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3. Civil War and Reconstruction
EXPLORATORY QUESTIONS
1. Which were the immediate causes that led to the war?
The causes can be considered in three planes, the economic conflict (differences between
the north and the south), the political and constitutional conflict (different ideas of the
states) and the social and moral conflict (the question of slavery).
If we talk about the immediate causes of the war, we have to say that in 1850 California
was admitted to the Union as a free state. In 1854 the Kansas and Nebraska Act stated
that the people were to decide whether states integrated in the Union either as a free or as
a slave state. This Act annulled the Missouri Compromise, so there was no reason why
slavery could not spread. Nebraska would become a free state and Kansas would become
a slave state.
Thus, southerners began to defend the government should protect slavery where it
existed. The pro-slavery state uses the Constitution to justify themselves, whereas Lincoln,
the abolitionists and slaves themselves turned to the Declaration of Independence.
2. What was the Quakers’ attitude towards slavery?
The Quakers are members of a group with Christian roots that began in England in 1650.
Their formal title is the Society of Friends. Quakers believe that there is something of God
in everybody and that each human being is of unique worth. This is why Quakers value all
people equally, and oppose anything that may harm or threaten them.
Quakers were among the earliest and most insistent voices opposing slavery and the
slave trade both in England and the U.S., and they led the 19th century abolitionist
movement that preceded the U.S. Civil War.
Despite the sect’s long history of commitment to human rights, some early Quakers were
slave owners. William Penn, who founded the colony of Pennsylvania in 1682 as a haven
for Quakers and other minority religious groups, owned slaves.
By 1688, a group of Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, issued a petition against
slavery. It was the first protest against African American slavery made by a religious body
in the English colonies. It was drafted by Francis Daniel Pastorius and signed by him and
three other Quakers living in Germantown, on behalf of the Germantown Meeting of the
Religious Society of Friends.
As the abolition movement gained momentum in the 1800s, Quakers matched their human
rights rhetoric with strong action, often at great risk. They played a major role in organizing
and running the so-called “Underground Rail-road”, a system of secret routes and safehouses that helped runaway slaves to reach freedom in the northern states and in
Canada.
3. Why was the Reconstruction defeated in the South?
During the Civil War, a lot of slaves became free. The conflict devastated the South and
subjected that region to military occupation. In the South, most planters thought that
emancipation meant a change of the legal situation of the blacks, but they tried to keep
their slaves as hired help or tenant farmers. They also issued a series of laws known as
"black codes", which aimed to re-impose slavery on the freedmen. They recognized the
right of blacks to own, sell, an inherit propriety, to appeal to court, and to access to some
kind of education, but they were no given the right to vote. Therefore, in the aftermath of
the war, Southern state legislatures passed black codes, which were different from state to
state. Some provisions, however, were common to all. Blacks were required to enter into
annual labour contracts, with penalties imposed in case of violation of these contracts, and
dependent children were subject to compulsory apprenticeship and corporal punishments
by their masters.
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4. Why did the expansion of slavery become a troublesome issue?
Northerners were convinced that slavery should not be allowed to spread to new
territories. At the same time Southerners were becoming equally determined to create new
slave states. This issue created an ever-widening breach between the South and the rest
of the nation. The slave states had long been a separate section economically. The
country was divided into states permitting slavery and states prohibiting it. After Abraham
Lincoln was elected president in 1860, eleven states left the Union and proclaimed
themselves an independent nation, the Confederate States of America: South Carolina,
Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee,
and North Carolina. The American Civil War had begun. Four years later, the Confederates
surrendered. The Civil War put an end to slavery; it also made clear that the country was
not a collection of semi-independent states but an indivisible whole.
5. How did the Civil War contribute to a stronger American nation-state?
When America's Founding Fathers established the United States in the late 1700s, they
decided to build the new nation on principles of freedom and liberty for its people. The civil
war forged a new national self-consciousness, reflected in the increasing use of the word
“nation” in place of the older “Union” of separate states. The Union’s triumph consolidated
the northern understanding of freedom as the national norm. Emancipation offered proof of
the progressive nature and global significance of the country’s history. American nation
embodied a set of universal ideas, centred on political democracy and human liberty. The
Union’s economic policies increased the power and size of the federal government.
