Names of the American Civil War
During the Jim Crow era of the 1950s, the term "War of Northern Aggression" developed under the Lost Cause of the Confederacy movement by Southern historical revisionists or negationists.
Commentators sometimes explain the naming scheme as linked to the economic and demographic differences between North and South – to the more industrialised North natural features like creeks would be notable whereas the more rural and agrarian Southerners would consider towns more remarkable.
In the United States, "Civil War" is the most common term for the conflict and has been used by the overwhelming majority of reference books, scholarly journals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, popular histories, and mass media in the United States since the early 20th century.
[1] The National Park Service, the government organization entrusted by the US Congress to preserve the battlefields of the war, uses this term.
[2][full citation needed] Writings of prominent men such as Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee,[3][full citation needed] Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, P. G. T. Beauregard, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Judah P. Benjamin used the term "Civil War" during the conflict.
[4][5][6] English-language historians[7][8][9] outside the United States usually refer to the conflict as the "American Civil War".
[10] The Confederate government avoided the term "civil war", which assumes both combatants to be part of a single country, and so referred to it in official documents as the "War between the Confederate States of America and the United States of America".
[11] European diplomacy produced a similar formula for avoiding the phrase "civil war".
In the early 20th century, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) led a campaign to promote the term "War Between the States" in the media and public schools.
During and immediately after the war, US officials, Southern Unionists, and pro-Union writers often referred to Confederates as "Rebels".
[20] On November 8, 1860, the Charleston Mercury, a contemporary southern newspaper, stated, "The tea has been thrown overboard.
The term is still used by the Sons of Confederate Veterans organization but with the intent to represent the Confederacy's cause positively.
[22][not specific enough to verify] Some Southern Unionists and northerners used "The War for the Union", the title of a December 1861 lecture by the abolitionist leader Wendell Phillips.
The sixth volume, War Becomes Revolution, 1862–1863, picks up on that earlier thread in naming the conflict, but Nevins neither viewed Southern secession as revolutionary nor supported Southern apologist attempts to link the war with the American Revolution of 1775–1783.
[25][26][27][better source needed] The name has been criticized by historians such as James M. McPherson,[28] as the Confederacy "took the initiative by seceding in defiance of an election of a president by a constitutional majority"[28] and "started the war by firing on the American flag".
[31] Conversely, the "War of Southern Aggression" has been used by those who assert that the Confederacy was the belligerent party.
They maintain that the Confederacy started the war by initiating combat at Fort Sumter.
Many modern accounts of Civil War battles use the names established by the North.
