, Research Paper
The American Civil War (1861-1865) and
the Reconstruction period that followed were the bloodiest chapters of
American history to date. Brother fought brother as the population was
people and the political parties that represented them in Washington. The
tension which snapped the uneasy truce between north and south began building
over slavery and statehood debates in California.
In 1848, settlers discovered gold at Sutter’s
Mill, starting a mass migration. By 1849, California had enough citizens
to apply for statehood. However, the debate over whether the large western
state would or would not allow slavery delayed its admittance. Delegates
state. Meanwhile, tempers also flared in New Mexico and Texas over border
disputes, and abolitionists fought pro-slavery advocates over the issue
mostly Democrats, proposed a convention in Nashville to discuss secession.
In 1850, Henry Clay proposed the Compromise of 1850 to Congress. The Compromise
contained the following provisions:
California would enter the union as free
state.
New Mexico territory would be divided
into New Mexico and Utah, and offered popular sovereignty.
Texas must yield disputed territory to
New Mexico in return for federal assumption of its state debt.
Trading, but not possession, of slaves
would be banned from the District of Columbia.
Fugitive slave laws would be enhanced.
Zachary Taylor, who was president at the
time, was prepared to veto the bills, but died suddenly. His successor,
Millard Fillmore, allowed the provisions to pass one at a time with the
help of Stephen Douglas. The Nashville Convention met soon afterwards and
denounced the plan, but took no decisive action.
years. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act makes further compromise practically
impossible. It granted popular sovereignty to both states, in the hopes
that they would split on the slavery issue and continue the shaky equality
between slave and free states. Nebraska quickly adopted an free-soil constitution
and was admitted as a free state. Kansas, however, was badly split along
sectional lines, and opposing political forces ratified both a free and
a slave constitution in 1855. Riots broke out everywhere, and “Bleeding
Kansas” fell into chaos. John Brown, an infamous and rebellious abolitionist,
of five abolitionists. This “Pottawatomie Massacre” further heightened
a feeling of an impending war over slavery.
The peace between abolitionists and slaveowners
was not helped by three events which occurred in 1857. One was an economic
“panic” which threw support to the newly formed Republican party. The Republicans
had promised high protective tariffs, against the lowering of import duties
imposed by the Democrats. However, they also maintained a strongly abolitionist
platform. The support they gained from the tariff issue also brought increased
support to their abolitionist aims. Second, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin,
responding to violent mobs protesting slavery, decided in favor of the
In Dred Scott v. Sanford, the slave Dred
Scott and his wife, Harriett, sued for their freedom from their master,
any court, much less the United States Supreme Court. This total denial
inspired an equally defiant spirit among pro-slavery activists.
In 1859, John Brown again made headlines
by raiding an armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Brown apparently hoped
to gain control of the arms magazine and distribute weapons to free and
enslaved blacks in the area. His ill-devised plan failed miserably. Brown
was convicted of treason in a Virginia court and hanged. The animosity
between the two sides of the slavery argument continued to intensify.
Sectionalism had grown so prevalent throughout
the states that the election of 1860 saw two opposing candidates, both
from the Democratic party: Stephen Douglas from the north, and John C.
Breckinridge from the south. The Republicans, confident after their success
in 1856, nominated Abraham Lincoln, an opponent of Douglas’s in the Illinois
senate race. The Constitutional Union Party, consisting largely of displaced
and elderly Whigs, tried to downplay sectionalism, and spoke only of preserving
the Union and the Constitution. They nominated John Bell.
Lincoln and Breckinridge. Lincoln won a majority of electoral votes (180
of 303) but only gained 39% of the popular vote. Lincoln had made considerable
abolitionist noise in the past, and several states had threatened to secede.
Now that Lincoln had been elected, South Carolina carried out its threats,
electing to secede on December 20, 1860.
Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas joined South Carolina and formed
the Confederate States of America, with their new capital at Montgomerey,
Alabama. The hastily assembled congress appointed Jefferson Davis and Alexander
Stephens to the posts of provisional president and vice president. In 1861,
amendment which, instead of abolishing slavery (as it does now), would
forever guarantee it in states where it already existed. The proposal also
provided for an extension of the Missouri Compromise, dividing slave and
free territories. Lincoln furthered the preservationist spirit by insisting
that the rebellious states were still part of the Union. However, before
Crittenden’s amendment could be sent to the states for approval, on April
12, 1861, troops in Charleston, South Carolina, fired on Fort Sumter, a
United States installation in Charleston’s harbor. The next day, Virginia,
Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina join the Confederacy, choosing
not to fight against their fellow slave states in the deep south. In November,
Davis and Stephens won the first (and only) presidential election in the
Confederacy unopposed, and moved the capital to Richmond, Virginia. The
dreaded civil war had begun.
the Union Congress, the Republicans met the demands of the northern merchants
war. For the first time, civilians are directly involved in supporting
acts. Thus “total war”, or war in which every citizen is involved in the
tide of the war against the Confederacy. In March, the “ironclad” battleship
built their own ironclad vessel, the Monitor, to intercept the Virginia
before it broke through the blockade. The two ships met in battle, and
after endless hours of shelling each other, both ships withdrew. Neither
vessel would survive the damage they incurred in the battle.
The other critical loss the rebels suffered
was at Antietam, one of the Confederacy’s precious few offensive campaigns.
