Dbq Revolution

Many controversial issues in the mid 1800’s, including slavery, preservation of the Union, and the rights of states, caused the division of the United States and the Civil War. One major event that began this division was the southern assault on Fort Sumter. Since the defeat of the Democrats in the 1860 election, by Abraham Lincoln, to the final withdrawal of northern troops from the South, the United States had gone through a great revolution that consisted of both constitutional and social developments. One event that consisted of the constitutional developments of the secession of many southern states from the Union and the Emancipation Proclamation was the Civil War. The revolution of Reconstruction followed the war and consisted of the constitutional developments of three civil rights amendments to the Constitution and the social formation of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The final revolution of this time period was that of the conservatives or Redeemers and gave place to lawful developments such as the Force Acts and the Ku Klux Klan Act and social developments like the formation of white terrorist groups and segregation of blacks from whites.

Before the Civil War began, the United States had split into four divergent regions: the Northeast, which had a growing industrial and commercial economy and an escalating population; the Northwest, a briskly expanding region of free farmers which, under the Northwest Ordinance, forbade slavery; the Upper South with a plantation system and economic prosperity; and the Southwest, a budding region with an intensifying cotton economy. Based on a wage labor system in the North and slavery in the South, two different views of society emerged in the United States in the 1800’s. Though previous compromises to keep a balanced number of slave and free states, such as the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, settled tensions between the North and the South in the past, a crisis now was inevitable. After the election of northern Republican, Abraham Lincoln, into the Presidential office, and the loss of the balance of power in the Senate by slave states, many southern states began to secede. They believed that with a Republican in office many of their constitutional rights as states were being threatened. The South Carolina Declaration of Secession explains that the southern states seceded because they believed their sovereignty was being taken away by the duties, such as protectionist tariffs, imposed by the Constitution. It also conveys that the states believed they had a constitutional right to secede, cited from the doctrine of states’ rights. Many Republicans, including the President at the time, disagreed with this and believed it was unconstitutional to secede. Later this feeling of the Republicans turned to anger when the South assaulted Fort Sumter in South Carolina, beginning the Civil War. Lincoln then ordered troops from all the remaining states to recover the other forts, which added four more states to the previous seven in the Confederacy. Though some abolitionists in the North felt the war was about slavery, both sides knew it was mostly about the rights of states. Contradicting the mindset of the Confederate States of America, Senator John Sherman, in a speech in Congress on the new banking and currency system, felt the states had too much power. He expressed his feelings that the lack of nationality was what caused the splitting of the Union and believed everything, including currency and a medium of exchange, should be as national as possible. However, the South conflicted this, wanting as much control as possible in the hands of the states. Eleven states had seceded from the Union but four slave holding states remained and one seceding state split, being called the “border states”, because they made up the border between the Union and the Confederacy. In September of 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which said all slaves of people engaged in rebellion against the U.S. were free. In addition, in January of 1863 the object of the war was changed to slavery, committing the U.S. to abolition. This action on behalf on the U.S. gets many blacks to volunteer to fight in the War. Already industrialized and possessing a better transportation network than the South, the North had many more advantages in winning the war. However, the advantages the South did have, of fighting on their home terrain and having experienced generals, posed as a big threat to the North. After firing many generals, Lincoln hired William Sherman and Ulysses Grant, who worked together using strategies such as the Total War to end the War in favor of the United States in April of 1865.

The Civil War had forced the South to industrialize, but it also left its economy in shambles and a half million southern whites faced starvation. Furthermore, the four million, recently freed, African Americans began to struggle to get economic independence and freedom. Nevertheless, even after their defeat in the Civil War, southern whites were determined to take back control and put things back the way they were. These were signs of the many changes that would take place in the Reconstruction revolution. After being emancipated, many blacks began to search for their families and turned their slave marriages into legal ones. To the slaves, a legal marriage meant having authority over their children and getting access to land titles as well as other opportunities. Though the former slaves looked for equal civil rights, southern whites looked for a way to keep the rights away. This was done by establishing “black codes” in many of the states, denying blacks racial intermarriages, the right to bear arms, possess alcohol, sit on trains except in baggage compartments, be on city streets at night, or congregate in large groups. In addition, many states made “Vagrancy” laws, which said that any black not employed by a white could be arrested, jailed, fined, or hired out to someone else.

In 1863, Lincoln began to make his plan for reconstruction, the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, which said each southern state must have 10% of its voters take an oath of loyalty to the Union and rewrite its Constitution to eliminate any mention of slavery. However, Congress disagreed with this and enacted the Wade Davis Bill, requiring each southern state, who wished to return to the Union, to have 50% of its voters take an oath of loyalty to the Union and only those people could then be able to vote on the Constitution. However, before this bill could come into play, President Lincoln vetoed it. Later in 1865, John Wilkes Booth, allowing Democratic Andrew Johnson to become President, assassinated Abraham Lincoln. President Johnson’s assuaging reconstruction plan gave amnesty and pardon along

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