Slavery, the Civil War, & Reconstruction

Antebellum (Prewar) Era: The Slavery Question Heats Up

Slavery has often been treated as a marginal aspect of history, confined to courses on southern or African American history. In fact, slavery played a crucial role in the making of the modern world and the development of the United States.

Beginning at least as early as 1502, European slave traders shipped approximately 11 to 16 million slaves to the Americas, including 500,000 to what is now the United States. During the decades before the Civil War, slave grown cotton accounted for over half the value of all United States exports, and provided virtually all the cotton used in the northern textile industry and 70 percent of the cotton used in British mills.

In the decades before the Civil War. A third of the South’s population labored as slaves. Enslaved African Americans performed all kinds of work, but slavery mainly meant backbreaking field work. Deprivation and physical hardship were the hallmark of life under slavery. Slave sales frequently broke up slave families. Nevertheless, enslaved African Americans were able—through their families, religion, and cultural traditions—to sustain an autonomous culture and community beyond the direct control of their masters. In addition, slaves resisted slavery through insurrection and a variety of indirect protests against slavery.

In the decades before the Civil War, diverging economies contributed to growing sectional differences between the North and South. Between 1790 and 1860, commercial agriculture replaced subsistence agriculture in the North, and household production was replaced by factory production. Massive foreign immigration from Ireland and Germany greatly increased the size of cities. In the South, slavery impeded the development of industry and cities and discouraged technological innovation.

During the 1850s the nation’s political system became incapable of resolving sectional disputes between North and South. The acquisition of vast new territories during the 1840s reignited the issue of whether slavery would be allowed to expand into the western territories.

The Compromise of 1850 was an attempt to solve this problem by admitting California as a free state but permitting slavery in the rest of the Southwest. But the compromise included a fugitive slave law opposed by many Northerners. The Kansas-Nebraska Act proposed to solve the problem of status there by popular sovereignty. But this led to violent conflict in Kansas and the rise of the Republican party.

The Dred Scott decision eliminated possible compromise solutions to the sectional conflict and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry convinced many Southerners that a majority of Northerners wanted to free the slaves and incite race war.

 

The Civil War: A Nation Divided Against Itself

Between the Napoleonic Wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and World War I, the American Civil War was the greatest military conflict in the western world. It cost 600,000 American lives, more than in World War I and World War II combined. Its social consequences were especially far-reaching. The war resulted in the emancipation of four million enslaved African Americans. It also brought vast changes to the nation's financial system, fundamentally altered the relationship between the states and the federal government, and became modern history's first total war. It is truly the central event in American history.

The election of a Republican president opposed to the expansion of slavery into the western territories led seven states in the lower South to secede from the Union and to establish the Confederate States of America. After Lincoln notified South Carolina’s governor that he intended to resupply Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, the Confederacy fired on the installation, leading the President to declare that an insurrection existed in the South.

Early in the war, the Union succeeded in blockading Confederate harbors, and by mid-July 1862 it had divided the Confederacy in two by wresting control of Kentucky, Missouri, and much of Tennessee, as well as Mississippi River. In the Eastern Theater in 1861 and 1862, the Confederacy stopped Union attempts to capture its capital in Richmond, Virginia. In September 1862 (at Antietam in Maryland) and July 1863 (at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania), Robert E. Lee tried and failed to provoke European powers intervention in the war by winning a victory on Northern soil.

After futile pleas to the border states to free slaves voluntarily, Lincoln in the summer of 1862 decided that emancipation was a military and political necessity. The Emancipation Proclamation transformed the war from a conflict to save the Union to a war to abolish slavery. It also authorized the enlistment of African Americans. During the war Congress enacted the Homestead Act offered free public land to western settlers; and land grants supported construction of a transcontinental railroad. The government also raised the tariff, enacted the first income tax, and established a system of federally-chartered banks.

 

Reconstruction: Putting the Nation Back Together Again

The twelve years following the Civil War carried vast consequences for the nation’s future. They helped set the pattern for future race relations and defined the federal government’s role in promoting racial equality.

Immediately following the Civil War, all-white Southern legislatures passed black codes which denied blacks the right to purchase or rent land. These efforts to force former slaves to work on plantations led Congressional Republicans to seize control of Reconstruction from President Andrew Johnson, deny representatives from the former Confederate states their Congressional seats, and pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and draft the 14th Amendment, extending citizenship rights to African Americans and guaranteeing equal protection of the laws.

In 1870, the 15th Amendment gave voting rights to black men. The freedmen, in alliance with carpetbaggers and southern white Republicans known as scalawags, temporarily gained power in every former Confederate state except Virginia. The Reconstruction governments drew up democratic state constitutions, expanded women’s rights, provided debt relief, and established the South’s first state-funded schools.

Internal divisions within the Southern Republican party, white terror, and Northern apathy allowed white Southern Democrats known as Redeemers to return to power. During Reconstruction former slaves and many small white farmers became trapped in a new system of economic exploitation known as sharecropping.