American History: A Survey

Within two months of Lincoln’s election, seven states left the union and formed the Confederate States of America, seizing nearly all federal government and military infrastructure within their boundaries. An army was quickly established, and the first real battle of the Civil War ended with the Confederacy claiming Fort Sumter, off the coast of South Carolina. After this victory, four more states joined the Confederacy.

Although the North had more people, more supplies, and a well-developed military, its forces were at first slow to mount a war effort against the Confederacy. Like the colonists in the Revolution, though, Southerners had the advantage of fighting in land they knew, and most were passionate supporters of their cause. They saw the war as a defense of their way of life. Northern sentiments were less strong: Many opposed the war even if they also opposed slavery. Full abolitionists were still a minority to those who favored a ban on slavery only in places where it did not yet exist. Lincoln’s government enacted strict laws to enforce support of the war, including detaining anyone who encouraged dissent against the war and enacting the first draft to bolster the lagging volunteer enlistments into the Union Army.

The South, despite its low population, had huge support for the war among almost every class of white people. Support for the Confederacy was almost universal, and Southerners were proud of what they saw as vast differences between themselves and the Union, even though their system of government almost duplicated the US Constitution. The concept of state’s rights was inherent to the South’s vision for the future, but the rights of states were unclear. Had a Confederate state decided to ban slavery, for example, Confederate law would have made it almost impossible. Despite what many Confederate supporters claim even to this day, state’s rights was not the Confederate government’s goal. From the beginning, the only thing the Confederacy truly aimed to do was ensure that slavery would continue indefinitely.

The Civil War ultimately lasted for five years, and both the Union and the Confederacy had both strategic battle victories and devastating defeats. The South generally had the advantage for the first two years, but the tide turned toward the North due to a series of events beginning with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which immediately freed all slaves in the states that had seceded. Before this time, the North and the ruling Republican Party was divided among radicals who fought for an immediate end to all slavery, those with more conservative views that slavery should be ended slowly to preserve the South’s economy, and those who saw slavery as only a tangential issue to the reunification of the states. The Emancipation Proclamation, although it had no immediate practical effect, solidified the idea that the war was as much about ending slavery as it was about preserving the Union. The legalization of Black enlistment was another turning point; a huge number of free Black Northerners and emancipated Southern defectors joined the Union army. An important outside influence on the outcome of the war was Europe’s failure to aid the Confederacy, support they assumed they would receive because of Europe’s dependence on Southern crops. Europe turned elsewhere for cotton, and the little foreign help in the war went to the Northern cause. The last major decision that aided the Union in their ultimate victory was the rise of Ulysses S. Grant to command of the Union Army. Grant was unconcerned with sparing the lives of soldiers on either side and employed a strategy of complete domination using the North’s vast resources to crush any hope of Confederate victory.

In the end, the Union was victorious, although the Confederacy did not accept defeat for some time. Both sides suffered heavy human casualties, but the South was almost completely destroyed. The formerly enslaved were now officially free, but the struggle for full emancipation from their history of bondage became something that Black Americans struggled with for more than a century. In many ways, the after-effects of slavery persist to this day.

The Civil War devastated the South in almost every regard. Union forces systematically destroyed towns, plantations, fields, and infrastructure. A huge percentage of adult males were left dead or severely handicapped. Many people had transferred their savings to Confederate money, which was now worthless. Former slaves were now technically free but received little to no assistance in building themselves up from the abject poverty that came with being property for most of their lives. The Union passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which banned slavery throughout the country, but the battle for freedom and reunification was far from over.

Contrasting views about how to deal with reconstruction of the South took hold almost immediately after the war. In the South itself, the most important divide was between the newly free Black people and the white people who resented both them and the forces that had aided in their emancipation. The Freedman’s Bureau made attempts to aid former slaves in the short term through food and monetary aid—and in the longer term by establishing schools for Black children and providing both Black and poor white people with farm land. These acts helped some people, but the Bureau was too weak to make any real progress in establishing significant advancements for either freed Black or poor white Southerners.

Ultimately, the issue of reconstruction became a political battle that doomed it in many regards. Lincoln and Congress disagreed about how to reunify the country and about how much punishment the Southern states should face for their secession. Lincoln’s assassination caused an upheaval within the government, and his replacement by Andrew Johnson, a former Democrat, did not help the situation. This was especially true for Southern Black people, who received almost no aid from Johnson’s government.

By the 1870s, radical racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan had gained wide influence over Southern politics, and Black people who attempted to exercise their new rights faced an established system of intimidation and sometimes murder. A number of Black people had established themselves in the immediate aftermath of the war and were seen as a threat to the revival of white Southern society. The federal government attempted to curtail the radical racist groups but eventually abandoned these efforts in the face of opposition from Northerners who believed that Black people now had freedom and should thus be left to their own devices.

The South attempted to build an industrial economy in the wake of the war, but farming was still its dominant economic vehicle. With the disappearance of slaveholding plantations, the system of sharecropping began to emerge. Landless Southerners rented land to farm from owners of former plantations, a practice that was often exploitative, especially to Black renters. Although this practice was the only way for many to sustain life, it preserved the vast social inequality that had typified the South for years. In addition, it aided the establishment the Jim Crow laws, which were enacted in the late 1800s after the federal government effectively stopped caring about Black equality. Poll taxes and property ownership requirements meant that many sharecroppers found themselves unable to vote. Although this likely prevented some poor white people from voting, it affected Black citizens much more. The Jim Crow era also saw the birth of state-enforced segregation between Black and white Southern citizens.