6. How did the acquisition of new territories affect the question of slavery?
The decades before the American Civil War were rifted with conflict. Debates over the
extension of slavery into newly acquired territory divided the country and would culminate
in the secession of the southern states and the war. As early as 1820 Congress grappled
with the question of how to appease all sides as slavery extended into the new territories.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 established a dividing line between the free states of
the North and the slave-holding states of the South. This, however, would be only a
temporary solution to a much larger problem. In 1846 war with Mexico broke out and
sparked an explosion of patriotic support in the United States. But by the end of the
Mexican-American War in 1848 and the resulting acquisition of new territory, new
questions about statehood and the status of slavery arose with the nation now stretching
from ocean to ocean.
7. What impact did the Emancipation Proclamation have?
On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to a nation
divided by war. The proclamation stated that all enslaved people in the states controlled by
the Confederacy were free.
Because the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to areas that the Confederacy
controlled, it did not actually free anyone. Lincoln knew, however, that many enslaved
people would hear about the proclamation. He hoped that knowledge of it would
encourage them to run away from their slaveholders. Even before the Emancipation
Proclamation, some 100,000 African Americans had left slavery for the safety of Union
lines.
Despite the limitations of the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans in the North
greeted it joyfully.
The proclamation had the desired effect in Europe as well. (Lincoln thought that striking a
blow against slavery would make Britain and France less likely to aid the South.) The
Confederacy had been seeking support from its trading partners, Britain and France.
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However, the British took a strong position against slavery. Once Lincoln proclaimed
emancipation, Britain and France decided to withhold recognition of the Confederacy.
In 1864 Republican leaders in Congress prepared a constitutional amendment to abolish
slavery in the United States. In 1865 Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, which
was ratified, or approved, the same year by states loyal to the Union. It was this
amendment that truly freed enslaved Americans.
Early in the war, Lincoln opposed enlisting African Americans as soldiers. The
Emancipation Proclamation also announced Lincoln’s decision to permit African
Americans to join the Union army.
8. What were the so called “black codes”?
A body of laws, statutes and rules enacted by southern states immediately after the Civil
War to regain control over the freed slaves, maintain white supremacy, and ensure the
continued supply of cheap labour.
The Union’s victory over the South in the Civil War signalled the end for the institution of
slavery in the U.S. Ratified in 1865, the 13 th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
formalized this result in U.S. law, abolishing slavery throughout the country and every
territory subject to its jurisdiction.
For the next several months, southern states sought a way to restore for the white majority
what the Civil War and the 13th Amendment had tried to deny them, supremacy, control,
and economic power over the fate of African Americans. Under slavery, whites had
disciplined the blacks largely outside the law, through extralegal whippings administered
by slave owners and their overseers. After the slaves were emancipated, panicky whites
feared that blacks would seek revenge against them for their harsh and inhumane
treatment on the southern plantations.
Mississippi whites began passing laws to take away the former slaves’ new found
freedom. The first such law was enacted on November 22, 1865. It directed civil officers to
hire orphaned African Americans and forbade the orphans to leave their place of
employment for any reason. The Mississippi legislature next passed a vagrancy law,
defining vagrants as workers who “neglected their calling or employment or misspent what
they earned”. Another Mississippi law required African Americans to carry with them
written evidence of their present employment at all times, a practice that was hauntingly
reminiscent of the old pass system under slavery. The final piece to the puzzle came when
Mississippi established a system of special county courts to punish blacks charged with
violating one of the new state employment laws. The law imposed draconian punishments,
including “corporal chastisement” for blacks who refused to work or otherwise tried to
frustrate the system. African American who committed real crimes, such as stealing, could
be hung by their thumbs.
Widely considered to be the first set of Black Codes passed in the south after the Civil
War, these Mississippi laws represented a concerted effort by white lawmakers to restore
the master-slave relationship under a new name. Within a few months after Mississippi
passed its first such law, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, Virginia and
North Carolina followed suit by enacting similar laws of their own.
Congress quickly responded to the Black Codes by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866,
which made it illegal to discriminate against blacks by assigning them an inferior legal and
economic status. Two years later the states ratified the 14 th Amendment, which
guaranteed “equal protection of the laws” to the residents of every state.
But the southern states were not deterred. They soon passed a new set of laws that
permitted local officials to informally discriminate against blacks, without specific statutory
authority. The thrust-and-parry exchanges between Congress and the southern states
continued throughout the period Reconstruction (1865 – 77) and through the first half of
the 20th century.
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9. Which were the political or constitutional causes of the American Civil War?
The political and constitutional causes that led to the American civil war can be
summarized in just one word: sectionalism.
The North of America was more industrialized, and their inhabitants had more freedom
than their neighbours, the inhabitants of the South, which were more rural. But the main
difference and the one which made the difference between the North and the South was
slavery. The economy of the South was based on it, whereas the North was based on
equality. All these made America be divided in two parts: the free countries and the slave
countries.
