During and immediately after the Civil War, many northerners headed to the southern states, driven by hopes of economic gain, a desire to work on behalf of the newly emancipated slaves or a combination of both.
You can develop several great ideas by checking your class notes, assigned readings, or checking the web for important issues. However, all of this can be time-consuming and when you think you’ve put together a good list of Civil War topics, you still have to narrow your options down to the original ideas that meet your assignment’s requirements.
Apart from being required to uphold the abolition of slavery (in compliance with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution ), swear loyalty to the Union and pay off war debt, southern state governments were given free rein to rebuild themselves.
But despite the stress of wartime, the enormous industrial and economic expansion allowed the North, and eventually the whole country, to grow into the industrial power that it is today. The economy wasn't the only thing that changed for people in the North after the Civil War.
After 1865, a number of northerners moved to the South to purchase land, lease plantations or partner with down-and-out planters in the hopes of making money from cotton.
But the purpose of the Civil War had now changed. The North was not only fighting to preserve the Union, it was fighting to end slavery. Throughout this time, northern black men had continued to pressure the army to enlist them.
The North had geographic advantages, too. It had more farms than the South to provide food for troops. Its land contained most of the country's iron, coal, copper, and gold. The North controlled the seas, and its 21,000 miles of railroad track allowed troops and supplies to be transported wherever they were needed.
Help from the Union The Union did a lot to help the South during the Reconstruction. They rebuilt roads, got farms running again, and built schools for poor and black children. Eventually the economy in the South began to recover.
The North wanted to block the spread of slavery. They were also concerned that an extra slave state would give the South a political advantage. The South thought new states should be free to allow slavery if they wanted. as furious they did not want slavery to spread and the North to have an advantage in the US senate.
But explaining Northern purposes continues to vex historians, in part because Northerners gave varied answers to the question. Most Northerners saw preserving the Union as the war's central purpose, and proved willing to take measures against slavery in order to achieve that aim.
The North had a better economic than the South, so the North had more troops to fight the war. The North had railroads, steamboats, roads, and canals for faster transport of supplies and troops.
Anaconda plan, military strategy proposed by Union General Winfield Scott early in the American Civil War. The plan called for a naval blockade of the Confederate littoral, a thrust down the Mississippi, and the strangulation of the South by Union land and naval forces.
By 1860, 90 percent of the nation's manufacturing output came from northern states. The North produced 17 times more cotton and woolen textiles than the South, 30 times more leather goods, 20 times more pig iron, and 32 times more firearms. The North produced 3,200 firearms to every 100 produced in the South.
Reconstruction refers to the period immediately after the Civil War from 1865 to 1877 when several United States administrations sought to reconstruct society in the former Confederate states in particular by establishing and protecting the legal rights of the newly freed black population.
The Reconstruction Era lasted from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to 1877. Its main focus was on bringing the southern states back into full political participation in the Union, guaranteeing rights to former slaves and defining new relationships between African Americans and whites.
The first three of these postwar amendments accomplished the most radical and rapid social and political change in American history: the abolition of slavery (13th) and the granting of equal citizenship (14th) and voting rights (15th) to former slaves, all within a period of five years.
The Fight for Civil Rights. The economy wasn't the only thing that changed for people in the North after the Civil War. The fight for racial equality during Reconstruction changed Northern society as well as the South.
But as we will see, the period after the Civil War also brought significant changes to the North. Wartime economic growth changed the way people lived after the war, and with the end of slavery came the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement that would come to life a whole century later. 6:01.
Reconstruction was the national effort to reintegrate the North and the South so they could function as one nation without slavery. The war left the Southern economy devastated, and since it had been based on slavery in the first place, the entire economic structure had to be rebuilt.
Many of the major issues of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, like segregated public transit, housing discrimination, and voting rights, were raised during this period.
Migration after the war also changed Northern communities . Many newly freed slaves moved from the South to the North and West, seeking economic opportunity in Northern industrial cities like Chicago and New York. Other groups founded towns in the West for ex-slaves.
During Reconstruction, the South saw a temporary period of military government and tremendo us social upheaval. But as we will see, the period after the Civil War also brought significant changes to the North.
The North had already been more industrialized than the South at the start of the war, and the demands of wartime accelerated the transition in the North from an economy based on farming to one based on manufacturing.
North and South. The economic differences between the North and South contributed to the rise of regional populations with contrasting values and visions for the future. The Civil War that raged across the nation from 1861 to 1865 was the violent conclusion to decades of diversification.
Also, in 1860, the South's agricultural economy was beginning to stall while the Northern manufacturers were experiencing a boom. A slightly smaller percentage of white Southerners were literate than their Northern counterparts, and Southern children tended to spend less time in school.
South. In contrast to the factory, the plantation was a central feature of Southern life. (Library of Congress) The fertile soil and warm climate of the South made it ideal for large-scale farms and crops like tobacco and cotton. Because agriculture was so profitable few Southerners saw a need for industrial development.
