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The Legacy of the Civil War:
If Americans could be described as a people of plenty, Southerners for a century could be more accurately described as a people of poverty.
-- C. Vann Woodward, 1986
The war that preserved the Union did not bring political unity. The Congress, dominated by Northern Radicals, exacted vengeance and imposed a harsh "Reconstruction" on Southern states that refused to accept the war's verdict. Economically, the North emerged as an industrial power, while much of the South, wrecked by invading armies and stripped of slave labor, sank into rural poverty. Racially, emancipation freed 4,000,000 enslaved Africans, but equality eluded blacks both north and south.
Peace did, however, lay the foundation for America's new nationalism and its entrance upon the world stage as an economic, industrial, and military behemoth. Yet despite these advances, women could not vote, capitalists crushed labor, monopolies cheated consumers, poverty disheartened immigrants, and racial segregation became the law of the land.
The Civil War had settled the questions of slavery and states' rights. Reunited, the nation was poised to pursue its destiny.
Steve replaced iron in America's infrastructure during the last half of the 19th century, By 1890, the United States had become the world's largest steel producer, and US Steel had become the nation's first billion-dollar corporation.
"A splendid little war. " -- Secretary of State John Hay, 1898
Asserting a new Manifest Destiny and proclaiming "Expand or Explode," the United States declared war on Spain in 1898, seizing Cuba and the Philippines in 113 days. The South patriotically embraced America's venture into imperialism. Camp George H. Thomas, located in the Chickamauga battlefield, became a staging area for nearly 70,000 eager recruits.
Railroads made the United States an industrial giant, speeding raw materials to factories and opening markets for manufactured goods. At the end of the Civil War, the country had 35,000 miles of railway. By the century's end, five transcontinental lines and nearly 193,000 miles of railway -- more than in all of Europe -- crisscrossed the nation.
Free But Not Equal:
The Civil War decreed freedom but did not establish equality. African Americans continued to struggle for another century, hampered by legal and social restrictions that relegated them to the status of second-class citizens in both the North and South.
Black leaders, influenced by regional inequities and the postwar reality of emancipation, disagreed on the role and future of African Americans. Defining equality became the subject of debate.
We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong -- this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty, and we must follow it.
-- W.E.B. Du Bois, 1905
New England native W.E.B. Du Bois advocated black empowerment through political power, civil rights, and higher education. The first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, and a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Du Bois demanded social -- as well as economic -- equality.
"We will not be satisfied to take one jot or title less than our full manhood rights," declared Du Bois in 1902. More than half a century would pass after Du Bois issued this ultimatum before civil rights became a reality.
Any movement for the elevation of the Southern Negro in order to be successful must have... the cooperation of Southern whites. They control government and own the property -- whatever benefits the black man benefits the white man.
-- Booker T Washington, July 16, 1884
Former slave Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, advocated education in the trades and agriculture as the future [???] for blacks in the South. Sometimes disparaged as the "Great Accommodator," Washington was willing to sacrifice social inequity and accept voting restrictions, in exchange for economic progress.
"In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers," Washington eulogized [???] at the Cotton States Exposition in 1893 [???], "yet one as the hand in all things oriented to mutual progress."
The doctrine of "separate but equal" was legitimized by the US Supreme Court in 1896. Nearly 60 years passed before the Court reversed itself in 1954 and declared that segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Equality finally became the law of the land -- nearly 100 years after the Civil War -- with passage of the 1964 Civil Rights legislation.
Sharecropping -- farming land owned by someone else for a share of the crop -- enchained millions of black and white Southerners to the soil in the decades following the Civil War. Few could escape this economic slavery. At the turn of the century, per capita wealth in the South was half the national average, and per capita income about 40 percent lower than elsewhere in the nation.
Voting Rights:
The former Confederate states could not regain representatives in the US Congress until they had amended their state constitutions to guarantee full suffrage to former slaves, and until they had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution -- which granted ex-slaves rights as citizens. By 1868, almost 703,000 black men had registered to vote in the Reconstructed states. With the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, black suffrage became federal law.
But black participation in elections withered by the turn of the century, as whites gradually constricted voting through poll taxes, residency requirements, and literacy laws. For example, in 1900 in Alabama, only 3,000 of 181,471 African-American men of voting age were registered. |