U.S. History 1 Reconstruction

Assignment 5: U.S. History to ReconstructionIn 1861 most Southerners thought that the Confederacy was favorite to win the war. The Confederacy’s sheer size – 750,000 square miles – was a major asset, making if difficult to blockade, occupy and conquer. Confederate forces did not have to invade the North: they simply needed to defend. The fire-power of the rifle-musket meant that battlefield tactics now favored the defender. The Union, having no option but to attack, was bound to suffer heavy casualties. Southerners hoped that Northern opinion might come to question high losses. If Northern will collapsed, the Confederacy would win by default. Geography gave the Confederacy an important strategic advantage. In the crucial theatre of the war – North Virginia – a series of rivers provided a barrier to Union armies intent on capturing Richmond, the Confederate capital. Slavery, which might seem to be a Confederate weakness, enabled the South to enlist more of its white manpower than the North.
The Confederacy also had important psychological advantages. Southerners were defending their own land and homes – a fact that may have encouraged them to fight that much harder than Northerners, who were fighting for the more abstract pursuit of reunion. In 1861 most Southerners were confidant that, man for man, they were better soldiers than Northerners. The ante-bellum South placed more emphasis on martial virtues than the North. In 1860 most of the military colleges in the USA were in slave states. The elite of the nation’s generals had all been Southerners. Most military experts assumed that farmers, who knew how to ride and shoot, made better soldiers than industrial workers. Confederate victory in the first major battle at Manassas seemed to confirm this assumption.
Robert Toombs compared secession with the American Revolution in 1860; “The arguments I now hear in favor of this Northern connection are identical in substance, and almost in the same words as those which were used in 1775 and 1776 to sustain the British connection. We won liberty, sovereignty, and independence by the American Revolution—We endeavored to secure and perpetuate these blessings by means of our Constitution. The very men who use these arguments admit that this Constitution, this compact, is violated, broken and trampled underfoot by the abolition party. Shall we surrender the jewels because their robbers and incendiaries have broken the casket? Is this the way to preserve liberty? I would as life surrender it back to the British crown as to the abolitionists. I will defend it from both. Our purpose is to defend those liberties.”
Toombs compared The American Revolution to the American Civil War because they were very similar in that in each, an underfunded, undermanned and under gunned underdog sought independence from what they felt was an oppressive regime. Prior to the American Revolution, the U.S. felt as if they were being robbed by Great Britain as they were not allowed to import goods except through Great Britain, and at the price (and tax level) Great Britain dictated. Likewise, prior to the Civil War, the southern states were having difficulties with the Treasury Department and bureaucrats in Washington. The southern states were allowed to import goods from foreign countries, but the tariffs on those goods (set by the federal government) made it cost-prohibitive to do so. So the southern states were forced to buy those same goods from the northern states, and since the federal government placed no onerous tariffs on the import of good that the southern states could produce (cotton, tobacco, etc.) the flow of capital was one way – out of the southern states and into the northern states. The primary difference between the two is that no other nations came to the aid of the Confederacy as France did with the colonies. As such, the Confederacy lost.
There were a variety of reasons why the north won the Civil War. The first reason is due to the fact that the North had experienced an industrial revolution, which left them with many factories to produce supplies necessary for outfitting an army. Also, with immigrants coming mostly to the North to settle (they were looking for jobs in the factories), little if any production was lost because of men leaving to fight in the war. Women and immigrants had been the main workers in the factories that now would be producing goods to be used by the Union soldiers. The North grew most of the country's food, and a fighting army can get very hungry. The South had the plantations, but mostly cash crops were grown there. The North possessed a large amount of the country's railroad and canal systems. These would be vital in the quick and easy transportation of troops and supplies. The North also possessed much more money and an in-place, working government while the South was struggling to put their government together and fight a war at the same time. The North's tactics and generals outweighed the South's tenfold. The North's Anaconda Plan was to blockade, divide, and conquer the South. They literally constricted the South into submission. The North also did not set a specific time limit for which they thought the war would end. The South, however, only planned for eighteen months of fighting. This restricted their options on war tactics. The North's superior generals were a major factor in the defeat of the South. U.S. Grant never lost a battle in the entire time frame of the Civil War, and even single handedly negotiated the surrender of General Lee's army at Appomattox courthouse on April 9, 1865.
