What effects did the Civil War have on the relationship between the federal government and the states?

This special issue focuses on the role of federalism in the Civil War era, primarily in the years before the war. Federalism—or the distribution of power among different governing bodies—defined how most nineteenth-century Americans understood their relationship to the government, both in theory and in practice.1 These men and women did not simply interact with the government and the law; rather, they were forced to navigate the complex relationships and overlapping authorities among the various governing bodies and regulations that made up the federal system.

Until recently, Civil War–era political and legal historians primarily viewed federalism as a binary—as the relationship between the federal government and the states. There is good reason for this: the two most pressing elements of the study of federalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been the meaning of "states' rights" in the conflict between northern and southern states and the role of the Civil War in producing the modern nation-state. This first emphasis comes from a desire to slay continuing Lost Cause dragons. Since the late years of the Civil War, Confederates and their defenders attempted to shift the meaning of the war from a conflict over slavery to one over the equality and sovereignty of the states. States' rights, they argued, motivated white southerners to leave the union and caused the Confederacy's downfall. No one captured this idea more distinctly than Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who later claimed he had told a colleague in 1864, "If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone, 'Died of a Theory.'"2

Historians have thoroughly dismantled the idea that Confederates fought primarily for a constitutional theory of states' rights. Some have argued that white southerners only used states' rights rhetorically, when it suited their political purposes. These historians often point to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act—the single biggest expansion of federal power in the prewar period—and white southerners' efforts to enact a federal slave code as evidence of states' rights hypocrisy.3 More recently, scholars have [End Page 499] emphasized the power of white southerners within the federal government and, conversely, how white northerners relied on their own states' rights arguments in fighting against slavery.4 While legal and constitutional historians remain interested in how conflicts between state and federal power manifested in the prewar period, all agree that any states' rights arguments that Confederates made were grounded in concerns about the peculiar institution.5

Historians who have studied Confederate governance have also shown just how problematic Davis's quip remains. These scholars emphasize how quickly the Confederacy centralized in the Civil War years.6 Their work has contributed to a second emphasis of scholarship on American federalism: the creation of the modern nation state. Works concerned with the growing power of Congress and executive bureaucracy in the Civil War and postwar years abound.7 Since the 1990s, scholars influenced by political science have pushed back on the idea that the Civil War revolutionized the role of the federal government, emphasizing the expansive nature of the State—both at the federal and state level—in the antebellum period.8

In recent years, new directions in the study of federalism have begun to take shape. A group of legal scholars has shifted the word's meaning beyond the federal-state binary to highlight the interactions among local, state, and federal powers and the prevalence of intersecting legal authorities. This new definition has allowed for key insights into the ways Americans understood and engaged with the federal system, particularly in the Revolutionary era and the twentieth century.9 Yet this new work also presents an opportunity for Civil War–era historians to reinvestigate how governance operated during our period. Thus, the articles in this issue examine federalism from multiple angles and investigate how the structures of the federal system had significant consequences for how Americans engaged with the most pressing problems of the period.

The importance of understanding the role of local governance in American federalism is critical to Laura Edwards's essay on how women participated in the...

But above all, Lincoln loved the telegram. Invented just a few decades earlier, the telegraph system had gone national in 1844.

As Tom Wheeler recounts in his book, Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War, the White House had no telegraph connection. Twice daily throughout his presidency, Lincoln walked to the telegraph office of the War Department (on the site of today's Eisenhower Executive Office Building, just west of the White House) to receive updates and to send orders to his generals on the front. He sent this one to General Ulysses S. Grant on Aug. 17, 1864: "Hold on with a bull-dog grip, and chew & choke, as much as possible."

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Before Lincoln's day, letters and speeches were often long-winded. With the telegraph came the need for concise communication. After all, every dot and dash of Morse Code carried a cost. Gone were the "wherefores," "herewith" and "hences." Flowery, formal speech was out.

Lincoln's Gettysburg and Second Inaugural addresses both demonstrate this new economy of phrase. "Events were moving too fast for the more languid phrases of the past," historian Garry Wills writes in his book Lincoln at Gettysburg. "The trick, of course, was not simply to be brief but to say a great deal in the fewest words. Lincoln justly boasted, of his Second Inaugural's six hundred words, ‘Lots of wisdom in that document, I suspect.'"

Not only did Lincoln's wartime dependence on the telegraph eventually lead to a wave of investment in new communication devices, from the telephone to the Internet (the latter invented, not coincidentally, for military use), but it also signaled the evolution of a language that morphs as quickly as the devices that instantaneously tweet our words around the globe.

5. We identify ourselves as Democrats and Republicans.

Before 1854, you might have been a Whig. Or a Free Soiler. But that year the Republican Party was founded by anti-slavery activists and refugees from other political parties to fight the iron grip of powerful southern Democrats.

