Lecture 2 : The Civil War, its origins and aftermath

The period between the 1850 and 1877 was dominated by the problem of sectionalism, i.e. antagonism
between the different regions of the United States. In the period, sectionalism mostly pitted the North
against the South. Distrust between Northern and Southern politicians led the latter to declare
Secession: they decided to separate from the United States and form a new country. The terrible war
that ensued between 1861 and 1865 restored the United States and abolished slavery throughout the
country without any financial compensation to slaveholders.

1) The political crises of the antebellum era

A) Slavery as a source of sectional conflict:

As mentioned in the last lecture, by 1850 Southerners viewed cotton plantations cultivated by
slaves as the main source of wealth for their region. Even if less than half of the white families owned
slaves (49% in Mississippi, 20% in Arkansas in 1860), the majority of whites saw slavery as an acceptable
institution. Southern journalists and politicians responded to the abolitionist critique of slavery by
combining racism with a critique of the Northern industrial society: they argued that blacks were not
fit for freedom and they contrasted the benevolence of slaveholders with the selfishness and
callousness of Northern capitalists.

The influence of the abolitionist associations and newspapers in the North and West should
not be exaggerated. They only represented a minority of the population and they were often viewed
as radicals, i.e. impatient agitators who took the notion of equality too seriously. However, even the
most moderate Northern politicians found that they could not ignore the issue of slavery. The first
problem revolved around the fugitive slaves who tried to find refuge in the North. The second problem
was the status of the new territories of the West: should slaveholders be allowed to move West with
their slaves or should they be barred from the West?

These two issues were major bones of contention between Northern and Southern politicians
in the antebellum era, i.e. in the 1850s. In 1850, Southern and Northern Congressmen negotiated a
difficult compromise which allowed California to enter the United States as a “free state” (the
California constitution prohibited slavery) in exchange for a strengthening of the “fugitive laws” which
required Northern judges and policemen to help slaveholders chase fugitives and deliver them to their
masters in the South. The Western territories which attracted migrants from both the North and the
South became the scene of violent controversies. In Kansas, pro-slavery and anti-slavery groups of
settlers came up with two rival constitutions for the new state.

B) The division of national political parties and the birth of the Republican party:

The leaders of the two main political parties proved increasingly unable to reconcile the
stances of their Southern and Northern followers, which made it difficult for them to pass legislation
in Congress and to choose candidates to the Presidency. In 1848, several Northern Democrats and
Whigs left their respective parties to form a party that would clearly oppose the extension of slavery
in the West. This “Free Soil Party” chose Martin Van Buren, a former Democrat from New York state,
as its candidate in the presidential election of 1848.

The Kansas-Nebraska act passed by the US congress in 1854 exemplified the growing paralysis
of the US Congress: instead of deciding whether Kansas would be open or closed to slavery,
Congressmen decided to leave the matter to the settlers themselves through local elections. This
solution challenged the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which had prohibited the extension of slavery
north of the 36°30’ parallel. Southern slaveholders were allowed to move to Kansas with their slaves
even though Kansas lay north of the 36°30’ parallel.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act exposed the weakness of the two main political parties, whose
followers were increasingly tempted to join smaller, new political parties. The most successful of these
became the Republican party, created by former Whigs, Free Soilers and some Northern Democrats
in 1854. The first convention of this new party convened in Philadelphia in 1856 and adopted a
platform that clearly stated the party’s opposition to the extension of slavery in the new territories of
the West. Although many Republicans were rather indifferent to the plight of black slaves, they
strongly objected to the rich planters of the South taking the lion’s share of the resources of the West.

C) The Dred Scott case (1857):

Urged by both sides to settle the controversy over the expansion of slavery in the West, the
judges of the US Supreme Court took the case of Dred Scott, a slave from Missouri who had travelled
with his master to Illinois and the territory of Wisconsin and claimed –along with his friends among
anti-slavery groups- that his stay in free territory had set him free.

Although the nine Supreme Court justices disagreed with each other on the various legal
problems raised in this case, the majority followed the decision issued by Chief Justice Roger Taney on
March 6, 1857: arguing that slaves were property, Taney said that legislation prohibiting slavery in US
territories violated the property rights guaranteed by the 5th amendment to the US Constitution [see
the text of the Bill of Rights in the brochure]. He also argued that blacks –whether free or slaves- had
never been regarded as US citizens and therefore could not defend their rights through the federal
courts.

