President Lincoln was elected in 1860, and his election marked the end of peace between the North and the South for almost two decades. Between 1860 and 1865 the blood of over half a million soldiers from both sides of the country would be shed, and from 1865 to 1877 countless others would die in the name of military reconstruction. However, military reconstruction and civil war are simply byproducts of social and constitutional developments that led up to the revolution. Constitutional and social developments between 1860 and 1877 only served to widen the schism between the North and the South, eventually leading to a revolution.
In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected president. After threatening to leave the Union for months, South Carolina
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But conferring on the black civil rights in another matter. I know not the authority” (Doc D). The civil rights of African Americans was scary, untrodden territory for the newly united nation. How should they confront the very object that split them apart so harshly in the first place? Out of this stems the Civil Rights Act of 1866. In that same year Senator Lot Morrill from Maine outright states, “...that this species of legislation [Civil Rights Act of 1866] is absolutely revolutionary” (Doc F). The act is revolutionary because African Americans have never had rights, and now those same people are changing up the Constitution, the very basis of the American government. Social changes like this anger the already embarrassed and downtrodden South. The North continues to force the South to follow their will through the military reconstruction after the war, so the South retaliates in typical fashion, with the formation of the KKK. The KKK was meant to scare the African American population across the nation, and it achieved this goal of terror with the help of the new white government. Shown in Thomas Nast’s Reconstruction Era Cartoon in 1874, a member of the KKK is seen shaking hands and making deals with the politician, but it is important to note that the deal goes both ways (Doc I). Nast comments that Reconstruction and South retaliation against African Americans in worse than slavery, and that is a white northern sentiment. This cartoon displays the social changes, how the politics of the new Union have been shaped by the social preferences of the South. Again this is a revolutionary ideal because the government is in the back pocket of the KKK, and the Constitution is being skirted by the very people that are elected to uphold
The Civil War and the period of Reconstruction brought significant political, social, and economic changes to American society, and these effects continued into the 20th century. Post Civil War (After the Civil War – The period after the Civil War) - President Abraham Lincoln and Congress were determined to rebuild the nation. Lincoln wanted to restore the Union by readmitting the southern states that had seceded, as well as provide African Americans with more rights. Period of Conflict -
The war between the North and the South that followed the Lincoln election claimed over 600,000 American lives and hence threatened the power within the Western hemisphere . And thus, hen Lincoln called for over 75,000 troops to fight against
The beginning of the Reconstructionist era was the perfect time for the KKK to attack the black community and Republicans politically, eventually leading to social structure and economy becoming targets as well. The South may have lost the Civil War and the slaves may have been emancipated, but the Klan wasn’t going to let history forget the Confederate movement. But their main goal extended further than the Confederate movement’s, which was to preserve the Southern way of life and the institution of slavery. Since they had lost all this and more, the Klan’s main objective was to maintain white
The Civil War occurred during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. The war was fought between the Union (the North) and the Confederate (the South). The Civil War was about slavery. Lincoln tried to downplay the slavery angle, arguing that the war was about preserving the Union. The Civil War was consider the first modern war because on the scale and destruction due to new technology such as rifles and machine guns.
Uncompromising differences between the South (Confederacy) and the North (Union) created a civil war that lasted five years. During this war, Abraham Lincoln was president. His election led to the secession of many Southern states. After refusing to recognize the Confederacy as its own nation, the American Civil War commenced in 1861. The three main causes of the Civil War between the North and the South were industrial and agricultural economies, politics, and slavery.
Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won the Election of 1860 with approximately forty percent of the popular vote and a majority of the electoral votes. Lincoln grasped the attention of the nation with his Cooper Union Speech which opposed the expansion of slavery but not slavery itself. Lincoln embraced a more popular free soil opposition to the expansion of slavery. This caused the Republican Party to become a supporter of free soil but not abolition. Soon after Lincoln was elected as the 16th President of the United States, South Carolina seceded from the Union.
As a result of this, racist organizations were founded to wreaked havoc on former slaves. Secret societies in the southern united states, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia used violence against the blacks. Their goal was often to keep blacks out of politics. Our textbook states, “In other states, where blacks were a majority or where the populations of the two races were almost equal, whites used outright intimidation and violence to undermine the Reconstruction regimes” (Brinkley 368). The people involved in such organizations were using violence to take away the fifteenth amendment right from the former slaves.