The government tried many times to solve this problem, for example, by the “Missouri
Compromise” (1820), which was an agreement between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery
factions in order to maintain the balance between the number of slavery states and the
free states; and the “Kansas-Nebraska Act” (1854), through which settlers could vote to
decide whether to allow slavery or not. So, it was made with the hopping that it would ease
relations between the North and the South, because the South could expand slavery to
new territories but the North still had the right to abolish slavery in its states.
But every act or measure was in vain because, day by day, the slavery problem was
becoming more important, and so, finally, it led to the American Civil War.
10. Which were the main social pro-slavery arguments?
The slavery in the South was an integral part of the basic economy of the region. That’s
why they avoided religious arguments for defending their pro-slavery attitude and
concentrate their arguments on economic reasons, and talk about moral relativism basing
them on human rights, but just for “white people”. Thus, the main social arguments in
favour of bondage were:
 Negro people were inferior and unfit for freedom. So, they were happier being
slaves.
 Slavery was a positive good. Owners could protect unproductive slaves. Besides,
slavery created social harmony since it avoided the social injustice and class battle
that characterized the north.
 Referring to the poor whites: slave owners constituted a small part of the South
population, and the poor whites were socially superior to the Negro slaves, so if
there were no slavery, there would be no distinction between them and the southern
poor farmers, except racial distinction.
Summing up, southern whites defended slavery fervently, asking for respect for the right to
have personal property. They said that there was a moral relativism and they feared the
possible institutional changes.
FURTHER TASKS
1. Write about Abraham’s Lincoln role in the Civil War.
In the electoral campaign of 1860 there were two candidates: Lincoln and Douglas. The
South had said if Lincoln won the campaign and became the next President they would
withdraw from the Union. Abraham Lincoln won the Presidency that year. Within the first
four months of him becoming President, seven states had already seceded from the
Union. Lincoln’s main interest was keeping the Union together, and after that, he wanted to
abolish slavery.
When the southern states of Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, Mississippi,
Louisiana and Texas seceded they formed the Confederate States. They had set out to
attack Fort Sumter in 1861. Lincoln tried to halt this attempt by ordering the navy to
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blockade Southern ports, thus preventing the trade of the South’s moneymaker, cotton.
This also prevented the South from obtaining manufactured and essential goods they
needed from the North, such guns and clothing they couldn’t produce by themselves. The
beginning of the war forced four more states to reluctantly join the Confederacy. Virginia,
Tennessee, North Carolina and Arkansas felt they had no other choice, due the fact they
were also slave states.
The main problem the South had was that they did not have a Unified Army. Each state
had its small army. But when the first real battle of the War took place at Bull Run, the
Confederates under the leadership of General Thomas Jackson, sent the Union running
back to Washington.
After losing the first battle, Lincoln changed generals: his new appointed General was
George B. McClellan. During the summer of 1862 General Robert Lee and General
George McClellan met again at Bull Run. Then Lee moved to the North, into the Union
State of Maryland, where the battle of Antietam occurred. It was a victory for the Union
Army.
With the victory at Antietam, Lincoln chose this time to deliver the Emancipation
Proclamation (1863), which freed the slaves in the areas that rebellion was established,
but it did not free the slaves in the Union slave states or in areas that the Union
recaptured. The final Emancipation Proclamation also authorized the recruitment of blacks
into the Union Army. It was followed by the Civil Rights Act. At this point, Lincoln and the
war’s aim completely changed from preservation of the Union to the abolition of slavery.
Lincoln also decided to change generals again. He appointed General George Meade, and
very soon after it, there came the bloodiest, most gruesome battle of the Civil War,
Gettysburg. It was fought on July 1, 1863. It was a Union victory, with more than forty five
thousand men killed and wounded. Lincoln chose this time to travel to Gettysburg to
deliver what is known as the Gettysburg Address.
After Gettysburg, Lincoln had decided to change Generals again. This time his choice was
Ulysses S. Grant. This was the beginning of the end, with William Tecumseh Sherman
destroying the Confederate’s way of getting materials to fight the war by destroying
railroads, factories and its plantations. He was breaking the spirit of the Confederacy.
When Sherman burned Atlanta it was all but over. Grant surrounded Richmond and it fell
to the Union army on April 3, 1865. Lee surrendered.
Just twelve days after the surrender of Lee, President Lincoln was attending a show at the
Ford Theatre, where he was fatally wounded. He died on April 15, 1865.
