The Change America Needed Dora Gan, Year 11, Wu House
Often referred to as the “Second American Revolution,” the Civil War was a turning point in the United States’ history. Its aftermath revealed systemic political, social and economic problems in the antebellum period, many of which failed to be resolved during Reconstruction due, in large measure, to disagreements between President Andrew Johnson and Congress. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise split the nation along the latitude of 36° 30', with slavery permitted in the south and prohibited in the north[1]. The Northern economy focused on manufacturing and industry, while the Southern economy was based on farming cotton and tobacco, dependent on the labour provided by black slaves[2]. However, as Senator William Seward of New York told his colleagues in 1858, the collision of interests between North and South was not “the work of interested or fanatical agitators”, but rather “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will sooner or later, become entirely a slaveholding nation or entirely a free-labour nation.”[3] The Republican Party was formed in 1854: a party based on the principle of opposing the extension of slavery to the western states as they joined the nation, with an ideology defined by competitive, egalitarian, free-labour capitalism[4][5][6]. When Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, seven southern states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) concluded that their legislatures and economy were in peril, leading them to secede from the Union and establish the Confederate States of America at Montgomery, Alabama on February 1861 with Jefferson Davis as president[7]. With the first shot fired at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 by the Confederates, the fires of the Civil War were ignited and would continue to burn well beyond the war’s conclusion[8].
35 | Home, Nostalgia and The Odyssey
The war was essentially a stalemate for the first three years, even though the North had an advantage in terms of armaments, manpower and finance. Lincoln changed commanders six times; it was not until he appointed Ulysses Grant as Lieutenant General in the spring of 1864 that the North seized the upper hand. Finally, on April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse, ending four years of brutal warfare that resulted in over 600,000 casualties. If the American Revolution created the United States, the Civil War determined what type of nation it would remain. With the assassination of Lincoln on April 14, 1865, a stunned Vice President Andrew Johnson, known to many as the “dead dog of the White House,” stepped into the Oval Office and inherited the task of reuniting the North and the South[9][10]. History would judge that he was ill-prepared to address the chaos and confusion of Reconstruction (1865 -1877)—much of which he would create in the first place. Lincoln’s original blueprint for Reconstruction took form in the Ten-Percent Plan of 1863: if 10% of a southern state’s voters swore an Oath of Allegiance to the Union, that state would be readmitted with its Confederate generals receiving a full pardon[11]. A new state government and restructured state constitution would be put in place, officially accepting the abolition of slavery[12]. However, Johnson, a Tennessee Unionist and previously a slave owner, was more lenient towards the South with his plan, which included dispensing thousands of pardons to former Confederates[13]. He called for a loyalty oath less stringent than Lincoln’s and as long as Southern state governments abolished slavery, repudiated secession and abrogated the Confederate debt, they would be free to manage their affairs[14]. The Southern states also had to uphold the new Amendments to the Constitution: 13th (1865) that “neither slavery nor
