The Confederate States Army, also called the Confederate Army or the Southern Army, was the military land force of the Confederate States of America (commonly referred to as the Confederacy) during the American Civil War (1861–1865), fighting against the United States forces to win the independence of the Southern states and uphold and expand the institution of slavery.[3] On February 28, 1861, the Provisional Confederate Congress established a provisional volunteer army and gave control over military operations and authority for mustering state forces and volunteers to the newly chosen Confederate States president, Jefferson Davis (1808-1889),. Davis was a graduate of the United States Military Academy, on the Hudson River at West Point, New York, colonel of a volunteer regiment during the Mexican–American War (1846-1848). He had also been a United States senator from Mississippi and served as U.S. Secretary of War under 14th President Franklin Pierce. On March 1, 1861, on behalf of the new Confederate States government, Davis assumed control of the military situation at Charleston Harbor in Charleston, South Carolina, where South Carolina state militia had besieged the longtime Federal Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, held by a small U.S. Army garrison under the command of Major Robert Anderson. (1805-1871). By March 1861, the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States meeting in the temporary capital of Montgomery, Alabama, expanded the provisional military forces and established a more permanent regular Confederate States Army..
An accurate count of the total number of individuals who served in the Military forces of the Confederate States (Army, Navy and Marine Corps) is not possible due to incomplete and destroyed / burned Confederate records; and archives. Estimates of the number of Confederate soldiers, sailors and marines are between 750,000 and 1,000,000 troops. This does not include an unknown number of Negro slaves who were pressed into performing various tasks for the army, such as the construction of fortifications and defenses or driving wagons.[4] Since these figures include estimates of the total number of soldiers who served at any time during the war, they do not represent the size of the army at any given date. These numbers also do not include sailors / marines who served in the Confederate States Navy.
Although most of the soldiers who fought in the American Civil War were volunteers, both sides by 1862 resorted to conscription as a means to supplement the volunteer soldiers. Although exact records are unavailable, estimates of the percentage of Confederate Army soldiers who were drafted are about double the 6 percent of Union Army soldiers who were drafted.[5]
According to the National Park Service, "Soldier demographics for the Confederate Army are not available due to incomplete and destroyed enlistment records." Their estimates of Confederate military personnel deaths are about 94,000 killed in battle, 164,000 deaths from disease, and between 25,976 deaths in Union prison camps. One estimate of the total Confederate wounded is 194,026. In comparison, the best estimates of the number of Union military personnel deaths are 110,100 killed in battle, 224,580 deaths from disease, and 30,218 deaths in Confederate prison camps. The estimated figure for Union Army wounded is 275,174.[6]
The main Confederate armies, the Army of Northern Virginia under General Robert E. Lee and the remnants of the Army of Tennessee and various other units under General Joseph E. Johnston, surrendered to the U.S. on April 9, 1865 (officially April 12), and April 18, 1865 (officially April 26). Other Confederate forces further south and west surrendered between April 16, 1865, and June 28, 1865.[7] By the end of the war, more than 100,000 Confederate soldiers had deserted,[8] and some estimates put the number as high as one-third of all Confederate soldiers.[9] The Confederacy's government effectively dissolved when it evacuated the four-year old capital of Richmond, Virginia on April 3, 1865, and fled southwest by railroad train with the President Jefferson Davis and members of his cabinet gradually continuing moving southwestward first to Lynchburg, Virginia and lost communication to its remaining military commanders, and soon exerted no control over the remaining armies. They were eventually caught and captured near Irwinville, Georgia a month later in May 1865.
