Nevada and the Civil War

The State of Nevada became a state at the end of the Civil War in 1864.  Nevada nicknamed the “Battle Born State”, was formerly Nevada Territory and under federal control. The Comstock Lode (the Virginia City Area) was a main source of silver and helped provide funding for the Union war efforts. Abraham Lincoln, president from 1861 until his assassination in 1865, needed Nevada’s electoral votes to win re-election against democrat George B. McClellan. To achieve statehood before the deadline for Lincoln’s re-election the entire 16,543-word constitution was telegraphed to Washington from Carson City via Salt Lake City, Chicago, and Philadelphia. The two-day, 12-hour transmission cost over $4300, roughly $90,000 today, and was the longest telegraph ever sent at that time. Nevada received statehood one week before Lincoln’s re-election. Following his re-election in 1864, Lincoln sought to heal the war-torn nation through Reconstruction.

The Compromise of 1850 failed to alleviate tensions over slavery between the slave-holding South and the free North. As the slavery debate in the Nebraska and Kansas territories became particularly acrimonious, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas proposed popular sovereignty as a compromise; the measure would allow the electorate of each territory to decide the status of slavery. The legislation alarmed many Northerners who sought to prevent the spread of slavery, but Douglas's Kansas–Nebraska Act narrowly passed Congress in May of 1854. Lincoln's Peoria Speech of October 1854, in which he declared his opposition to slavery, was one of an estimated 175 speeches he delivered in the next six years on the topic of excluding slavery from the territories. Lincoln's attacks on the Kansas–Nebraska Act marked his return to political life. The South was a slavery-based economy using free slave labor in the agriculture industry. While the North depended on more of a factory-based industry economy. Abraham Lincoln wanted to stop the whole slavery industry. 



After Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and before his inauguration in March 1861 seven southern states seceded from the Union forming the Confederate States fearing his opposition to slavery and their way of life. Four more states would secede following the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861 that formally started the Civil War. Lincoln wanted the United States to stay together and had used it as part of his campaign speeches. Most of the Confederate States would rejoin the Union in 1868 during Reconstruction, the last four in 1870 after ratifying the 14^th Amendment banning slavery.

Nevada provided 12,000 volunteer soldiers to the Union of the North, more than requested. The Civil War was the bloodiest war fought in the United States. Young men as young as 15 years of age were allowed in. Women were not allowed to be soldiers, but some disguised themselves as men and entered. Most soldiers died of disease. Diarrhea and dysentery were the leading causes of death as well as inadequate sanitation and a general lack of medical knowledge regarding germs and malnutrition.