Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.

Civil

Specialty Definition: American Civil War

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

Stainless Banner, adopted on May 26, 1863 by Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory. (compare Stars and Bars)

The American civil war was fought in the United States of America between the northern states, popularly referred to as the "Union", and the seceding southern states (in the U.S., The South), calling themselves the Confederate States of America or the "Confederacy" between 1861 and 1865.

While there is considerable debate about the influence of individual events that led the states to war, the following events are often cited as contributing:

• Widening abolitionist sentiment in the North had been influenced by:
  • Uncle Tom's Cabin published in 1852
  • Dred Scott case, 1857
  • John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859, resulting in Brown's capture and execution. Abolitionists paid for his legal defense, deeply offending the South.
  • William Lloyd Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society
• The issue of whether new states would be slave states or free states:
  • Missouri Compromise of 1820
  • Compromise of 1850
  • Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854
• The rising of the Republican Party:
  • Created in 1854, it was against expansion of slavery territory and composed of Conscience Whigs, Anti-Nebraska Democrats, Know-Nothings, and Nativists
  • Election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 (Lincoln had no electoral votes from the South)
• Earlier expressions of states' rights against federal authority such as the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and the South Carolina Exposition and Protest, which supported the doctrine of nullification preceded the doctrine of succession.
• Economic issues including taxation and imbalance of trade

There is little question that the salient issue in the minds of the public and popular press of the time, and the histories written since, was the issue of slavery. Slavery had been abolished in most northern states, but was legal and important to the economy of the Confederacy, which depended on cheap agricultural labor. State sovereignty (for the South) and preservation of the Union (for the North) have both also been cited as issues, but both were reflections of the slavery issue, i.e., could the Federal government force southern states to end slavery or could the southern states leave the Union to preserve slavery?

These names are infrequently used today, but the war was also known in the South as The War Between the States, The War of Northern Aggression, The War of Southern Independence, Mr. Lincoln's War, or simply as The War. More obscure names for the war include The Second American Revolution and The War in Defense of Virginia. Northerners often referred to it as The War of the Rebellion, The War to Save the Union, or The War for Abolition.

The states which seceded consisted of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Three 'slave states' did not secede: Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky. Although Kentucky did not secede, it declared itself neutral in the conflict. Delaware and Maryland were garrisoned by Union forces throughout the war to prevent their secession. Missouri's government split, with a Unionist government in the capitol and a secessionist government-in-exile run from Camden, Arkansas and Marshall, Texas. The state of West Virginia was created by the secession from Virginia of its northwestern counties, and added to the Union in 1863.

The Union was led by President Abraham Lincoln and the Confederacy by President Jefferson Davis.

Historical Summary

It started with Lincoln's victory in the presidential election of 1860, which triggered South Carolina's secession from the Union. Leaders in the state had long been waiting for an event that might unite the South against the antislavery forces. Once the election returns were certain, a special South Carolina convention declared "that the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states under the name of the 'United States of America' is hereby dissolved." By February 1, 1861, six more Southern states had seceded. On February 7, the seven states adopted a provisional constitution for the Confederate States of America. The remaining southern states as yet remained in the Union.

Less than a month later, on March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president of the United States. In his inaugural address, he refused to recognize the secession, considering it "legally void". His speech closed with a plea for restoration of the bonds of union. The South, particularly South Carolina, ignored the plea, and on April 12, the South fired upon the Federal troops stationed at Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina until the troops surrendered.

Abraham Lincoln
16th President
(1861-1865)

As a Confederate force was built up by July 1861 at Manassas, Virginia, a march by Union troops under the command of Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell on the Confederate forces there, was halted in the First Battle of Bull Run, or First Manassas, whereupon they were forced back to Washington, DC by Confederate troops under the command of Generals Joseph E. Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard. Alarmed at the loss, and in an attempt to prevent more slave states from leaving the Union, the United States Congress passed the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution on July 25 of that year which stated that the war was being fought to preserve the Union and not to end slavery.

Major General George McClellan took command of the Union Army of the Potomac on July 26 (he was briefly given supreme command of all the Union armies, but was subsequently relieved of that post in favor of Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck), and the war began in earnest in 1862. Ulysses S. Grant gave the Union its first victory of the war, by capturing Fort Henry, Tennessee on February 6 of that year.

McClellan reached the gates of Richmond in the spring of 1862, but when Robert E. Lee defeated him in the Seven Days Campaign, he was relieved of command of the Army of the Potomac. His successor, John Pope, was beaten spectacularly by Lee at Second Bull Run in August. Emboldened, the Confederacy's made its first invasion of the North, when General Lee led 55,000 men of the Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac River at White's Ford near Leesburg, Virginia into Maryland on September 5. Lincoln then restored McClellan, who won a bloody, almost Pyrrhic victory at the Battle of Antietam near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862. Lee's army, checked at last, returned to Virginia.

