Civic Literacy Curriculum

Background

Over the course of the 19th century, slavery polarized American politics. Where once most political leaders from across the country had looked forward to the day slavery would die out, in the early 1800s Southerners such as John Calhoun began defending it not as a necessary evil but as a positive good, even for the slaves themselves. In the North, the abolitionist movement gained traction and grew increasingly intense in its rhetoric, as members of the movement argued for the immediate and complete elimination of slavery in the United States. Many other Americans, especially in the North, sought to arrest slavery’s growth in order to bring about its eventual collapse, and thus the newly formed Republican Party sought to end slavery in federal territory (that is, land that had not yet become a state).

The Civil War

Southerners, long used to using the power of the federal government to protect slavery over the protest of anti-slavery Northern states, feared the loss of this power. Thus, they responded to the victory of Abraham Lincoln and the anti-slavery Republican Party in 1860 by seceding from the Union. This triggered the Civil War.

Although later generations rehabilitated the Confederacy to be fighting for “states’ rights” as part of the Lost Cause romanticizing the South, and some of the secession declarations by the states alluded to additional secondary grievances, most historians today do not take those claims seriously, and certainly not for the cause of the first set of states seceding. Many of the seceding states’ declarations in fact protested against northerners using states’ rights to resist slavery within their borders (such as prohibiting southerners to bring their slaves with them on vacations). Moreover, the Republican platform explicitly adopted states’ rights and sought only to stop the spread of slavery into federal territories while leaving the practice untouched within the states where it currently existed, and after the war Republicans remained broadly committed to federalism.

The Civil War began when Confederate forces fired on the Union base at Fort Sumter in 1861. The war, which many expected to be over quickly, rapidly became a stalemate. Eventually, however, Union forces began amassing victories, such as the Battle of Antietam (or Sharpsburg, Maryland) in 1862, the Battle of Gettysburg (Pennsylvania) and Battle of Vicksburg, Mississippi (both 1863). General William T. Sherman’s march through the South demoralized Confederates, while the military strategy of the Union army’s eventual overall commander, Ulysses Grant, to cut off the Confederacy by focusing on the western front proved successful. Eventually, the leading Confederate General, Robert E. Lee, surrendered his army to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse.

While the South seceded and launched the Civil War to defend slavery, the Union initially did not wage war to end it. Lincoln famously observed that “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” This statement of Lincoln’s policy was consistent with his position throughout the 1850s – to restrict the spread of slavery into federal territories in the hopes of its eventual elimination, but not to interfere with it in the states where it already existed. His Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves within states currently in rebellion, and even then, only after giving those states time to surrender, only applying to parts Union forces did not control and only after Lincoln had determined that emancipation was indispensable to the Union war effort. But as the war continued, and in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, the cause increasingly included ending slavery. Some of the slave states that remained in the Union began ending the practice, and toward the end of the war, Republicans in Congress pushed through the Thirteenth Amendment that ended slavery throughout the Union.

Lincoln did not see the results of these victories, however, as he was assassinated at war’s end by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer who raged at Lincoln’s support for black suffrage.