Racism Uncovered (Part 2): The Civil War

Part 2: The Civil War

In this series, Racism in America, I aim to discuss the history of the United States with a focus on the topic of racism, both systemic and individual racism. Through this series, I hope to play a part in fighting the issue of racism that still persists in our society today. This series was inspired by the Black Lives Matter protest movement.

In the last post in this series, we discussed the issue of slavery in the United States when it was a young country, all the way until the mid-1800s. We left off after discussing the Dred Scott Decision. In today’s post, we will talk about the events that led to the Civil War and the consequences of the Civil War.

The 1860 Presidential Election, held in the year following the Dred Scott Decision, was one of the nation’s most polarized elections. Abraham Lincoln, who supported banning slavery across the country, was the main contender for the Republican Party. The South viewed this as a violation of their constitutional rights. As a result, Lincoln didn’t even get on the ballots in most Southern states. However, because the North had the largest number of voting men, the North was able to secure a plurality of the popular vote and the Electoral College vote. As such, Lincoln won the presidential election against Democrat Stephen A. Douglas and Constitutional Unionist John Bell, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency.

The South was outraged at Lincoln’s election, and even before he was inaugurated as president, seven Southern slave states seceded from the Union. These states were South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. In February 1861, a month before Lincoln’s inauguration, the Confederate States of America is formed.

After Lincoln was inaugurated as the 16th President of the United States on March 4, 1861, hostilities began on April 12, 1861. Confederate forces opened fire at the Union’s Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. The Civil War has officially begun.

Within a week, Virginia secedes, followed by Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina, joining the Confederacy.

In the Western Theater, which involved battle operations west of the Mississippi River, the Union made significant permanent gains in the first years of the war, they endured some losses in the Eastern Theater (operations that took place east of the Mississippi River) in 1861-1862.

The first Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Lincoln in September 1862, making abolition a key war goal. The final Proclamation was finalized by January 1, 1863. The Proclamation declared all slaves in Confederate states free.

Harsh fighting continues throughout all of 1862 and early 1863, but the Union made a significant gain when they won the Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania in July 1863. The Union gained control of the entire Mississippi River by Independence Day 1863, effectively splitting the Confederacy in half.

During the Civil War, a presidential election occurred in 1864, where Lincoln won reelection easily. On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrenders to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the Civil War. Shortly after, on April 14, Lincoln is assassinated in the Ford’s Theater by John Wilkes Booth.

The picture shows how Lincoln’s assassination may have looked like.

The final Confederate forces surrender in May. Almost 1 million people died during the Civil War, making it the deadliest war in American history.

Lincoln never lived to see the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolishes slavery, ratified in the Constitution. The Amendment, although approved by Congress in January 1865, was only ratified into the Constitution on December 6, 1865, officially abolishing slavery in the United States. Approximately 4 million slaves were freed throughout and after the Civil War. This was the first of three Reconstruction Amendments.

The two remaining Reconstruction Amendments, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, were intended to establish rights to all former slaves. The Fourteenth Amendment, arguably one of the most important amendments to the Constitution, contains several important clauses. It ensures birthright citizenship in the U.S. (giving all former slaves U.S. citizenship), ensures all people have equal protection under the law, repealed the three-fifths compromise (ensuring all citizens are counted as one person), required a two-thirds vote by Congress to allow Confederate leaders to regain citizenship or hold office (written broadly as people who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” and “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,” but more specifically targeting Confederate leaders), ensures the federal government would not pay Confederate debts, and gives power to Congress to enforce the amendment. It was ratified in 1868.

The Fifteenth Amendment prohibits the federal and state governments to deny citizens the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” ratified in 1870.

The Reconstruction Amendments are some of the most important amendments that helped reconstruct the country. Next time, we will look into more detail into Reconstruction after the Civil War, and how states tried to circumvent these amendments to enforce segregation throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with Jim Crow laws and the like.

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