When McClellan failed to follow up on Antietam, he was replaced by Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside. Burnside suffered near-immediate defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg, and was in his turn replaced by Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker. Hooker, too, proved unable to defeat Lee's army, and was relieved after the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863. He was replaced by Maj. Gen. George Meade, who stopped Lee's invasion of Union-held territory at what is sometimes considered the war's turning point, the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863), inflicting 28,000 casualties on Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, and again forcing it to retreat to its namesake state.

While the Confederate forces had some success in the Eastern theater holding on to their capital, fortune did not smile upon them in the West. Confederate forces were driven from Missouri early in the war.

Jefferson Davis
First and only President of the Confederate States of America

Nashville, Tennessee fell to the Union early in 1862. The Mississippi was opened, at least to Vicksburg, with the taking of Island No. 10 and New Madrid, Missouri and then Memphis, Tennessee. New Orleans was captured in January, 1862, allowing the Union forces to begin moving up the Mississippi as well.

The Union's key strategist and tactician was Ulysses S. Grant, who won victories at Fort Donelson, Battle of Shiloh, Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, driving Confederate forces out of Tennessee. Grant understood the concept of total war and realized, along with Lincoln, that only the utter defeat of Confederate forces would bring an end to the war.

At the beginning of 1864, Grant was given command of all Union armies. He chose to make his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac although Meade remained the actual commander of that army. Union forces in the East attempted to maneuver past Lee and fought several battles during that phase of the Eastern campaign: the Battle of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, and Cold Harbor. An attempt to outflank Lee from the South failed under Generals Butler and Smith, who were 'corked' into the Bermuda Hundred river bend. Grant was tenacious and kept pressing the Army of Northern Virginia under the command of Robert E. Lee. He extended the Confederate army, pinning it down in the Siege of Petersburg and, after two failed attempts (under Siegel and Hunter), finally found a commander, Philip Sheridan, who could clear the threat to Washington DC from the Shenandoah Valley.

Meanwhile General William Tecumseh Sherman marched from Chattanoga on Atlanta and laid waste to much of the rest of Georgia after he left Atlanta and marched to the sea at Savannnah. When Sherman turned north through South Carolina and North Carolina to approach the Virginia lines from the south, it was the end for Lee and his men, and for the Confederacy.

Advantages widely believed to have contributed to the Union's success include:

• The North's strong, industrial economy
• The North's strong compatible railroad links (and the South's lack thereof)
• The North's larger population
• The North's possession of the U.S. merchant marine fleet and naval ships (and successful blockade of the South)
• The North's established government
• The North's moral cause (the Emancipation Proclamation) given to the war by Abraham Lincoln mid-way during the war and encouraged international support.

Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia on 9 April 1865 at Appomattox Court house. Joseph E. Johnston, who commanded Confederate forces in North Carolina, surrendered his troops to Sherman shortly thereafter. The Battle of Palmito Ranch, fought on May 13, 1865, in the far south of Texas was the last land battle of the war and ended with a Confederate victory. All Confederate land forces had surrendered by June 1865. Confederate naval units surrendered as late as November of 1865.

Major Battles

Major battles included First Bull Run, Second Bull Run, Battle of Shiloh, The Seven Days, Antietam, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and the Siege of Petersburg. A naval battle between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia was the first battle in history between steam-powered, iron-armored ships with shell-firing guns. The Union's naval blockade of the Confederate coast was one of the most ambitious up to that time, and was the first major blockade under the Declaration of Paris of 1856.

See also: List of American Civil War battles

Civil War Leaders

Significant Southern leaders included Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, James Longstreet, P.G.T. Beauregard, Braxton Bragg, James Ewell Brown (JEB) Stuart, and Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Northern leaders included Abraham Lincoln, Edwin M. Stanton, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, George B. McClellan, Henry W. Halleck, Joseph Hooker, Ambrose Burnside, George McClellan, Irvin McDowell, Philip Sheridan, George Crook, George Armstrong Custer, Christopher "Kit" Carson, John E. Wool, George G. Meade, and Abner Read.

Aftermath

During the War, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves held in territory under Confederate control at the time of the Proclamation. Slaves were not freed in the remaining states and parts of the Confederacy until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment by 3/4 of the states, which did not occur until December of 1865, 8 months after the end of the war. A good deal of ill will among the Southern survivors resulted from the resulting shift of political power to the North, the destruction inflicted on the South by the Union armies as the end of the war approached, and the Reconstruction program instituted in the South by the Union after the war's end.

