The issue of post-Civil War conditions has many intricacies and matters to consider but, in the end, one can state with absolute certainty that the North won the war. With that being said, though, it is important to recognize that the South’s general ideology, sans slavery, reigned powerfully for a century after. Let us examine the military results of the war, racial dynamics, the Compromise of 1877, sharecropping, voting rights, and segregation.
Clearly, the secessions that southern states took to preserve slavery and white supremacy came at a dear cost to the South. While the secessionist movement enjoyed rapid momentum during 1860 and resulted in the formation of the Confederacy in 1861, the South would soon found itself reeling from the military might that Unionists, with President Abraham Lincoln as commander-in-chief, ultimately mounted. There are a number of reasons that the Union was eventually won the Civil War. Principally, one cannot possibly overstate just how imperative President Lincoln’s strong leadership was to preserving the Union. Early on during the war, Lincoln firmly conveyed to people on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line that he intended to keep the Union whole and, making a bold step, his Emancipation Proclamation provided an ultimatum for the South and real hope of abolition for enslaved blacks.
Aside from President Lincoln’s effective leadership though, there are tangible matters to consider as well when determining why it is that the Union eventually won the military side of the war. The Union had the advantage of blacks who clamored to fight for the Union military, and ethnic groups, like the rising numbers of newly minted Americans of German nationality in places such as Missouri; these German-Americans by and large supported the Union cause and deplored slavery. In fact, the fighting blacks and pro-Union German-Americans formed their own military units and proved vital to the military strategy and manpower of the Union. Furthermore, the north had an advantage in terms of resources. While the South did have edible crops, cotton as an economical engine, and sizable man power, the North boasted some two-thirds of the nation’s population, a similar proportion of total railroad miles, a complex economy, and a healthy supply of artillery, thanks to “arms factories equipped for mass production,” (Henretta, Brody, Dumenil 426). Lincoln and the Republicans were successful in utilizing these resources thanks to their enactment of a grand policy of “government-assisted national economic development,” (Henretta, Brody, Dumenil 426). Meanwhile, most economic policy in the Confederacy was set by individual states.
In fact, considering the whole of the Civil War, perhaps one of the few unifying factors in the Confederacy, outside of the southern states’ group secession, was that the whites in the region fought to preserve their racial supremacy in the interest of keeping slavery and out of fear of potential social ramifications should blacks become free people. Fears of white enslavement, black power through shear numbers, and white women marrying black men and bearing children together were veritable rallying calls for southern whites.
In the end, after the transpiration of four years of political and economic strategizing, and dozens of bloody battles and attacks, the Union eventually won the war in that the southern states were eventually readmitted into the Union and the Thirteenth Amendment brought an end to the institution of legal slavery. Though, while the war was over, racism and poverty in the South was very much alive and well.
The latter-half of the 1860s and the decade of the 1870s saw Reconstruction take shape, insomuch the nation saw many initiatives to rebuild the nation economically, socially, and physically. Importantly, the Fourteenth Amendment ensured that blacks would be legally recognized as American citizens and protected civil rights, and voting rights were enforced through the Fifteenth Amendment. Unfortunately, because of the legal structuring of the Fifteenth Amendment, poll taxes, literacy tests, and property-based restrictions were allowed and kept scores of blacks away from the polls. Further troubling still is that the Fifteenth Amendment did not grant women the vote, which outraged a number of female abolitionists. Considering that women would have to wait fifty years to vote (which came with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920) and blacks would have to wait nearly a century before they saw their voting obstacles demolished, one could suggest that any efforts to extend the vote to population other than to propertied white men was very noble and, in legal theory, should have worked, but in actuality, any efforts to extend the vote were met with opposition in the south and crafty use of policies that intimidated blacks. In effect, it seems as if the situation in many southern communities was no better for blacks than if the Fifteenth Amendment was never ratified at all.
Sharecropping is another aspect to consider when looking at the post-Civil War picture. When investigating the economic scene in the South, one has to wonder how the region could have even survived without sharecropping. While one could assert that white property owners perhaps fared better thanks to laws and economic benefit derived from the practice, the bottom line is that sharecropping not only gave the South an economic heartbeat, but that it also gave blacks their truly first taste of economic and wage-earning independence. Whle sharecropping did not necessarily provide all involved people pronounced financial propserity, at the very least it was a significantly valuable practice in that white landowners were still able to lead fairly lucrative lives as planters, free blacks began establishing themselves en masse into society and the workforce, and the South could rely on its internal resources both for the sake of growing edible and commodity crops and for stimulating the economy with exchangeable harvest, namely cotton.
When weighing the results of the Compromise of 1877, it certainly was the best outcome for the good of the entire nation. After all, given the extreme acridity stemming from the handling of the 1876 election, it is fair to say that the compromise could have possibly saved our nation from, potentially, another internal war. However, as Reconstruction was halted, the cause of the South and its impoverished whites and newly free blacks were essentially abandoned. Therefore, the eventual outcome of the Compromise of 1877 is that it generally did not assist the fragile South and its citizens, particularly those who were struggling to survive. However, given the context of the nation at the time, both socially and politically, it is hard to imagine where the United States would be without the Compromise of 1877, especially considering the election fallout. Furthermore, blacks in both the North and the South now had a series of laws that would protect them and give the a chance to hold their own in society.
Work Cited:
Henretta, James A.; David Brody; and Lynn Dumenil. America: A Concise History. 3rd Ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006.