Until then, the British had considered aiding the Confederacy, despite
their claims of neutrality and the negative reactions they received from
Russia and France, which the British feared. The British hoped that a major
offensive victory would turn the tides of the war, gain the support of
other European powers, and provide Britain with a powerful ally against
the United States in the future. However, the Union armies defeated the
already exhausted force at Antietam, and Britain gave up any serious hopes
of a Confederate victory. With Britain’s vote of confidence also went the
possibility of European support for the Confederacy. Without this vital
link with the outside world, the Confederacy lost all advantage in the
war.
Amidst all the turmoil of the Civil War,
and apply for readmission to the Union. The Proclamation would also prove
slavery) would find support.
The Confederacy suffered severe losses
Virginia, rallied the support of fifty surrounding counties and seceded
admitted the state soon afterwards. Also in 1863, Confederate General Robert
the Union forces hold off the offensive, and Lee is forced to withdraw
to Virginia. On the same day that Lee withdrew from Gettysburg, the city
of Vicksburg, Mississippi, fell to a Union siege. The fall of Vicksburg
returned full control of the Mississippi River to the Union, and divided
the Confederacy in half, with strong Union armies expanding from the middle.
The Confederacy was being torn down from the inside out.
In July of 1864, the Union Congress proposed
the Wade-Davis Bill, which would have made reacceptance into the Union
more difficult for the rebels who wished to set up provisional Union governments
in occupied states. Lincoln defeated the bill by a pocket veto, meaning
he kept the bill unsigned for ten days, whereafter the bill became invalid.
This angered the “Radical Republicans” who wished to take revenge on the
which would eventually take effect at war’s end.
Meanwhile, Union generals Ulysses S. Grant
and William Tecumseh Sherman were making a name for themselves fighting
commanded Sherman to move eastward, cutting the eastern section in half
again and further disabling their resistance. Sherman marched from the
leaving only destruction in his wake. On September 2, 1864, the city of
Atlanta fell to Sherman’s forces. Sherman turned north to meet Grant, who
was enjoying bittersweet success in his so-called “Wilderness Campaign”.
pursuing Lee’s retreating resistance force. Finally, Grant surrounds Lee’s
army and beseiges Richmond and Petersburg. Meanwhile, the states of Louisiana,
ten-percent plan. Lincoln himself gained reelection in 1864 over George
McClellan, the infamously inept Union general who had failed to win the
goal. The Confederacy’s hopes of independence were finally defeated on
Appomattox Courthouse, VA, ending the war.
Five days later, on April 14, 1865, John
Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln while the president was watching a play
with him were executed. Seemingly before Lincoln was cold in his grave,
the radical Republicans tried to gain support of his successor, Andrew
Johnson. However, Johnson’s policies on Reconstruction were more similar
by the radicals in Congress.
One issue both parties did agree on, however,
was the abolition of slavery. While Union troops began the long and oppressive
military occupation of the south, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment,
abolishing slavery in all United States territories and possessions. Tennessee’s
new state government almost immediately ratified the amendment, and was
freed from military control in 1865. The news was met with mixed feelings
slaves made up a majority of the houses of Congress in the southern states.
The blacks, while they enjoyed their freedom, were uncertain about the
amendment’s effectiveness, and fearful that their rights would be restricted
despite federal law. Though the whites’ fears of wide-scale racial violence
were not immediately realized (those would not become reality for almost
100 years), the blacks’ fear of oppression began almost immediately.
In 1866, several southern states adopted
“black codes”. While these new laws did grant blacks a few new rights (such
as the right to testify in courts of law), they also restricted their involvement
in almost every other activity, especially suffrage and labor. Abolitionists
everywhere cried out against the black codes, deeming them a disguised
reinstitution of slavery. President Johnson vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau
Bill, which would have given the Bureau more power in enforcing blacks’
rights. Angered by Johnson’s opposition, the still dominant radical Republicans
revised the bill and overrode another Johnson veto to finally make it law.
Also, Congress passed the Civil Rights Bill, declaring that all blacks
were legal citizens of the United States, and enjoyed all rights that citizenship
entails.
Later in 1866 was the proposal of the
Fourteenth Amendment, which amplified the Civil Rights Bill and the Freedmen’s
Bureau Bill. Tennessee was again the first of the former Confederate states
to ratify the amendment, and in 1866, was readmitted to the Union. Congress,
five “military districts”, and offers each state readmission if they follow
Tennessee’s example and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, over yet another
veto from a now frantic and ineffective Johnson.
In 1868, feeling his political influence
waning all too quickly, Johnson tried to hamper Congress’s Reconstruction
efforts by dismissing Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. However, Congress
appointed official from being removed by the president without the consent
of the Senate. Radicals and Democrats alike were delighted, because they
thought they now had sufficient grounds to impeach Johnson. They quickly
did so, but fell short of convicting Johnson of “high crimes and misdemeanors”
by only a single vote.
Amidst the political turmoil in Washington,
six former Confederate states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. Alabama,
Arkansas, North and South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana all ratified
the amendment and gained readmittance to the Union. However, military control
was withdrawn only from Alabama, Arkansas, and North Carolina.
In 1870, Congress proposed a Fifteenth
Amendment, which revoked suffrage restrictions on the grounds of race.
ratified both and were readmitted. Military control was withdrawn from
While the Reconstruction policies instituted
by even the radicals were lenient, a feeling of extreme bitterness still
control was not withdrawn from Florida until 1876, and South Carolina and
Louisiana suffered Union occupation until 1877. The atrocities of some
of the military deputies and their units, along with the racial tension
between displaced whites and newly freed blacks, armed a time bomb between
the races which built up strength for almost 100 years. The Civil War and
the Reconstruction set a precedent for racial, territorial, and social
prejudice which this country suffers from to this day.
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