A third goal had not been addressed during the war. It would be addressed in the postwar years, during an era called the ‘Reconstruction.’
The Confederacy had failed to preserve its “peculiar institution,” as it called slavery. It had also failed to destroy the Union, as historians Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski write:
Although war involves killing, killing is not the object of war. Men fight for vital reasons, as defined by their country’s political leadership. The North fought for the preservation of the Union and the destruction of slavery, while the South fought for independence and the preservation of its “peculiar institution.” In saving the Union and freeing the slaves, Lincoln believed the North would be achieving goals of cosmic significance, transcending national boundaries into the infinite future. Like many of America’s leaders, he thought the United States had a special destiny to safeguard and foster its democratic institutions as an example for the world. The North, he said in December 1862, “shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.” And in the Gettysburg Address he urged his fellow citizens to take increased resolve from the northern soldiers who had given “the last full measure of devotion” on the battlefield. Let us ensure “that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The Civil War permanently changed the way Americans thought and spoke about the nation. Until 1861, the United States was viewed as a collection of sovereign and largely independent governments that cooperated on a few common tasks.
After the Civil War, the United States was understood as a single entity, and the individual states as having limited autonomy within the federal system.
Those northerners who fell at Gettysburg and elsewhere did not die in vain, since the North achieved its dual war aims. The conflict delivered a deathblow to the doctrine of secession and considerably weakened (though it did not destroy) the idea of states’ rights. Within the American federal system, the balance of power shifted from the states to the national government. People no longer said “the United States are” but instead “the United States is.” In the process of saving the Union, the North also destroyed slavery. Advancing Union armies and the Emancipation Proclamation undermined the institution, and the Thirteenth Amendment killed it.
The Thirteenth Amendment ensured that the gains made during the war — i.e., the end of slavery — would be permanent and irreversable. It finalized the achievement of the Republicans: the abolitionist movement had won.
Southerners had seemingly died in vain, since the Confederacy achieved neither of its war aims. And yet merely saying that the Union lived and slavery died left several crucial questions unanswered. What was the status of the defeated states? How and when were they to return to “their proper practical relation with the Union”? Who would control the restored states, former secessionists or southern Unionists, perhaps in league with the freedmen? And what was the status of the former slaves?
The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments would do much to answer those questions. While the Civil War, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and the Thirteenth Amendment had decisively ended slavery, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments would go further: The goal was now full legal citizenship, not only for the former slaves, but also for the millions of free African-Americans who had never been slaves.
Legal equality was a radical change, as radical as ending slavery. Gaining this legal status for African-Americans could only be achieved by the presence of large numbers of Republicans in the South after the war’s end, during the time called the “Reconstruction” Era.
When the war ended in 1865, many of the Confederate states attempted to return to their prewar systems. The local political leaders were almost exclusively members of the Democratic Party, and they moved swiftly to enact many “Black Codes” – laws designed to prevent former slaves from enjoying their civil rights.
Even though the Republicans had won the war, they realized that there was a danger of losing the gains they had made. They had fought so hard to end slavery, but now the political leaders in the Confederate states were trying to take away the liberties which had been won for the former slaves.
The Republicans took several steps to protect the civil rights of the African-Americans. They adopted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, they created the Freedmen’s Bureau, and they wrote the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
Life in the postwar South was an up-and-down experience for the newly freed African-Americans. The immediate postwar year of 1865 and 1866 were grim, as the Democratic Party reasserted itself. The next decade was better, as the Republicans worked to guarantee civil rights during the Reconstruction Era.
When Reconstruction came to an end around 1877, many of the Republican leaders were forced out of the South, and the ex-slaves again experienced an erosion of their liberties, as Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski explain:
As solutions to these perplexing problems emerged during Reconstruction, southerners salvaged much that looked like victory from their apparent defeat. Former secessionists regained effective control over the former Confederate States and maintained unquestioned white supremacy. Furthermore, southerners soon took as much pride in the legend of the Lost Cause as northerners did in the fact of Appomattox. Ironically, even perversely, by 1877 both North and South could proclaim success. How and why the North lost so many of the fruits of victory is a complex story in which the Army played a central role.
Although the war had ended with surrender of the Confederate military forces at Appomattox, the North found it necessary to keep a substantial military presence in the South, because groups of former Confederate soldiers terrorized the freed Blacks using guerilla-style tactics.
The Republicans in Congress authorized the Army to keep troops in the South as one of several measures necessary to protect the lives, properties, and freedoms of the former slaves.