2. Explain the major causes that led to the civil war.
The causes of the Civil War can be divided in: economic, political and constitutional, and
social and moral. But there are some issues and facts that embrace all these causes and
that, also, are the major causes of the civil war. These are:
 Slavery: it is the centre of the matter. America is divided into two factions: free
states, where slavery is prohibited; and slave states, where slavery is the root of
their economy.
 Slave states vs. free states in the South: in 1850, California entered to the Union
as a free state. The problem was that California was situated in the South West, a
territory that could admit slavery. This created a great dissatisfaction in the South,
and, although slave owners were offered a series of advantages as compensation,
they didn’t agree and, in the Nashville convention, they declared that the
government had no right to prohibit slavery and that it had the obligation of
protecting them.
 Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854): through which the line imposed by the Missouri
Compromise was repealed. Douglas, an ardent believer in grassroots democracy,
felt that all the territories should be subject to popular sovereignty. Seen as a
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concession to the South, the act led to an influx of pro- and anti-slavery forces into
Kansas. Operating from rival territorial capitals, the "Free Staters" and "Border
Ruffians" engaged in open violence for three years. This was known as the
“Bleeding Kansas”.
 The ruling of the Supreme Court in 1857: in the case of Dred Scott, a slave from
Missouri (slave state) that lived with his owner in Illinois (free state), that sued for
liberation taking into account that he was in a free state. The Supreme Courts
decision was that Dred was property of his owner and that Constitution guaranteed
property rights. This decision caused resentment throughout the North.
Thus, the division of America was becoming bigger and bigger, and while the pro-slavery
states used the Constitution to justify themselves, Lincoln and the abolitionists, and the
slaves themselves, turned to the Declaration of Independence, where the right of equality
was clearer.
3. Describe the two currents of thought regarding abolitionists.
Abolitionism in Europe meant the abolition of the slave trade. The first whites to denounce
slavery in Europe were known as Quakers. They thought that if the slave trade was
abolished slavery itself would soon cease to exist.
Abolitionism in America meant the abolition of the institution itself. Until the end of the 18 th
century rebellious slave did not really challenge the institution of slavery itself, they simply
sought to free themselves from it.
http://autocww.colorado.edu/~toldy2/E64ContentFiles/WorldHistory/
4. Explain the important significance of the Kansas and Nebraska Act (1854).
In 1854 The Kansas and Nebraska Act, stated, according to the principle of popular
sovereignty, let its people decide for themselves whether to permit slavery there. This act
annulled the Missouri Compromise.
A race began to win control of Kansas. By January 1856, rival governments existed in
Kansas, one for and one against slavery. Each asked Congress for recognition. Kansas
became the first battleground between those favouring the extension of slavery and those
opposing it. “Bleeding Kansas”, as newspapers dubbed the territory, became the scene of
a territorial civil war between pro-slavery and antislavery settlers.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act shattered the Whig Party. Every Northern Whig in Congress
had voted against the bill, while most Southern Whigs had supported it. Many Northern
Whigs left their party and joined forces with Free-Soilers and a few antislavery Democrats
during the congressional elections of 1854. These antislavery coalitions officially organized
as the Republican Party in July 1854. Their main message was that the government
should ban slavery from new territories. The Republican Party quickly showed its strength
in the North. In the election, the Republicans won control of the House of Representatives
and of several state governments. In the South the Republicans had almost no support.
Before the presidential election of 1860 the issue of slavery was seriously discussed and
eventually caused a break in the Democratic Party.
The Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln. Their platform, designed to attract voters
from many quarters, was that slavery should be left undisturbed where it existed, but that it
should be excluded from the territories. Many Southerners feared, however, that a
Republican victory would encourage slave revolts. With the Democrats divided, Lincoln
won a clear majority of the electoral votes.
5. Summarize the main economic pro slavery arguments.
The size dimensions of slavery are important to comprehend, for slavery was a colossal
institution. The property rights argument was the ultimate defence of slavery, and white
Southerners and the proslavery radicals knew it.
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Slavery was supported in the South because it was seen as a pillar of the Southern
economic structure. The way the South was set up, the slaves were necessarily on the
bottom of the pyramid, and did not see the benefits of their labour. The people in charge of
making decisions in the South, the plantation owners that made money off of the slaves,
deemed it necessary to maintain slavery to maintain their economic standing; a plantation
with 50 slaves would have only a small fraction of its original profit if it had to pay all of
those slaves a wage.
Defenders of slavery argued that the sudden end to the slave economy would have had a
profound and killing economic impact in the South where reliance on slave labour was the
foundation of their economy. The cotton economy would collapse.
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