A 1905 cover of Puck magazine employs the donkey and elephant as satirical stand-ins for the political parties that took permanent hold during the Civil War.

Udo Keppler/Library of Congress

As the name of their party suggests, these activists believed that the republic's interests should take precedence over the states'. In the years before the war, many northern Democrats defected to join the new party — and, in 1860, to elect Abraham Lincoln as the first Republican president — while southern Democrats led the march to secession.

The Democratic and Republican parties both survived the war and have held their spots as the dominant U.S. political parties ever since. The "Solid South," as it was known, protected the interests of agrarian Southern whites and consistently elected Democrats to Congress from Reconstruction through the early 1960s, when the national Democratic Party's support of the civil rights movement allowed the Republican Party to begin making new political inroads below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Within a few years, North and South swapped party hats. Conservative southerners grew disenchanted with the Democratic Party's increasingly progressive platforms. Republicans capitalized on this with their "Southern Strategy," an organized plan to make headway there on a socially conservative, states' rights platform. In reverse, historically Republican strongholds in the Northeast began voting Democrat, establishing the pattern of red and blue that we see on election-night maps today.

6. We see war "up close and personal."

The Civil War was the first war in which people at home could absorb battle news before the smoke cleared. Eyewitness accounts by reporters and soldiers were relayed via telegraph to the country's 2,500 newspapers, printed almost immediately and then read voraciously by citizens desperate to know how their boys were faring. The Civil War created a tradition of intimate war reportage that is still with us today.

This 1863 photograph shows a dead Confederate sharpshooter after the Battle of Gettysburg.

Alexander Gardner/Library of Congress

Take this excerpt from a dispatch from George Townsend, who was just 20 when he began to cover the war for the New York Herald:

"In many wounds the balls still remained, and the discolored flesh was swollen unnaturally. There were some who had been shot in the bowels, and now and then they were frightfully convulsed, breaking into shrieks and shouts. Some of them iterated a single word, as, 'doctor,' or 'help,' or 'God,' or 'oh!' commencing with a loud spasmodic cry, and continuing the same word till it died away in cadence. The act of calling seemed to lull the pain. Many were unconscious and lethargic, moving their finger, and lips mechanically, but never more to open their eyes upon the light; they were already going through the valley and the shadow."

Tony Horwitz, a former war correspondent and the author of Confederates in the Attic and the forthcoming Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, says that the front-line dispatches influenced his modern battlefront reporting. "Having been moved by soldiers' writing from the 1860s, I also sought them on foreign battlefields, even going through the pockets of the Iranian dead at Majnoon and getting a Farsi speaker to translate letters and diaries for me," he says. "This sounds ghoulish, I know, but I think you need to personalize the dead to bring home the shock and tragedy of it all. Otherwise, they're just statistics."

Photography, still in its infancy, was not yet a part of the daily news cycle. But the Civil War was the first such conflict recorded by photographers (the most famous of whom was Mathew Brady). Because the primitive wet-plate technology of the era required that subjects be still at the moment the camera's shutter snapped, images of the era depict virtually every aspect of the war but one: battle. But that in time would change, too.

7. We hold certain rights to be sacred.

A political cartoon by Currier & Ives depicts Horace Greeley, the newspaper editor and anti-slavery activist, and Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Currier & Ives/Library of Congress

Think of these three amendments to the U.S. Constitution, all ratified within five years of the end of the Civil War:

• 13th Amendment (1865). Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. ...
  
• 14th Amendment (1868).Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. ...
  
• 15th Amendment (1870). Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. ...
  

Before the Civil War, the concept of liberty and justice for all meant little unless you were white and male. Going beyond the abolition of slavery, the 14th and 15th amendments were the first extensions of citizenship and voting rights to minority groups.

Of course, half of us — women — went without a voice until 1920, but the postwar laws set a precedent that eventually would lead to suffrage for all adults. Imperfect in practice over the next 100 years, voting rights finally gained protection through the 1964 Civil Rights Act, ensuring that bigotry could never again disenfranchise any U.S. citizen.

8. We're all Americans.

An unidentified woman stands in front of a building in Georgia that displays both the state and U.S. flags.

Jack Delano/Library of Congress

It took the War Between the States to make us one nation, indivisible. Before 1861, the United States were loosely tied entities and always described as a plural noun, as in, "The United States are in trade with France."

The war's bloodiest battle came at Gettysburg in 1863, with 51,000 casualties in just three days. Although the Union stopped Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's Northern invasion, young men's bodies littered the farms and gardens that had turned into a battleground. Was the preservation of these united states worth the cost in blood?

What effect did the Civil War have on the federal government?

How did the Civil War change the power and authority of the federal government?

How did the Civil War alter the relationship between states and the national government?

Did the Civil War strengthen or weaken the federal government in relation to the states?