While Southern politicians welcomed the Dred Scott decision, Northerners saw it as a step
toward ending all restrictions on slavery throughout the United States. As the majority of Supreme
Court justices were Democrats, the decision hurt the image of the Democratic Party and strengthened
the new Republican Party in the North. Abraham Lincoln, a Republican who ran for a seat in the US
Senate in 1858, said in one his campaign speeches that “this government [the government of the US]
cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free”.

2) Secession and Civil War

A) The 1860 election:

The victory of the Republican candidate (Abraham Lincoln) in the 1860 presidential election
exemplified the polarization of US politics along regional (or sectional) lines: the Democratic Party was
unable to agree on a single candidate, and the Democratic vote was split between a Northern
Democrat (Stephen Douglas, the main author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act) and John Breckinridge.
Abraham Lincoln secured a majority of the electoral vote but did not carry any Southern state, which
allowed hostile Southerners to claim that he only represented the North.

B) The Confederacy, the Union, the border states:

The Civil War resulted from the decision of Southern politicians to separate (or secede) from
the Union (hence the French phrase “guerre de Sécession” to describe what Americans call “the Civil
War”). They portrayed Republicans as friends of African-Americans (calling them “black Republicans”)
who would sooner or later abolish slavery even in the South. South Carolina was the first state to
declare Secession in December 1860. Six other Southern states followed in early 1861. The seceding
states formed the Confederate States of America, with their own constitution. After the beginning of
the war Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas joined the Confederacy, making a total of
eleven states in this new republic. The Confederacy chose a new flag and elected a President, Jefferson
Davis.

Lincoln and most Republicans refused to accept the Secession of Southern states and insisted
that their intention was to save the Union rather than to abolish slavery where it already existed. Thus
the Northern troops were known as the Union troops.

It is important to remember that a few slave states stayed within the Union. The Confederate
sympathizers in the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware did not manage to
sway their state governments. The Western counties of the state of Virginia refused to join the
Confederacy and became the state of West Virginia in 1863.

C) The war (1861-1865):

The Civil War started at Fort Sumter, a US military fort located in South Carolina, on April 12,
1861, when Confederate soldiers attacked the federal garrison that stationed in the fort. Both the
Confederate Congress and the Union Congress passed laws allowing them to draft young men for
military service, respectively in 1862 and 1863. Union leaders found that the demographic superiority
of the Union (2/3rds of the white population of the US) did not yield immediate military advantages.

The growing hostility of Northern public opinion toward the Confederates encouraged
Abraham Lincoln to take the risk of promising freedom to the slaves who lived in the “rebel” states.
The Emancipation Proclamation issued on 22 September 1862 announced that these slaves would be
set free by January 1, 1863. Thus the slaves who ran away to Union lines would not be returned to
their masters. Initially presented as a war measure, this decision made it clear that the abolition of
slavery was now a major stake in the Civil War.

The battle of Gettysburg in the summer of 1863 showed that the Union troops were more and
more able to check the offensives of the Confederates. The final surrender of the Confederate army
took place at the Appomattox courthouse in Virginia, where Confederate General Robert E. Lee met
Union General Ulysses Grant on 9 April 1865. The war had destroyed cities and farms, mostly in the
South. It had taken the life of more than 600 000 people and wounded 500 000 soldiers.

3) Reconstruction (1865-1877)
“Reconstruction” (or the “Reconstruction era”) is the period that followed the Civil War, a period in
which the former Confederate states were under military occupation by the federal (or Union) troops.

A) The terms of Southern reintegration into national politics :

As early as 1864, most Republican Congressmen agreed with Lincoln that slavery had to be
abolished in the whole country –including the border states who had remained loyal to the Union- and
that the former « rebels » should accept this decision before being readmitted into the United States.
This prompted the US Senate (in April 1864) and the House of Representatives (in January 1865) to
pass the 13th amendment to the US constitution. Beyond this measure, however, the terms of the
Confederates’ reintegration into the national government long remained uncertain and disputed.
Should reconciliation and amnesty for Confederate leaders prevail or should the latter be at least
temporarily barred from political offices in their state and in the national government? Should the US
Congress try to protect the freedmen and how?