By the time Abraham Lincoln took office as President of the United States on March 4, 1861, the seven seceding slave states had formed the Confederate States. They seized federal property, including nearly all U.S. Army forts, within their borders.[10] Lincoln was determined to hold the forts remaining under U.S. control when he took office, especially Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. On February 28, shortly before Lincoln was sworn in as president, the Provisional Confederate Congress had authorized the organization of a large Provisional Army of the Confederate States (PACS).[11]
Under orders from Confederate President Jefferson Davis, C.S. troops under the command of General Pierre Gustave Toutant / P. G. T. Beauregard military forces surrounding the city harbor began bombarding bombarding Fort Sumter on April 12–13, 1861 and forced its capitulation on April 14.[12][13] The remaining loyal United States in the North, outraged by the Confederacy's attack, demanded war. It rallied behind new 16th President Lincoln's call on April 15 for all the loyal states to send their state militia units avolunteer troops to reinforce and protect the national federal capital of Washington, D.C. , to recapture the various forts, arsenals, shipyards and other seized federal installations from the secessionists, to put down and suppress the rebellion and to save the Union.[14] Four more upper border slave states (North Carolina , Tennessee, Arkansas and finally Virginia) then joined the Confederacy, making eleven seceded states rather than fight fellow Southerners. The Confederacy then moved its national capital from temporary Montgomery, Alabama to the state capital of Virginia in Richmond. Both the United States and the Confederate States began in earnest to raise large, mostly volunteer, armies,[15][16] with the opposing objectives: putting down the rebellion and preserving the Union on the one hand, and establishing Southern independence from the northern United States on the other.[17]
The Confederate States Congress provided for a regular Confederate States Army, patterned after its parent in the United States Army (established 1775 / 1789). It was to consist of a large provisional force to exist only in time of war and a small permanent regular army. The provisional, volunteer army was established by an act of the Provisional Confederate Congress passed on February 28, 1861, one week before the act which established the permanent regular army organization, passed on March 6. Although the two forces were to exist concurrently, little was done to organize the Confederate regular army.[18]
Members of all the military forces of the Confederate States (the army, the navy, and the marine corps) are often referred to as "Confederates", and members of the Confederate army were referred to as "Confederate soldiers". Supplementing the Confederate army were the various state militias of the Confederacy:
Control and operation of the Confederate army were administered by the Confederate States War Department, which was established by the Confederate Provisional Congress in an act on February 21, 1861. The Confederate Congress gave control over military operations, and authority for mustering state forces and volunteers to the President of the Confederate States of America on February 28, 1861, and March 6, 1861. On March 8, the Confederate Congress passed a law that authorized President Davis to issue proclamations to call up no more than 100,000 men.[20] The C.S. War Department asked for 8,000 volunteers on March 9, 20,000 on April 8, and 49,000 on and after April 16. Davis proposed an army of 100,000 soldiers in his message to Congress on April 29.[21]
On August 8, 1861, the Confederacy called for 400,000 volunteers to serve for one or three years. Eight months later in April 1862,[22] the Confederacy passed the first conscription law in either Confederate or Union history, the Conscription Act,[23] which made all able bodied white men between the ages of 18 and 35 liable for a three-year term of service in the Provisional Army. It also extended the terms of enlistment for all one-year soldiers to three years. Men employed in certain occupations considered to be most valuable for the home front (such as railroad and river workers, civil officials, telegraph operators, miners, druggists and teachers) were exempt from the draft.[24] The act was amended twice in 1862. On September 27, the maximum age of conscription was extended to 45.[25] On October 11, the Confederate States Congress passed the so-called "Twenty Negro Law",[26] which exempted anyone who owned 20 or more slaves, a move that caused deep resentment among conscripts who did not own slaves.[27]
The C.S. Congress enacted several more amendments throughout the war to address losses suffered in battle as well as the United States' greater supply of manpower. In December 1863, it abolished the previous practice of allowing a rich drafted man to hire a substitute to take his place in the ranks. Substitution had also been practiced in the United States, leading to similar resentment from the lower classes. In February 1864, the age limits were extended to between 17 and 50.[28] Challenges to the subsequent acts came before five state supreme courts; all five upheld them.[29]
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In his 2010 book Major Problems in the Civil War, historian Michael Perman says that historians are of two minds on why millions of men seemed so eager to fight, suffer and die over four years:
Some historians emphasize that Civil War soldiers were driven by political ideology, holding firm beliefs about the importance of liberty, Union, or state rights, or about the need to protect or to destroy slavery. Others point to less overtly political reasons to fight, such as the defense of one's home and family, or the honor and brotherhood to be preserved when fighting alongside other men. Most historians agree that, no matter what he thought about when he went into the war, the experience of combat affected him profoundly and sometimes affected his reasons for continuing to fight.
