Per definition a civil war is when both sides try to control the same thing. the same government, same territory etc. This really wasn’t the case in the 1860s when states seceded and joined the confederacy to make their own new country (they weren’t interested in making all North America theirs), then the country they left opposed that. In some languages they call this American Secession War which IMO is just more accurate. You wouldn’t call the 1770s war a British Civil War.
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They didn’t secede. They TRIED to, but American law doesn’t allow for that. So, despite what the South said, they were under the DC federal government that time. Thus, Civil War.
Looks like you just answered your own question with the two sides trying to control the “same government, same territory.” It’s ultimately a flawed, oversimplified, nitpicky take on what a Civil War is (no matter the nation).
No one in the US calls it the “American Secession War.”
Both sides were trying to control the same territory. The states that had seceded.
The Union wanted the territory/states, and so did the Confederates.
Who told you that definition? A civil war is a war amongst groups in the same country/state – so it makes perfect sense to call it that. You don’t call it the British Civil War because it wasn’t between groups in Britain, it was them and a colony
civil war:
– a war between citizens of the same country.
– a war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country
– a war fought by different groups of people living in the same country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War
The reason the American Revolution isn’t called a civil war is because our succession worked. So in retrospect, it’s not Brits fighting each other.
The north and south were both trying to control the same territory…the South.
The American War of Independence WAS referred to as a civil war until William Drayton coined the term “American Revolution” in 1776. Many of the British regulars continued to call it a civil war throughout the conflict and these references are readily found in their contemporaneous writings.
Also, in the American Civil War both sides *were* fighting over the same territory. The declaration of war was issued because of just this reason – the firing on Ft Sumter. Sumter was Federal property located in a state that claimed it was no longer part of the Union and as such, was not required to recognize property rights of the Federal government. South Carolina claimed Sumter was its property. This concept applied to the entire war. The US government believed the entire contested territory was its territory because the Constitution established a perpetual union the South could not freely secede from. The Confederacy believed the entire contested territory was its territory because the 10th Amendment to the Constitution reserved all “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it […] to the States respectively, or to the people.” They incorrectly believed the right to secession was reserved to the states. I don’t even know how it can be reasonably argued they weren’t fighting over the same territory.
I’m not sure what your home country and native tongue are, but it wouldn’t occur to me to tell you you were wrong about the terms you used to describe your own history.
Technically the name of a war is relative to who won. If the south won it would be the southern revolution. Civil wars imply the government wins revolution implies the rebels win. It’s not perfect but that’s generally how it works
Because the United States of America did not recognize the secession as legitimate and were fighting to keep control of it’s territory.
Your cited definition matches the scenario perfectly.
As for “some languages” why does anyone else get to dictate the definition of something they played no part in?
The secession of southern states was never recognized by the U.S. government or any foreign government. All the states in rebellion had governments in exile loyal to the U.S. The confederate states were never a real country.
>You wouldn’t call the 1770s war a British Civil War.
We might be calling it that if we lost. The Confederates lost, so they effectively can be considered never to have seceded in the first place.
It is also called the War of Northern Aggression and sometimes the War between the States.
>American Secession War which IMO is just more accurate.
Curious where you’re from, and how you would react to people teaching you your own history and telling you you’re wrong.
You’re absolutely correct that it wasn’t technically a civil war. Americans generally misunderstand the term for exactly this reason. The events in Kansas in the 1850s were much more properly a civil war than the actual Civil War.
It’s called the Civil War due to political considerations, and correctly so. During and after the war it was important both politically and legally for the US to treat the way as an internal rebellion and not an actual war between independent countries, even if that was the de facto state of affairs.
This was absolutely the correct approach for a number of reasons. It was extremely beneficial when constructing the post-war legal framework for occupation as well as various legal challenges following the war. One of the most important [Texas v. White](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_v._White) found that states don’t have the unilateral right to secede from the Union and require the permission of the other states. I’m sure you can see how important a decision that was.
It’s also very important culturally. Being the product of a separatist movement ourselves the concept obviously has a lot of cultural cachet, although less nowadays as we’ve become the hegemon. Framing it as an internal conflict was extremely important both internally and externally. Northerners generally, at first at least, fought to keep the Union together against this internal threat whereas allowing the Southern framing of a noble revolution to go unchallenged would have made that harder. Externally it made foreign powers less eager to choose a side although Southern slavery did most of the work on that front with the one power that mattered, which is to say the British Empire.
Post-war it was also very important but towards the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century pro-Confederate propaganda became more and more popular and there have been concerted efforts in controlling school textbooks in order to provide a more pro-Confederate view of the war. An easy barometer in order to determine how pro-Confederate a textbook or period was is to see it’s portrayal of John Brown. If he’s described as a lunatic that’s a fairly pro-Confederate book or period. They’d have to portray a white man who would kill other white men to free black people as a lunatic. To this day there has been a constant struggle between pro-Confederate propagandists and actual historians and the name of the war is part of that. This is also why you’ve seen many people in this thread acting very defensively as this conflict is occurring today. In Florida they recently approved textbooks that [minimize the evils of slavery](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/30/ron-desantis-florida-slavery-curriculum).
Atun-Shei Films on YouTube has a lot of pretty good videos talking about modern Confederate propaganda, including this video [on a film that came out in 2003](https://youtu.be/S3E2FdedPwU?si=0U27Kd3k3DqdR0SW). I was in my early 20s at the time and pro-Confederate propaganda was running wild at the time and a lot of people like myself were drawn in to at least some degree. I’m from Michigan, the first state to send troops in response to Lincoln’s call to arms and my ancestors fought in the war. The propaganda is powerful and relentless and that’s why people react strongly when they come across something that smells suspiciously like it.
> when states seceded
Turns out they never actually seceded.
By virtue of losing the war, it turns out they were really just engaging in insurrection the whole time.
Accepting the premise that secession happened and that the confederacy was a legitimate government is doing the insurrectionists a rhetorical favor.
States cannot unilaterally secede from the union. They might be able to secede with Congressional approval, but certainly not without congressional approval.
The United States was trying to control the south, and the Confederates were also trying to control the south.
I agree with you that the colloquial name for that war was kinda less than accurate, given that in reality it was a failed rebellion/secessionist war. That said, it was (and still is) politically advantageous to frame the war as a struggle of brother against brother instead of a failed secession because this framing is/was advantageous to unionists who did not want to cast southerners as having a legitimately different culture which would warrant secession, and it was beneficial for white southerners as it helped to obscure the fact that their families were literally committing the worst type of treason against the United States. It also helps to simplify the war for the purposes of general education in amplifying the slavery aspect of the war, despite the fact that President Lincoln consistently stated that the restoration of the union was his top priority until the last bits of the war when he started finally coming around to the idea of abolishing slavery.
So while you are technically correct in saying this should more accurately be labeled as a failed war of secession or a failed rebellion, in the end, calling it a “civil war” really doesn’t hurt anyone, and in the English language, the most common name for this war by far is the “American Civil War”.
Tldr: I understand and kinda agree with your confusion, but in the end, it has a name, so if you want people to understand what you are talking about, just use the colloquial name.
It is called the civil war because the rebelling faction neither took control of the government, nor retained independence. Had the Confederacy won and kept independence the “Secession War” would be an accurate term for it.
Both the USA and the rebellious CSA fought for control of the same territory: the South.