Andrew Johnson, the vice-president who succeeded Lincoln after the latter’s assassination
on 14 April 1865, was a Democrat from Tennessee who had chosen to remain loyal to the Union.
President Johnson advocated a lenient treatment of the former Confederate leaders. On the opposite
side of Congress stood the Radical Republicans like Senator Charles Sumner and representative
Thaddeus Stevens, who believed that without strong political action by the federal government, the
leaders of the Southern ”rebellion” would continue to control the state governments of the South.
Their victory at the 1866 Congressional election increased their influence with moderate Republicans.
The 14th amendment to the US constitution, passed in June 1866, combined a set of guarantees on the
civil rights of African-Americans with sanctions against the former Confederate leaders.

In 1867, a series of Reconstruction Acts required the former Confederate states to accept the
14th amendment before being allowed to send representatives and senators to the US Congress as
before the war. The ten states who refused to ratify the 14th amendment became military districts
placed under the authority of Union army commanders who supervised public affairs.

The 14th and 15th amendments to the US constitution are the most lasting legacy of this period
of Radical Reconstruction. They represented the first attempt to define the notion of US citizenship.
The 14th amendment stated that all persons “born or naturalized in the US” were citizens (the principle
of birthright citizenship). Even if it did not include any positive definition of the rights attached to
citizenship, the 14th amendment said that state governments could not deny any person the equal
protection of the law. The 15th amendment, passed in February 1869, specified that citizens could not
be denied the right to vote “on account of color, race or pevious condition of servitude”.

B) Reconstruction governments in the South :

In the South, the former Confederate leaders resented the abolition of slavery and first tried
to pass laws to restrict the freedom of African-Americans (“black codes”). They viewed the occupation
of the South by Union troops as an example of the continuing interference of arrogant « Yankees » (a
nickname for Northerners) in Southern affairs. They also criticized the work of federal agencies such
as the « Freedmen’s Bureau », which helped freedmen negotiate labor contracts with their former
masters. Secret societies like the Ku Klux Klan tried to intimidate both African-Americans and the white
“scalawags” (a word for traitors) who were willing to work with the Republicans.

From 1867 onward the Reconstruction acts allowed for the organization of state elections
under the supervision of the US army. The former office-holders of the Confederacy were temporarily
barred from the polls. Unsurprisingly, the “Reconstruction governments” of the Southern states were
dominated by Republicans or by political coalitions comprising both whites and blacks. While they
managed to pass important civil rights legislation and to set up public schools, these governments were
beset with financial troubles, fierce political opposition and outright violence at the hands of secret
societies and paramilitary groups.

C) Toward the end of Reconstruction :

At the national level, the alliance between radical and moderate Republicans became less
effective after 1872: indeed, several newspaper editors depicted Johnson’s Republican successor
Ulysses Grant as a friend of corrupt Western capitalists ; Democrats criticized Grant’s pro-business
policy and played with racist prejudices, charging that Radical Republicans tried to force « racial
mixing » between whites and blacks in schools and other public places. A Civil Rights bill prohibiting
discrimination in public places finally became law –after a long struggle- in 1875, but the text of the
act omitted the important issue of racial discrimination at school.

By the presidential election of 1876, radical Republicans had disappeared from the political
scene, the Republican party was increasingly indifferent to the plight of African-Americans, and the
Democrats had recouped much of their former influence both in the South and in the North. In seven
out of the eleven former Confederate states, Democrats had regained control of the state
governments, depicting themselves as the “Redeemers” (saviors) of the South.

The withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South in 1877 marked the end of
Reconstruction. This decision was part of the negotiations that followed the disputed presidential
election of 1876: a special electoral commission appointed by Congress had to decide whether the
winner was Republican Rutherford Hayes or Democrat Samuel Tilden. The Democrats agreed to leave
the Presidency to Hayes, but in exchange they obtained the end of federal supervision of Southern
affairs, opening the way for the “Redeemers” to overthrow the last Reconstruction governments in
the South.