N 1840, most Americans were optimistic about the future as their young nation matured. The United States was already the world’s largest republic. Its population continued to grow rapidly, economic conditions were improving, and war with Great Britain seemed a part of the distant past. Above all, Americans continued to move westward, where vast expanses of land beckoned farmers, ranchers, miners, and shopkeepers. By the end of the 1840s, the United States—yet again—had dramatically expanded all the territory, claiming from Texas to California and the Pacific Northwest. In the process it developed a continental empire from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
This extraordinary expansion, gained at the expense of Indians and Mexicans, was not an unmixed blessing, however. How to deal with the new western territories emerged as the nation’s flashpoint issue at mid-century as the differences between America’s three distinctive regions—North, South, and West—grew more divisive.
A series of political compromises had glossed over the fundamental issue of slavery during the first half of the nineteenth century, but abolitionists refused to give up their crusade against extending slavery into the new territories. Moreover, a new generation of politicians emerged in the 1850s, leaders who were less willing to seek political compromises. The continuing debate over allowing slavery into the new western territories kept sectional tensions at a fever pitch. By the time Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, many Americans had decided that the nation could not survive half-slave and half-free; something had to give.
In a last-ditch effort to preserve the institution of slavery from federal restrictions, eleven southern states seceded from the Union and created a separate Confederate nation. That, in turn, prompted northerners such as Lincoln to support a civil war to restore the Union. No one realized in 1861 how prolonged and costly the War between the States would become. Over 620,000 soldiers and sailors would die of wounds or disease. The colossal carnage caused even the most seasoned observers to blanch in disbelief. As President Lincoln confessed in his second inaugural address, in 1865, no one expected the war to become so “fundamental and astonishing.”
Nor did anyone envision how sweeping the war’s effects would be upon the future of the nation. The northern victory in 1865 restored the Union and in the process helped accelerate America’s transformation into a modern nation-state. National power and a national consciousness began to displace the sectional emphases of the antebellum era.
A Republican-led Congress enacted federal legislation to foster industrial and commercial development and western expansion. In the process the United States began to leave behind the Jeffersonian dream of a decentralized agrarian republic.
The Civil War also ended slavery, yet the status of the freed African Americans remained precarious. Former slaves found themselves legally free, but few of them had property, a home, education, or training. Although the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) set forth guarantees for the civil rights of African Americans and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) provided that black men could vote, southern officials found ingenious—and often violent—ways to avoid the spirit and the letter of the new laws.
The restoration of the former Confederate states to the Union did not come easily. Bitterness and resistance festered among the vanquished. Although Confederate leaders were initially disenfranchised, they continued to exercise considerable authority in political and economic matters. In 1877, when the last federal troops were removed from the occupied South, former Confederates declared themselves “redeemed” from the stain of federal military occupation. By the end of the nineteenth century, most states of the former Confederacy had devised a system of legal discrimination against blacks that re-created many aspects of slavery.
World History
