American Civil War

Main contributor: Dr. David Heffernan

The American Civil War was a conflict which was fought within the United States between 1861 and 1865 over numerous issues dividing the Northern and Southern states. The principal cause of the conflict was that the northern states had ended slavery decades earlier and now wanted to extend this policy countrywide. There were other issues at stake also, notably the clash of economic systems and the extent to which the federal government could impose its rules on individual states. The southern states resisted and seceded from the Union to form a Confederacy of slave-owning states. War then broke out in 1861. The war would drag on for four years, eventually resulting in the full abolition of slavery and Union victory. The civil war led to changes in migratory trends in North America, primarily as the Lincoln administration loosened its migration laws to encourage an influx of men of military age from countries like Ireland who were quickly recruited and sent to fight the Confederates.^[1]

Chronology of events

The European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century had seen a growing awareness amongst Europeans and people of European descent in the Americas that slavery was morally unacceptable. Accordingly, Abolitionist movements led by figures like William Wilberforce emerged and successfully pressured the British government to first prohibit the slave trade through the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and then ban the practice of owning slaves altogether through the Slavery Abolition Act of 1834. Such was the power of the British Royal Navy in the nineteenth century that it was soon able to begin pressurizing other states into adopting these measures as well. By the middle of the nineteenth century, most European countries and American states had followed the British lead and banned slavery, but there were still some outliers, notably Brazil which would not ban slavery until 1888.^[2]

The United States was a more complicated case. The country was founded as a decentralized federal union where individual states had a large degree of control over their own affairs. Consequently, in some of the more liberal and urbanized northern states slavery had been banned long before the British acted. Pennsylvania, for example, a colony that was initially founded by the Quakers, a somewhat peculiar religious movement of the early modern era, whose genuinely ethical adherents did more than any other group to drive the Abolition movement from the 1750s onwards, had banned slavery in the state in 1780. Many states of New England followed suit in the 1780s and New York became a ‘free state’ in 1799. However, the southern states like Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas, the economies of which relied on cheap, slave labor to mass-produce cotton and tobacco, were wholly unwilling to become ‘free states’ and remained slave-owning states well into the nineteenth century.^[3]

The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed a growing clash between the northern free states and the southern slave-owning states. For instance, in 1808 the northern states managed to pass the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves as a federal law. This banned southern states from importing slaves from Africa, but they were still allowed to retain the slaves they already had and any children born to their slaves would in turn become slaves as well, while illegal slave-smuggling was occurring widely too. Eventually the conflict became more severe and by the 1850s it was clear that the northern states intended to eventually ban the slave trade altogether across the Union.^[4] When Abraham Lincoln, the candidate for the new Republican Party, formed in 1854, won the 1860 US Presidential Election on an Abolitionist platform, seven of the southern states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas) seceded from the Union within weeks and formed the Confederate States of America in February 1861, better known to posterity as the Confederacy. They were soon joined by Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee, while others such as Kentucky would also opt-in at later dates.^[5]

The American Civil War began on the 12th of April 1861 when Confederate forces attacked a Union stronghold, Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston in South Carolina, the very first state to secede from the Union in December 1860. It would last for four years, only ending in May 1865 after the deaths of approximately 650,000 soldiers, the maiming and wounding of hundreds of thousands more and a large loss of civilian life. But the Union was ultimately victorious owing to engagements like the Battle of Gettysburg. Slavery was abolished across the southern states and the Union was preserved.^[6]

Extent of migration

One might ask how all of this impacted migration within the United States. A wide-ranging, brutal war like this will always displace people from regions that are experiencing high levels of military activity. As such, many people were displaced in regions like northern Virginia and southern Maryland which lay along the border between the Union and the Confederacy, the two competing powers having their capitals, Washington D.C. and Richmond, Virginia, less than 100 miles away from each other. Approximately 200,000 people were displaced from the southern states, many heading north.^[7] But the foremost impact of the American Civil War on migration patterns was in the manner in which the Union government promoted inward migration from Europe during the early 1860s. This was to bolster its manpower and win the war, a strategy which ultimately worked as the Union army at its peak was nearly 700,000 strong, whereas the Confederacy topped out at just half this number.

In particular, the Union government made it clear that it now welcomed the influx of Irish migrants, who had been arriving in enormous numbers to America since the 1840s when the Irish potato famine occurred back home from 1845 onwards. Yet the Roman Catholic Irish were deemed by many Americans, who were generally of Protestant and British background, to be savage brutes and there was a growing movement in the 1850s to restrict their migration to the US. The outbreak of the American Civil War stopped this xenophobic movement in its tracks as the administration of President Abraham Lincoln began promoting Irish migration. Indeed, such was the desire to have the Irish arrive and fight in the Union army, that federal military recruiters were even dispatched to Ireland itself, a practice which the Confederacy imitated. Often the methods used were brutal. Many Irish adult males in their twenties and thirties arriving at ports like New York and Boston in the early 1860s were coerced into immediately joining the Union army. Moreover, the passage of the Enrollment Act by the Union government in March 1863, a piece of legislation that required unmarried men aged between 20 and 45 to enlist in the Union army, was explicitly aimed against the Irish and free African Americans in the northern states and led to the New York Draft Riots and the Detroit Race Riots in the spring and summer of 1863.^[8]

Demographic impact

The demographic impact of these measures was significant. Although there had been a desire to curb migration from Ireland to the US in the 1850s, this was abandoned owing to the war and approximately 435,000 Irish were allowed into the United States in the 1860s. The pattern was continued once the war ended and a further 435,000 arrived in the 1870s, followed by 650,000 in the 1880s and 400,000 in the 1890s. Thus, the American Civil War reversed the drive to restrict Irish immigration to America and allowed for the emergence of the enormous Irish American community in the second half of the nineteenth century.^[9]