Time Period #5 [1848 to 1877]
As the nation expanded and its population grew, regional tensions, especially over slavery,led to a civil war — the course and aftermath of which transformed American society.
By the mid-1840s, the idea of Manifest Destiny had become so influential that it helped to shape the era’s political debates. This concept, which asserted U.S. power in the Western Hemisphere and supported U.S. expansion westward, was built on a belief in white racial superiority and a sense of American cultural superiority. Enthusiasm for U.S. territorial expansion, fueled by economic and national security interests and supported by the idea of Manifest Destiny, resulted in 1846 in the Mexican-American War, the opening of new markets, the acquisition of new territory, and increased ideological conflicts.
Improved transportation, growing sectional economic specialization and rapid westward expansion contributed to strong differences of opinion over the expansion of slavery into the territories. Differing attitudes toward the institution of slavery itself, spanning a continuum from Northern abolitionists at one end of the spectrum to white southerners who regarded African Americans as racial inferior and slavery as a positive good on the other, resulted in a widening cultural and ideological divide. These differences of opinion were exacerbated by the attachment of most southern whites to the idea of states’ rights, and the preaching by some of their leaders of the doctrine of nullification.
Repeated attempts at political compromise failed to calm tensions over slavery and often made sectional tensions worse, breaking down the trust between sectional leaders and culminating in the bitter election of 1860 and the secession of several southern states. National leaders made a variety of proposals to resolve the issue of slavery in the territories, including the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas–Nebraska Act. Chief Justice Roger Taney and the southern majority on the Supreme Court also tried to put an end to the controversy with the the Dred Scott decision. Nevertheless, sectional conflict persisted and both the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision served only to heighten sectional tensions.
One of the casualties of the sectional crisis was the so-called Second American Party System. The issues of slavery and anti-immigrant nativism weakened loyalties to the two major parties and fostered the emergence of sectional parties, most notably the Republican Party in the North and the Midwest. When the Democratic Party split due to differences of opinion over protecting slavery in the territories, the Republicans gained an important advantage. Radical Southern slaveholders and their allies, perceiving a threat to their political power and the peculiar institution from the Republicans and their free soil platform, decided to secede from the Union after the Election of 1860. They refused to risk subordination to Abraham Lincoln and the new Republican Party, who adamantly opposed the expansion of slavery.
What began in the eyes of Lincoln and the Republicans as a war to save the Union was transformed in 1862 by Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Issuing the proclamation changed the purpose of the war, enabling many African Americans to fight in the Union Army, and helping prevent the Confederacy from gaining full diplomatic support from European powers. Unable to organize its economy or unite its society to fight a long and costly war and unable to convince most northerners to permit them to destroy the Union, the Confederates were eventually compelled to surrender and turn their attention to preventing the Republicans from guaranteeing full citizenship rights to African Americans.
Ratification of the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, bringing about the war’s most dramatic social and economic change, but the exploitative and soil-intensive sharecropping system that replaced plantation slavery would endure for several generations. Efforts by radical and moderate Republicans to reconstruct the defeated South changed the balance of power between Congress and the presidency and yielded some short-term successes, reuniting the union, opening up political opportunities and other leadership roles to former slaves, and temporarily rearranging the relationships between white and black people in the South. Although citizenship, equal protection of the laws, and voting rights were granted to African Americans in the 14th and 15th Amendments, these rights were progressively stripped away after the end of Reconstruction through segregation, violence, Supreme Court decisions, and local political tactics. The women’s rights movement was both emboldened and divided over the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution.
Finding the cost in time, energy and money too great, and distracted by the Panic of 1873 and ensuing depression, northern Republicans abandoned the freedmen. In exchange for white southerners support for economic policies favorable to the North, the Republicans tacitly agreed to permit them to deal with African Americans as they saw fit. After 1877, Republicans increasingly turned their attention to the problems resulting from rapid industrialization, especially increasing tensions between capital and labor.