Civil War & Reconstruction

From Sectional Crisis to Secession

The Civil War was the violent resolution of a constitutional and moral dispute over slavery's expansion. The Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), and the Supreme Court's ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) — which held that Black Americans were not citizens and that Congress could not bar slavery from the territories — radicalized Northern opinion and shattered the Second Party System. The Republican Party, founded in 1854 on a free-soil platform, elected Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 without carrying a single Southern state.

South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860, followed by six Gulf states; they formed the Confederate States of America in February 1861 under Jefferson Davis. The war began when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, Charleston harbor, on April 12, 1861. Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers pushed four Upper South states, including Virginia, into secession.

The War and Emancipation

The Union's grand strategy followed the Anaconda Plan: blockade Southern ports, seize the Mississippi, and strangle the Confederacy's capacity to wage war. The war's character changed in 1862-63. The Battle of Antietam (September 17, 1862) — the bloodiest single day in American history — gave Lincoln the strategic footing to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, effective January 1, 1863. It freed enslaved people in rebelling states and authorized Black enlistment; roughly 180,000 Black soldiers served in the United States Colored Troops.

The twin Union victories of July 1863 — Gettysburg (July 1-3) and the fall of Vicksburg (July 4) — marked the strategic turning point, splitting the Confederacy and ending Lee's offensive capacity. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (November 19, 1863) recast the war as a struggle to vindicate a 'government of the people, by the people, for the people.' General Ulysses S. Grant's elevation to overall command in 1864 and Sherman's March to the Sea (late 1864) applied total war. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, days into the peace.

The Thirteenth Amendment

The Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure of contested permanence. Constitutional abolition came with the Thirteenth Amendment, passed by Congress in January 1865 and ratified December 6, 1865, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime. It was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments and the foundation on which the postwar constitutional order would be built — and contested — for the next twelve years.

Presidential vs. Congressional Reconstruction

Reconstruction was a struggle over who would define the terms of reunion and the status of four million freedpeople. President Andrew Johnson's lenient program (1865) allowed former Confederate states to re-enter on minimal terms; Southern legislatures responded by enacting Black Codes that re-imposed near-bondage. Congressional Republicans seized control. Over Johnson's vetoes they passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and, fearing its repeal, drafted the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified July 9, 1868), which established birthright citizenship, due process, and equal protection — binding the states for the first time.

The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into five military districts and required new constitutions and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment for readmission. The conflict peaked when the House impeached Johnson in 1868 for violating the Tenure of Office Act; the Senate acquitted him by one vote. The Fifteenth Amendment (ratified February 3, 1870) barred denial of the vote on grounds of race, color, or previous servitude.

Achievements and Counter-Revolution

Reconstruction governments established the South's first public school systems, elected over 1,500 Black officeholders, and sent Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce to the U.S. Senate. The Freedmen's Bureau (1865) administered relief, labor contracts, and schools. But violence answered Black political power. The Ku Klux Klan, founded 1866, waged terror; Congress responded with the Enforcement Acts and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

The Supreme Court then narrowed the amendments. The Slaughter-House Cases (1873) gutted the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause; United States v. Cruikshank (1876), arising from the 1873 Colfax Massacre, held that the amendments restrained only state, not private, action.

The Compromise of 1877

The disputed Hayes-Tilden election of 1876 was resolved by the Compromise of 1877: Rutherford B. Hayes gained the presidency in exchange for withdrawing the last federal troops from the South. Reconstruction collapsed, opening the door to disfranchisement and the Jim Crow regime that Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) would constitutionalize.

Why This Matters for the Exam

The FSOT US History/Society/Culture section tests the Civil War-Reconstruction era heavily because it defines American citizenship, federalism, and race — themes a diplomat must explain abroad. Expect multiple-choice items on the three Reconstruction Amendments (memorize their content and ratification years: 13th-1865, 14th-1868, 15th-1870), the Dred Scott and Plessy cases, and the 1877 Compromise. The high-yield framing: emancipation was achieved by war, secured by constitutional amendment, and then judicially and politically eroded — a cycle from promise to retrenchment.