According to data from the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, the last surviving Union veteran of the conflict, Albert Woolson, died on August 2, 1956 at the age of 109, and the last Confederate veteran, John Salling, died on March 16, 1958 at the age of 112. However, William Marvel investigated the claims of both for a 1991 piece in the Civil War history magazine Blue & Gray. Using census information, he found that Salling was born in 1858, far too late to have served in the Civil War. In fact, he concluded, "Every one of the last dozen recognized Confederates was bogus." He found Woolson to be the last true veteran of the Civil War on either side; he had served as a drummer boy late in the war.

See also: American Civil War spies, Emancipation Proclamation, CSS Hunley, Jim Crow laws, Ku Klux Klan and Reconstruction.

External Links

• Portions copied from the U.S. Department of State infoUSA site
• American Civil War
• PBS Civil War

  Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "American Civil War."

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Civil engineering

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

Civil engineering is a field of engineering that deals with the construction and maintenance of the structures that are required for human civilization, such as buildings, roads, water supply and sewers. In general, civil engineering has developed from observations of the ways natural and manmade systems react and from the development of empirical equations that provide bases for design.

It is an umbrella field comprised of many related specialities.

Structural engineering, of which structural design is a component, is typically the largest part of civil engineering as a practice. Structural engineers design bridges, buildings, offshore oil platforms, dams etc. Structural analysis is another component of structural engineering and a key component in the structural design process. This involves computing the stresses and forces at work within a structure. There are some structural engineers who work in non-typical areas, designing aircraft, spacecraft and even biomedical devices.

Supporting structural engineering is the field of geotechnical engineering. The importance of geotechnical engineering can hardly be overstated: buildings must be connected to the ground. Geotechnical engineering is concerned with soil properties, foundations, footings and soil dynamics.

Transportation engineering is concerned with queueing theory and traffic flow planning, roadway geometric design and driver behavior patterns. Simulation of traffic operation is performed through use of trip generation, traffic assignment algorithims which can be highly complex computational problems.

Environmental engineering deals with the treatment of chemical, biological, and/or thermal waste and with hydrology.

Sanitary engineering is primarily concerned with purifying water for drinking and with treating sewage.

Hydraulic engineering is concerned with the flow and conveyance of fluids, principally water. This area of engineering is, of course, intimately related to the design of bridges, dams, channels, canals, and levees, and to both Sanitary and Environmental engineering.

Construction engineering involves planning and execution of the designs from transportation, site development, hydraulic, environmental, structural and geotechnical engineers.

Civil engineering also includes material science. Engineering materials include concrete, steel and recently, polymers and ceramics with potential engineering application.

A popular misconception is that civil engineering is far from the exciting frontiers in mathematics and computer science. In actuality, much of what is now computer science was driven by work in civil engineering, where structural and network analysis problems required parallel computations and development of advanced algorithms.

There are also civil engineers who work in the area of safety engineering, applying probabilistic methods to structural design, safety analysis and even estimates of insurance losses due to natural and man-made hazards.

The civil engineer degree

In Scandinavian countries, some people prefer to call their Master of Science degree by the term civil engineer. The word has its origin from one of the English meaning of 'civil engineer' [1];

an engineer whose training or occupation is in the design and construction especially of public works (as roads or harbors).

Although the English language meaning is very narrow, during the middle of 19th century (before [1] 1874), its Swedish interpretation also becamed 'person graduated from institute of technology' and now the profession represents all fields within engineering professions, like civil engineering, computer science, electronics engineering, etc. However, it might also mean only the civil engineering topic.

Although a 'college engineer' (högskoleingenjör, diplomingenioer) represents a Bachelor of Science in Scandinavia, to become a 'civil engineer', one have to almost re-start the education from zero and it will take a half up to one year extra compared to B.Sc./M.Sc. studies. This is because the higher educational system is not fully suited to the international standard graduation system since, at least in Sweden, it is treated as a professional degree.

See also

• List of civil engineers

  Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Civil engineering."

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Civil law

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

The term civil law is used to refer to three different bodies of law:

1. a legal system derived from Roman law and commonly used in Europe; here the contrast is common law;
2. the set of rules governing relations between persons (either humans or legal personalities such as corporations); here the contrast is public law, especially criminal law;
3. Secular law, as opposed to canon law.