The swift pace of change during the era incited a repercussion amidst those left behind by modernity like the farmers that received no economic gains from the new industry, traditional moralists angry about flappers and speakeasies, Christian fundamentalists annoyed by Darwinian objection to the literal word of the bible, nativists overrun by immigrants. All these disagreements made conflict between tradition and modernity. A failed doctor named William J. Simmons coordinated a new Klan in Atlanta, declaring it to the world by a great fiery cross up on Stone Mountain. Simmons new KKK spread around America in the era, enhancing the most critical agent for a traditional politics that was not just anti-black but also anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Communist, anti-alcohol, anti-immigration, anti-sex, and anti-science. ”In 1921, Congress, at the urging of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan...
To say the time period following the Civil War in the United States involved a lot of change would be a understatement. Between the years 1870 and 1900 the people of the United States lived through a period of great change. Not only did they witness technological advances that would change their daily lives, they also saw new laws and organizations formed. All of this was done in hopes of improving the country. Many of these changes came about because of the type of businesses that were formed.
The American Civil War changed Americans and their ideals about freedom in many ways. Northern and Southern United states began to have simmering tensions for the states’ rights versus federal authority, plus westward expansion, and slavery had huge effects on the states. An election which made anti-slavery Republican Abraham Lincoln the president of the United States of America in 1860, caused seven of the southern states to concede from the Union to make The Confederate States Of America soon after four more joined afterwards. It changed Americans in many ways as neighbors fought each other through the 4 gruesome years of the war. Conflict between the sides were like fights between brother and brother instead with many deaths.
The initial causes of the outbreak of the Civil War: The Civil War began after the Ordinance of Secession in South Carolina on Dec. 20, 1860. Southerners clung to slavery since it was responsible for the production and wealth of their economy. The North declared slavery "the great moral, social, and political evil of the day." The North’s Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln winning the election in 1860 directly caused the ensuing secession of South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—even before Lincoln took office.
Abraham Lincoln was an extreme activist for the emancipation of slaves. For the previous eight years before Lincoln came into office, Pierce and Buchanan were the president and felt that slavery should be upheld in the south, much to the disapproval of the free-soil party, later to become the Republican Party. Once Lincoln received the place as president for the republican party, a few of the states in the south began to succeed from the Union and a month after his inaugural address was the commencement of the Civil War. The Union hoped that the war would be over quickly and that they could return to their daily life, but that hope was forgotten after a Confederate victory in the Battle at Bull Run. Lincoln was vaguely familiar with wartime strategies and atmospheres after serving in the Black Hawk War but surprised many with his excellent command and leadership during the Civil War.
He came to represent the troubles of the African Americans as they laughed in public and wept in their souls. This segregation gave way to White Supremacy groups that exist to conserve the social order that was established by the Jim Crow laws. The Ku Klux Klan is the most widely known of all the groups that came about in the period. The “Klan” as it is also known advocated extremist positions in the fields of white supremacy, white nationalism, and also anti-immigration. The first “Klan” flourished in the South of the United States of America in the late 1860s immediately after the Civil War.
Frederickson argues African Americans simply did not have the time or preparation to oppose racist forces. Using paramilitary forces, southern redeemers easily made threats to reconstruction forces as seen through the emergence of the violent Ku Klux Klan during the election of 1866. The opportunity for African Americans to gain a stance in society was short lived by the racist efforts of democrats in the south and impartial ideals from
The Civil War was a monumental bloodshed, which was fought between the United States of America and the Confederate States, from 1861 to 1865. The primary cause of the war was the Southern states' desire to preserve the institution of slavery, which did not please the beliefs of the North. At the beginning of the Civil War, twenty-two million people lived in the North and 9 million people, which included four million of whom were slaves, lived in the South. The North, led by President Abraham Lincoln and his trusted generals, had more money, more factories, more horses, more railroads, and more food than the south. These advantages made the United States much more powerful than the Confederate States, which ultimately led to Northern victory.