Another major player in the victory of the north was the Emancipation Proclamation. Up until September 1862, the main focus of the war had been to preserve the Union. With the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation freedom for slaves now became a legitimate war aim. The Emancipation Proclamation helped prevent the involvement of foreign nations in the Civil War. Britain and France had considered supporting the Confederacy in order to expand their influence in the Western Hemisphere. However, many Europeans were against slavery. Although some in the United Kingdom saw the Emancipation Proclamation as overly limited and reckless, Lincoln's directive reinforced the shift of the international political mood against intervention while the Union victory at Antietam further disturbed those who didn't want to intervene on the side of a lost cause. James McPherson stresses how Abe Lincoln’s strategy and political brilliance played a major role in the Civil War in his essay titled, “The Role of Abraham Lincoln in the Abolition of Slavery”. “In essence, concluded Randall, Lincoln believed in evolution rather than revolution, in “planting, cultivating, and harvesting, not in uprooting and destroying.” Many historians have agreed with this interpretation. To cite just two of them: T. Harry Williams maintained that “Lincoln was on the slavery question, as he was on most matters, a conservative”; and Norman Graebner wrote an essay entitled “Abraham Lincoln: Conservative Statesman,” based on the premise that Lincoln was a conservative because “He accepted the need of dealing with things as they were, not as he would have wished them to be.”
These historians were correct about Abraham Lincoln, if he hadn’t played the politics like he did and if he just tried to destroy instead of dealing with things as they were and taking his time to develop a strategic plan, the north could have lost this war. Abraham Lincoln stopped the south from gaining global allies; he turned the war into a war against slavery. He gained soldiers that were previously slaves, and allowed them to fight against their owners that they had a deep seeded hatred toward. This was the South’s worst nightmare. All of these reasons brought the north to win the Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln issued the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction in 1863. The proclamation addressed three main areas of concern. First, it allowed for a full pardon for and restoration of property to all engaged in the rebellion with the exception of the highest Confederate officials and military leaders. Second, it allowed for a new state government to be formed when 10 percent of the eligible voters had taken an oath of allegiance to the United States. Third, the Southern states admitted in this fashion were encouraged to enact plans to deal with the freed slaves so long as their freedom was not compromised. This was to be carried out after the Civil War ended; however, Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 and Andrew Johnson was elected president. President Johnson ran into conflict with congress, which drove moderate republicans into an alliance against him with Radical Republicans. Emancipation reshaped black communities and sharecropping replaced slavery. “Begun as a compromise between freedmen and landowners, sharecropping soon trapped African-Americans and other tenant farmers in a cycle of debt; black political rights waned as well as Republicans lost control of the Southern states”. Blacks also had to deal with a lot of hatred and terrorizing by the groups that were formed in the South as retaliation against freed black including the Klu Klux Klan. “Antagonism toward free blacks, long a motif in Southern life, resurged after the war. In 1865, Freedmen’s Bureau agents itemized outrages against blacks, including shooting, murder, rape, arson, and “inhuman beating.”” This created a lot of conflict between the Republicans and blacks, and the Southern ex-confederates/Klu Klux Klan.
At the same time the north was sidetracked by a political scandals of the Grant administration and the impact of the depression after the panic of 1873. “By the mid 1870’s, northern politicians were ready to discard the Reconstruction policies that congress had imposed a decade before”. Reconstruction came to an end in 1877, the northern resolve crumbled and an ex-confederate campaign of violence, daunting and rioting that started in the 1860’s prevailed. Sited by historians, there are two main causes of the Reconstruction failure. “First, Congress did not promote freedmen’s independence through land reform; without property of their own, southern blacks lacked the economic power to defend their interest as free citizens. Property ownership, however, does not necessarily ensure political rights nor invariably provide economic security. Considering the depressed state of postwar southern agriculture, the freedmen’s fate as independent farmers would likely have been perilous. Thus the land-reform question remains a subject of debate. A second cause of the Reconstruction’s collapse evokes fewer disputes: the federal government neglected to back congressional Reconstruction with military force. Given the choice between protecting blacks’ rights at whatever cost and promoting reunion, the government opted for reunion. As a result, the nation’s adjustment to the consequences of emancipation would continue into the twentieth century”.