(1) Civil law (as opposed to "common law") is a legal tradition which is the basis of the law in many countries of the world, especially in continental Europe, but also Quebec, Louisiana, Japan, Latin America, and elsewhere. (Some authors wrongly state that the Scottish legal system is also based on civil law, because of its origin in civil law. But it has been developing since 1707 into a mixed system combining elements of civil law and of common law as the House of Lords in England being the court of last resort for Scotland has interpreted Scots Law through the lens of English jurisprudence.) In the western and southwestern parts of the U.S., laws in such diverse areas as divorce and water rights show the influence of their Iberian civil-law heritage, being based on distinctly different principles from the laws of the northeastern states colonized by settlers with English common-law roots.

The civil law is based on Roman law, especially the Corpus Juris Civilis of Emperor Justinian, as latter developed through the Middle Ages by mediaeval legal scholars. The most authoritative modern source is Karl Eduard Zachariae.

Originally civil law was one common legal system in much of Europe, but with the development of nationalism in the 17th century Nordic countries and around the time of the French Revolution, it became fractured into separate national systems. This change was brought about by the development of national codes, most importantly the Napoleonic Code, but the German and Swiss codes are also of historical importance. Around this time civil law incorporated many ideas associated with the Enlightenment.

Some authors consider that civil law latter served as the foundation for socialist law used in Communist countries, which in this view would basically be civil law with the addition of Marxist-Leninist ideas.

Civil law, in this sense, is primarily contrasted to common law, which is the legal system developed among Anglo-Saxon peoples, especially in England. The primary difference is that, historically, common law was law developed by custom, beginning before there were any written laws and continuing to be applied by courts after there were written laws, too, whereas civil law develops out of the Roman law of Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis proceeding from broad legal principles and the interpretation of doctrinal writings rather than the application of facts to legal fictions. In later times civil law became codified as droit coutumier or customary law that were local compliations of legal principles recognized as normative. This lead after the French Revolution to the development of Civil Codes in such jurisdictions such as France (with its Napoleonic Code), Quebec, Spain, and Germany (with its own German Civil Code), but remains uncodified in such countries as Scotland, Belgium, Namibia and South Africa to name a few countries that remain uncodified civilian or mixed jurisdictions.

In practice, in many countries based on civil law, such as France, case law still plays a considerable role.

See Also:

• Law of Obligations

(2) Civil law regulates relationships amongst persons and organizations. Civil law, in this sense, is usually referring to redress to civil law courts (as opposed to criminal courts) and is often used as a means to resolve disputes involving accidents (torts such as negligence), libel and other intentional torts, contract disputes, the probate of wills, and trusts, and any other private matters that can be resolved between private parties. Violations of civil law are considered to be torts or breaches of contract, rather than crimes. Depending upon the regional government, this field of law contain commercial law and some kinds of administrative law remedies, though sometimes administrative law judges adjudicate penal law violations such as parking tickets and other minor offenses.

Contractual law enforces contracts by allowing a party, whose rights have been violated or breached, to collect damages and penalties from a defendant. Where monetary damages are deemed insufficient, civil courts may offer other remedies; such as forbidding someone to do an act (eg; an injunction) or formally changing someone's legal status (eg; divorce or change of name). Civil lawsuits sometimes occur as a result of criminal action, and such a lawsuit can be successful even when the defendant was found not guilty under criminal law. Some civil lawsuits, such as under the civil provisions of the U.S. federal RICO Racketeering, Influence, and Corrupt Organizations statutes, allow for a private right of action for damages when someone has suffered due to the violation of certain predicate crimes under federal law (such as wire and mail fraud and other specifically enumerated federal offenses).

See Also:

• Barratry
• Cause of action
• Civil procedure
• Class action
• Fraud
• Frivolous lawsuit
• Litigant
• Garnishee order

(3) Civil law (as opposed to "canon law") is the secular legal system of the national government when there is also a system of ecclesiastical courts governed by a church's laws in the same country. This was the situation in England that repeatedly caused problems between the two legal systems, most famously perhaps the one that led to the murder of Thomas à Becket during the reign of Henry II of England.

INDEX

1. Definition 2. Synonyms 3. Crosswords 4. Usage: Modern

5. Usage: Commercial 6. Images: Slideshow 7. Images: Photo Album 8. Images: Digital Art

9. Quotations: Familiar 10. Quotations: Historic 11. Quotations: Fiction 12. Quotations: Non-fiction

13. Quotations: Spoken 14. Quotations: Speeches 15. Usage Frequency 16. Names: Frequency

17. Expressions 18. Expressions: Internet 19. Translations: Modern 20. Translations: Ancient

21. Abbreviations 22. Acronyms 23. Derivations 24. Rhymes

25. Anagrams 26. Bibliography

Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.