Slavery had died out, replaced in the cities and factories by immigrant labor from Europe. In fact an overwhelming majority of immigrants, seven out of every eight, settled in the North rather than the South.
At the end of May 1865, President Andrew Johnson announced his plans for Reconstruction, which reflected both his staunch Unionism and his firm belief in states’ rights. In Johnson’s view, the southern states had never given up their right to govern themselves, and the federal government had no right to determine voting requirements or other questions at the state level. Under Johnson’s Presidential Reconstruction, all land that had been confiscated by the Union Army and distributed to the formerly enslaved people by the army or the Freedmen’s Bureau (established by Congress in 1865) reverted to its prewar owners. Apart from being required to uphold the abolition of slavery (in compliance with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution ), swear loyalty to the Union and pay off war debt, southern state governments were given free rein to rebuild themselves.
Among the other achievements of Reconstruction were the South’s first state-funded public school systems, more equitable taxation legislation, laws against racial discrimination in public transport and accommodations and ambitious economic development programs (including aid to railroads and other enterprises).
Reconstruction (1865-1877), the turbulent era following the Civil War, was the effort to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly-freed people into the United States. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures passed restrictive “ Black Codes ” to control ...
The following March, again over Johnson’s veto, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which temporarily divided the South into five military districts and outlined how governments based on universal (male) suffrage were to be organized. The law also required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment, which broadened the definition of citizenship, granting “equal protection” of the Constitution to formerly enslaved people, before they could rejoin the Union. In February 1869, Congress approved the 15th Amendment (adopted in 1870), which guaranteed that a citizen’s right to vote would not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
After 1867, an increasing number of southern whites turned to violence in response to the revolutionary changes of Radical Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations targeted local Republican leaders, white and Black, and other African Americans who challenged white authority.
In a speech delivered on April 11, while referring to plans for Reconstruction in Louisiana, Lincoln proposed that some Black people–including free Black people and those who had enlisted in the military–deserved the right to vote.
During Reconstruction, the Republican Party in the South represented a coalition of Black people (who made up the overwhelming majority of Republican voters in the region) along with "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags," as white Republicans from the North and South, respectively, were known. Emancipation changed the stakes of the Civil War, ...
The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, ...
A Brief Overview of the American Civil War. The Civil War is the central event in America's historical consciousness. While the Revolution of 1776-1783 created the United States, the Civil War of 1861-1865 determined what kind of nation it would be. The war resolved two fundamental questions left unresolved by the revolution: whether ...
But these achievements came at the cost of 625,000 lives--nearly as many American soldiers as died in all the other wars in which this country has fought combined. The American Civil War was the largest and most destructive conflict in the Western world between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the onset of World War I in 1914.
Lee's Army of Northern Virginia staved off invasions and attacks by the Union Army of the Potomac commanded by a series of ineffective generals until Ulysses S. Grant came to Virginia from the Western theater to become general in chief of all Union armies in 1864.
Due to the Confederate army’s small size, Confederate President Jefferson Davis planned to avoid major battles with the Union army to prevent annihilation of his army and instead planned to only participate in small, limited engagements when the odds were in their favor.
The idea was that it would put an economic stranglehold on the Confederacy, isolate it from all sources of supply and allow for growth of anti-secessionist sentiments which would eventually cause the South to surrender without the use of violence and would therefore save more lives.
The plan received a lot of criticism and was originally rejected because it was deemed too slow and cumbersome, according to the book Historical Dictionary of the U.S. Army:
Scott further proposed that if the strategy didn’t work, the Union could raise an army of 300,000 soldiers that could invade the South and win the war within two to three years. Scott’s great snake. Cartoon map illustrating Gen. Winfield Scott’s Anaconda plan, by J.B. Elliott, circa December 1861. The press dubbed the strategy ...
Gettysburg is considered a major turning point in the Civil War because it caused such devastating losses for the Confederates that they were never able to fully recover. The battle marked the beginning of the end for the Confederates.
While the Confederates did suffer severe shortages by mid-war, they never lost a battle because of a lack of guns, ammunition or other supplies. They did lose battles because of a lack of men, and a broken-down railway system made it difficult to move troops and materials to critical points.
The war finally came to a close after General Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia became trapped by invading Union forces in Appomattox county , Va and were forced to surrender. This prompted similar surrenders by remaining Confederate troops across the South, which finally brought an end to the Civil War. Sources:
What caused the change in the public opinion of the North regarding the war?
What were the differences between Ulysses Grant and Robert Lee’s military styles?
What roles did the states play in dividing the nation in two by region?
What impact did the Fugitive Slave of 1850 in the years leading up to the war?
Do you agree with researchers’ claim that the Mexican War was the first Civil War battle?
There have been a lot of revisionists historians that insist Lincoln may have fought unfairly against the south. Do you agree with this sentiment?
How were the lives of African Americans different in the North and South?