When the government withdrew federal troops from the statehouses of South Carolina and Louisiana in 1877, “it marked the end of their role, at least for nearly another century, in protecting the rights and property of African Americans and other working people…” This was the final straw that paved the way to the loss of virtually all rights of African Americans until the nearly 100 years later.
In the century between the creation of the USA and the end of Reconstruction, not all individuals were treated equally. In the beginning the Indian were treated of lower class than the white men. As discussed in the first assignment, “It would not be accurate to say that the Native American nations remained powerful or significant economic, political and military entities until the late 1700’s because they were coexisting with the Europeans. They became dependent on the Europeans and thus, the Europeans gained power early on. Eventually, the entire Western Hemisphere came under the control of European governments, leading to profound changes to its landscape, population, and plant and animal life.” Next, Blacks were shipped to the USA to serve as slaves, which was mentioned in the first assignment. “After Bacon’s Rebellion, one of the major influences that played a role in the reshaping of Chesapeake society was race. The development of racial slavery took place in three-fold.” The difference between blacks and whites was actually written on paper, “colonists distinguished between blacks and whites in official documents”.
In assignment two, The American Revolution was addressed. The American Revolution was started because of the unfair treatment that the Anglo Americans were receiving from Britain, “The government wanted to control Anglo-American expansion proclaiming its rule over the various colonies claiming western lands.” After the war, it was said that, “Native Americans suffered the worst in response to the war. “In an overwhelmingly agrarian society like the United States, the Revolution’s implicit promise of equal economic opportunity for all male citizens set the stage for territorial expansion onto Native American landholdings. Even where Indians retained their land, newly arrived whites posed dangers in the form of deadly diseases, farming practices inimical to Indian subsistence, and alcohol.”” During this time Blacks were still treated as second class citizens.
Assignment three gave an idea of how the Industrial Revolution changed America. Durring this time period women were not treated as equals to men, “Men earned money for their families. Women took care of the home and saw their economic role decline. While many factory workers were initially women, most of them were young women who would quit working when they married.” Immigrants were not treated equally either, “The newcomers found themselves jammed into tenements, crowded apartments and shoddy houses with few sanitary facilities. The worst slums in the world were supposed to have existed in Chicago, a situation exacerbated by the stockyards that supplied the meat-packing industry.” “As immigrants from Ireland began to fill up some of the poorer districts of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, they found their children abused, and their churches attacked.”
Assignment four was based on the antebellum America. Indians were still treated as second class citizens; however, the men and women of the tribes were also treated differently from one another. “known as Jeffersonian Indian policy, the third president proposed to lead Indians from savagery to civilization by instructing men in agriculture and women in the domestic arts (house-hold tasks such as spinning and weaving cloth).” African Americans were treated as property, “Though slavery had such a wide variety of faces, the underlying concepts were always the same. Slaves were considered property, and they were property because they were black. Their status as property was enforced by violence -- actual or threatened. People, black and white, lived together within these parameters, and their lives together took many forms.”
In assignment five the Civil War was discussed. As a result of the war, African Americans were supposed to be “free”. In all actuality they were far from “free”. For a short period of time the blacks were taking advantage of their new rights. They were trying to educate themselves, vote, and work for compensation. “Emancipation reshaped black communities and sharecropping replaced slavery. “Begun as a compromise between freedmen and landowners, sharecropping soon trapped African-Americans and other tenant farmers in a cycle of debt;” “Antagonism toward free blacks, long a motif in Southern life, resurged after the war. In 1865, Freedmen’s Bureau agents itemized outrages against blacks, including shooting, murder, rape, arson, and “inhuman beating.”
All of these statements and documentation about the time period from 1775-1877, confirm that all people were not treated equally as the declaration of independence promised. People of color and women were also not allowed to vote at the end of this time period.