— Michael Perman, Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction (2010), p. 178.[30]
Educated soldiers drew upon their knowledge of American history to justify their costs. Historian James M. McPherson says:
Confederate and Union soldiers interpreted the heritage of 1776 in opposite ways. Confederates professed to fight for liberty and independence from a too radical government; Unionists said they fought to preserve the nation conceived in liberty from dismemberment and destruction ... The rhetoric of liberty that had permeated the letters of Confederate volunteers in 1861, grew even stronger as the war progressed.[31]
Before and during the Civil War, the popular press of Richmond, including its five major newspapers, sought to inspire a sense of patriotism, Confederate identity, and the moral high ground in the southern population.[32]
The southern churches met the shortage of Army chaplains by sending missionaries. The Southern Baptists sent a total of 78 missionaries, starting in 1862. Presbyterians were even more active, with 112 missionaries sent in early 1865. Other missionaries were funded and supported by the Episcopalians, Methodists, and Lutherans. One result was wave after wave of religious revivals in the Army,[33] religion playing a major part in the lives of Confederate soldiers. Some men with a weak religious affiliation became committed Christians, and saw their military service in terms of satisfying God's wishes. Religion strengthened the soldiers' loyalty to their comrades and the Confederacy.[34][35][36][37] Military historian Samuel J. Watson argues that Christian faith was a major factor in combat motivation. According to his analysis, the soldiers' faith was consoling for the loss of comrades; it was a shield against fear; it helped reduce drinking and fighting in the ranks; it enlarged the soldiers' community of close friends and helped compensate for their long-term separation from home.[38][39]
In his 1997 book For Cause and Comrades, which examines the motivations of the American Civil War's soldiers, noted Princeton University war historian and author James M. McPherson (born 1936), contrasts the views of Confederate soldiers regarding slavery with those of the colonial American revolutionaries of the earlier 18th century.[40] He stated that while the American rebel colonists of the 1770s saw an incongruity between owning slaves on the one hand, and proclaiming to be fighting for liberty on the other, the later Confederacy's soldiers did not, as the Confederate ideology of white supremacy negated any contradiction between the two:
Unlike many slaveholders in the age of Thomas Jefferson, Confederate soldiers from slaveholding families expressed no feelings of embarrassment or inconsistency in fighting for their liberty while holding other people in slavery. Indeed, white supremacy and the right of property in slaves were at the core of the ideology for which Confederate soldiers fought.
— James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997), p. 106.[40]
McPherson states that Confederate States Army soldiers did not discuss the issue of slavery as often as the opposing United States Army soldiers did, because most Confederate soldiers readily accepted as an obvious fact that they were fighting to perpetuate slavery and thus did not feel the need to debate over it:
[O]nly 20 percent of the sample of 429 Southern soldiers explicitly voiced proslavery convictions in their letters or diaries. As one might expect, a much higher percentage of soldiers from slaveholding families than from non-slaveholding families expressed such a purpose: 33 percent, compared with 12 percent. Ironically, the proportion of Union soldiers who wrote about the slavery question was greater, as the next chapter will show. There is a ready explanation for this apparent paradox. Emancipation was a salient issue for Union soldiers because it was controversial. Slavery was less salient for most Confederate soldiers because it was not controversial. They took slavery for granted as one of the Southern 'rights' and institutions for which they fought, and did not feel compelled to discuss it.
— James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997), pp. 109–110.[41]
Continuing, retired Professor McPherson also stated that of the hundreds of Confederate soldiers' letters he had examined, none of them contained any anti-slavery sentiment whatsoever:
Although only 20 percent of the soldiers avowed explicit proslavery purposes in their letters and diaries, none at all dissented from that view.
— James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997), p. 110, emphasis in original.[41]
McPherson admits some flaws in his sampling of letters. Soldiers from slaveholding families were overrepresented by 100%: