Dr. John Coski answers: Historian Jay Hoar counted 126 different names given to the American War of 1861-1865 by contemporaries, historians, and others. There is no “official” name for the war unless it is the name that adorns the U.S. Government’s 129-volume set of official records: “War of the Rebellion.” The victorious North dubbed the war the “Rebellion” and it was among the most oft-used terms during the war and in the decades after the war.

“Civil War” – usually written as the lower case “civil war” – also emerged as a popular name for the war even before there was a war. “I see no cause of disunion, strife, and civil war and pray it may be averted,” Robert E. Lee wrote to a friend on January 22, 1861. The following day he wrote to his family: “As far as I can judge by the papers, we are between a state of anarchy and civil war.” The day before he regretfully resigned his seat in the U.S. Senate in January 1861, Lee’s future commander-in-chief, Jefferson Davis, worried that Abraham Lincoln would pursue a policy that would “inaugurate a civil war….” After southern forces fired on Fort Sumter and Abraham Lincoln reacted by asking the states for troops to crush the “insurrection,” Virginia’s governor John Letcher refused the request and wrote angrily to Lincoln: “You have chosen to inaugurate civil war, and having done so, we will meet it, in a spirit as determined as the Administration has exhibited towards the South.”

Those men obviously knew that the South was not fighting to conquer the North or to seize power in Washington, D.C. Their understanding of the meaning of “civil war” simply was not as restrictive as that held by those who have since objected to the term. The 1858 revised edition of Webster’s dictionary defined a civil war as “a war between the people of the same state or city; opposed to a foreign war.” In 1860-1861, except for constitutional theorists and ideologues, most Americans, even southern Americans, were accustomed to thinking of the United States as one country, at least in relation to the rest of the world. Civil War seemed an appropriate designation for a war seemingly destined to occur within the borders of their country.

Although most writers during the conflict – from newspaper editors to soldiers in the field – simply referred to the “war” or “War,” “Civil War” gained currency as a formal name. For example, beginning in 1861, the subject index for The Illustrated London News grouped its articles about the conflict under “America, (The Civil War in).” The 1863 Canadian printing of a volume in the ongoing history of the war written by Richmond editor Edward A. Pollard received the title, Southern History of the Great Civil War in the United States,

Early histories of the war also used the name Civil War. John O. Headley’s 1865 work was entitled The Great Rebellion: A History of the Civil War in America, hinting at the transition from the shamelessly pro-Union name to the more neutral one.

Objections to “Civil War” and especially to “War of the Rebellion” came decades after the conflict in a concerted effort by southerners to avoid any name that disparaged their cause. Confederate veterans were satisfied with “Civil War” as an alternative to the hated “Rebellion,” but the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) also lobbied against “Civil War” because it denied the premise that the Confederacy was a legitimate independent nation and, therefore, that the conflict did not occur within the borders of one nation. This has been the position of Confederate nationalists and memorialists in the last century and the source of often spirited objections to the use of “Civil War.” The most popular southern alternative (avidly and systematically promoted by the UDC and other organizations) has been “War between the States.” Others prefer names intended to be more accurate, such as “War for Southern Independence,” or more belligerent, such as “War of Northern Aggression.”

In contrast to “civil war,” “War between the States” was not a name that was used widely during the war. It appears once in wartime official records – in a Confederate memorandum of a February 1865 discussion between Jefferson Davis and an informal envoy from the U.S. It gained wider currency after its usage in the titles of several postwar memoirs, notably Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens’ 1868 Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States.

The UDC formed a War Between the States Committee to lobby Congress to have “War between the States” declared the official name of the war. Representatives introduced legislation into Congress, but the bill failed to get to the floor.

Despite the failure of the UDC’s bill, a modern legend has emerged that the U.S. Congress designated War between the States the official name of the war. What actually occurred was that Congress in 1928 passed a joint resolution concerning a wartime claim by Nevada against the United States. The resolution referred to the conflict as the ‘War Between the States’ in explaining the context of the claim. (The resolution’s sponsor called it the “Civil War” in his remarks on the Senate floor.) Even the UDC’s official history noted that this resolution did not constitute official recognition.

During the 1961-1965 centennial observations, “Civil War” was the official
name used by the national commission and most state commissions (including
Virginia’s), with several exceptions, notably the Mississippi Commission on
the War Between the States and the Georgia Civil War Centennial Commission
Commemorating the War Between the States. South Carolina’s commission and the federation of southern state commissions adopted the name “Confederate War.”

Disagreements over the name of the war will continue as long as disagreements over the nature of the war continue. The term “Civil War” came into common usage not as an ideologically loaded or sectionally biased name, but as a simple, straightforward one that people on both sides of the conflict found acceptable.