Amid a political and economic crisis that stretched from the East Coast to the West Coast, the Civil war transformed the nation. Its preservation made possible the American economic and political colossus of the next century. Yet the four years of conflict produced deep and lasting divisions over slavery, its role in secession and the war, and how to remember and interpret the era’s bloodiest chapter.
The framers of the United States Constitution had compromised regarding slavery, giving individual states the right to maintain it within their boundaries. Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 provoked secession from seven southern states whose economies were heavily dependent on cotton cultivated by slave labor. Nat Turner’s 1831 bloody slave revolt, the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery bestseller “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in 1852, and John Brown’s raid on a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry fueled fears that the social and economic system of slavery was being threatened.
By the summer of 1862, the Union had destroyed much of the Confederate river navy on the Mississippi and seized New Orleans, while the 1863 Siege of Vicksburg split the rebellion in half at the Mississippi River. The Emancipation Proclamation, which declared enslaved people in rebelling states to be free, and the drafting of black soldiers into the army, marked key turning points in the Union’s war strategy. Increasingly, as the conflict continued, white northerners came to see preserving the Union as a crucial moral crusade.