor but seeing in them competitors for jobs. so badly paid from a nascent industrialization. William Lloyd Garrison , at the forefront of the abolitionist fight and not very suspicious of any sympathy for the slave-owning South, wrote thus, concurring with Tocqueville's observations two decades earlier: I found there [in the North] more bitterness, opposition active, relentless denigration, narrow-minded prejudice and cold apathy, than among the slaveholders themselves. »

In an improvised 1855 speech to a mixed audience, black leader Frederick Douglass, for his part, emphasizes the internalization of white superiority even in abolitionist circles:

Even in the management of the anti-slavery cause, it is considered absurd for a man of color to pretend to do more than follow the directives given by these superior men... One thing is certain; whether we are able or have the natural disposition to rise from a low condition to a high level of civilization, no one can answer this question for us. We have to show them what we are capable of becoming; show them that we are skillful architects, deep thinkers, creators and discoverers of ideas, and all other things related to a high level of civilization. This is far more important than all the rhetoric in our favor by our white friends.

Two years earlier, the Lion of Anacostia already declared:

I affirm that poverty, ignorance and decay are the combined evils, or in other words constitute the disease of the colored free men of the United States. In order to deliver them from this triple disease, they must be ameliorated and uplifted, that is to say, simply placed on an equal footing with their fellow whites in the sacred right of "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. I don't believe in artificial progress, I only ask for a fair game.

The former slave escaped from Maryland , fighting all his life for the abolition of slavery and equal rights, and whose lofty view would even allow him to reconcile one day with his former master, however, only reflects a small fraction of northern opinion in 1860. For most, the central issue was that of the Union, slavery being seen there, rather than as a moral evil, as a curse undermining the political unity of the nation.

The North, gradually abolishing slavery that had become useless and cumbersome, therefore sold rather than freed its slaves in the Upper South, which itself sold them in the deep South, the latter already seeking, in the west or In the Caribbean , with future market outlets guaranteeing the value of its human goods. In 1860, Virginia still lists 53,456 slave owners over the age of 24, a quarter of the population of that age. Unstoppable conflict will find the Old Dominion ready to defend slavery, in which it is so materially committed, did not hesitate to affirm the Daily Dispatch , one of the main newspapers of Richmond , illustrating the overwhelming importance of the issue in the motivations of the secessionist South. The purely moral dimension of the question of slavery exists of course; it even grows strongly from the 1840s according to the testimonies of real former slaves or fictionalized stories culminating with La Case de l'Oncle Tome ( Uncle's Tom Cabin ) by Harriet Beecher Stowe . But between social control, racist prejudices and mercantile interest, active abolitionism remains very much in the minority across the country, and even marginal if it envisages resorting to violence. Few are the William Garrisons who, in his Liberator , does not hesitate to evoke the political rupture, a secession... of the North to remove it from the influence of a South deemed impious. From this point of view, the rise of the Republican Party and the germ of the crisis at the end of the 1850s represented a strong hope that a true revolution in mentalities was beginning. "May the moral blows for freedom now delivered by our friends be as effective in their consequences as those delivered by