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 safe-houses 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.
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. 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 13th 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 14th 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.
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.