The Civil War laid the foundation for modern America, guaranteeing the Union’s permanence, destroying slavery, and shifting power in the nation from the South to the North (and, more specifically, from slaveowning planters to northern capitalists). It dramatically increased the power of the federal government and accelerated the modernization of the northern economy. And it placed on the postwar agenda the challenge of defining and protecting African-American freedom.
Paradoxically, both sides lost something they had gone to war to defend. Slavery was the cornerstone of the Confederacy, but the war led inexorably to slavery’s destruction. In the North, the war hastened the transformation of Lincoln’s America—the world of free labor, of the small shop and independent farmer—into an industrial giant. Americans, in the words of the abolitionist Wendell Phillips, would “never again... see the republic in which we were born.”
Late in May 1865, a little over a month after Lincoln’s death, some 200,000 veterans paraded through Washington, D.C., for the Grand Review of the Union armies, a final celebration of the nation’s triumph. The scene inspired the poet Bret Harte to imagine a very different parade—a “phantom army” of the Union dead:
The martyred heroes of Malvern Hill,
Of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville,
The men whose wasted figures fill
The patriot graves of the nation...
And marching beside the others,
Came the dusky martyrs of Pillow’s fight.
To Harte, the war’s meaning ultimately lay in the sacrifices of individual soldiers. He included in his reverie the black troops, including those massacred at Fort Pillow. Blacks, Harte seemed to be saying, had achieved equality in death. Could the nation give it to them in life?
Here was the problem that confronted the United States as the postwar era known as Reconstruction began. “Verily,” as Frederick Douglass declared, “the work does not end with the abolition of slavery, but only begins.”
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. What made the American Civil War the first modern war?
2. Explain how the North won the war by considering its material resources, military strategy, and effective political and military leadership.
3. Describe how President Lincoln’s war aims evolved between 1861 and 1863, changing from simply preserving the Union to also ending slavery.
4. flow did the Emancipation Proclamation, northern military successes, and actions by the slaves themselves combine to finally end slavery?
5. What role did blacks play in both winning the Civil War and in defining the war’s consequences?
6. What major policies did the wartime Congress pass that transformed the nation’s economic and financial systems?
7. How was the American Civil War part of a global trend toward more destructive and deadly wars?
8. Compare the end of slavery in the United States to emancipation elsewhere in the world.
9. In what ways did the outcome of the Civil War change the United States’s status in the world?
FREEDOM QUESTIONS
1. How did Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address express the new connection between free dom, liberty, and nation?
2. Explain how both northern and southern soldiers could claim they were fighting for “freedom” and “liberty.”
3. Explain how both northern and southern governments restricted liberties during I he war. How were such actions justified?
4. Describe how the Civil War permanently altered the national definition of freedom and linked it to the survival of the nation
