This was one of the most brutal, bloody and Godforsaken times ever in America. The Sixties in the South were bad for us, but the Civil War was far worse. Why the South "liked Dixie" and wanted to create another nation within the United States, one below the Mason-Dixon Line, is hard to fathom. People in the South even used to put on Civil War "recreations," as if it was "fun" somehow, where actors pretended to "die" in the major battles of the War, which has been described by historians as a war where "brother killed brother."

Anyway, the Civil War was between the northern United States, (the Union, or the North) and the southern slave states of the temporary Confederate States of America (the Confederacy, or the South), which was led by their elected president, Jefferson Davis. The Union included all Free states and also the five slave-holding Border States, and its leaders were President Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, which was actually the original version of what later became the Democratic Party.

The Republicans at that time opposed the expansion of slavery into USA owned territories abroad, and Lincoln's victory in the presidential election of 1860 resulted in seven of the southern states declaring secession from the Union, which happened before Lincoln took office. The Union summarily rejected secession, calling it an internal "rebellion."

The war itself began on April 12 of 1861, with Confederate forces attacking a Union military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. President Lincoln soon formed up a large volunteer army of northerners, but four more southern states then declared their secession. Over the first year of the war, the Union assumed control of the Border States, establishing a naval blockade, but both sides amassed huge armies and resources. In 1862, the battles of Shiloh and Antietam produced war casualties on American soil unlike anything that had gone before them.

Some 620,000 Americans died fighting this bloody war, heralded as "the battle between brother and brother in the land of liberty." Many men who fought in it were family members related to each other. The war caused an untold number of civilian casualties, financially ruining the white South. It left huge farm fields strewn with bodies, as newer weapons technology caused massive damage.

This war went down in history as the worst one America ever fought, which is probably a major reason why the South still remembers it. White northerners certainly remember their "attitude adjustment" problems over their loss, which include references to the South "rising again" and somehow even, yes, seceding from the Union. Most of this latter "ranting" has died down, since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Howsoever, during the Civil War, the white North offered opportunities to blacks if they fought for them, while the South actually used black soldiers themselves, being able to press their own slaves into battle. But this is where the Emancipation Proclamation came into play, and what made it famous was that its "war goal" was ending southern slavery. This seriously complicated the Confederacy's manpower shortages, and probably helped the Union to finally win. But the entire country, especially the South itself, was horribly torn up and devastated, and needed reparations over a great length of time, causing the South to dream of white vengeance.

Confederate General Robert E. Lee won many victories initially over the Union army, but Lee's loss at Gettysburg in 1863 turned the war over to the North. Union General Ulysses S. Grant fought several gruesome battles with Lee in 1864 which forced the Confederate general to defend the Confederate capital in Richmond, Virginia. Then Union General William Sherman captured Atlanta, Georgia, starting his famous March to the Sea, devastating a hundred-mile area in Georgia. The Confederate resistance soon collapsed, after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House in April of 1865 in Virginia.

The war had been caused primarily by the battle over "the question of slavery." The coexistence of a slave-owning South with an increasingly abolitionist North was not well borne, and the conflict was inevitable. Meanwhile, President Lincoln would not propose federal laws against slavery where it already existed, although in his 1858 "A House Divided" speech, he had stated his plans to "arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction."

Lincoln was often wishy-washy about ending slavery, wanting to make concessions to the South, so Dr. King was not his most enthusiastic supporter, along with other civil rights leaders. MLK apparently vastly enjoyed getting to speak in Washington D.C. after the "March for Jobs, Peace and Freedom" in 1963 at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, a giant white statue - because he got to outclass Lincoln by having more people listen to what a black man had to say for a change. That's where King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, affirming what Lincoln really wanted to believe. MLK was assassinated primarily for trying to end the "baggage" of years of oppression due to slavery. He wanted blacks to get jobs, and also to end the Viet Nam War - not his most popular platform.

But slavery back in the 1800s was the issue of the century in America. Therefore, the most pitched American political battle of the 1850s was over the expansion of slavery into the newly created territories, which had been bought from France through its emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte. This was the Louisiana Purchase. All of these new organized territories were set to become free-soil states, which pushed the South into secession, for both the North and the South knew that if slavery could not expand any further, it would die. Too many federal and state laws had been passed, banning the importation of further slaves, for instance.

The South's fears of losing control of State's Rights to the federal government and the abolitionists, and the contrasting northern fears that "slave power" (I think that phrase may be from where Stokely Carmichael got "Black Power") was controlling the government pushed the ongoing crisis to the wall in the late 1850s. Both the North and South were influenced by the ideas of Thomas Jefferson from his "Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions," which emphasized State's Rights and the right of revolution mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, but they interpreted them wildly differently from each other.

On the one hand, northerners like abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and moderate Republican leader Abraham Lincoln stressed and underlined the Jeffersonian declaration that "All men are created equal," a statement also mentioned in Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address." But to oppose these views, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens wrote "A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States." He thought slavery was the "cornerstone of the Confederacy," claiming that the war was not over slavery, but instead concerned State's Rights. Stephens became one of the South's staunch defenders of what was becoming known as the "Lost Cause," the attempt to maintain the South's "grand glory days."

Read the next article in this series, "The America Civil War - Ends in 1865" and the other articles in this long article series about why racism was and is so prevalent in the American South.

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