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Overview
The
Civil War was perhaps the most momentous event in American history. The
survival of the United
States as one nation was at risk and
on the outcome of the war depended the nation's ability to bring to
reality the ideals of liberty, equality, justice, and human
dignity.
The war put
constitutional government to its severest test as a long festering debate
over the power of the federal government versus state rights reached a
climax. Its enormously bloody outcome preserved the Union
while releasing not only four million African Americans but the entire
nation from the oppressive weight of slavery.
The war can be
studied in several ways: as the final, violent phase in a conflict of two
regional subcultures; as the breakdown of a democratic political system;
as the climax of several decades of social reform; and as a pivotal
chapter in American racial history. In studying the Civil War, students
have many opportunities to study heroism and cowardice, triumph and
tragedy, and hardship, pain, grief, and death wrought by conflict.
Another important topic is how the war necessarily obliged both northern
and southern women and children to adapt to new and unsettling
situations.
As important as the
war itself, once the Union prevailed,
was the tangled problem of Reconstruction. Through examining the 13th, 14th,
and 15th amendments--fundamental revisions of the Constitution--students
can see how African Americans hoped for full equality as did many white
lawmakers. They can assess the various plans for Reconstruction that were
contested passionately. The retreat from Radical Reconstruction--the
first attempt at establishing a biracial democracy--should be of concern
to all students who need to understand how shared values of the North and
South sharply limited support for social and racial democratization. The
enduring republican belief in the need to respect local control made
direction by central government power unpopular. Northerners, like
southerners, did not support schemes to redistribute wealth under
Reconstruction because of the need to protect private property.
Northerners, like southerners, believed in the social inferiority of
blacks.
Students should learn
how southern white resistance and the withdrawal of federal supervision
resulted in the "redemption" of the South through the
disfranchisement of African Americans, the end of their involvement in
Reconstruction state legislatures, greater racial separation, the rise of
white intimidation and violence, and the creation of black rural peonage.
Balancing the
success and failures of Reconstruction should test the abilities of all
students. Too much stress on the unfinished agenda of the period can
obscure the great changes actually wrought. Moreover, it needs to be
remembered how most white Americans were diverted from completing
Reconstruction toward new goals brought about by social change. A new
generation sought new fields of endeavor afforded by industrialization.
They were not imbued by the reformist idealism of their predecessors.
Indeed, they were receptive to new doctrines of racial and social
inequality. The legacies of the era of war and reconstruction needs to be
considered with reference to the North and West as well as the
South.
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