THE CIVIL WAR AND NEW PATTERNS OF AMERICAN POLITICS
CHAPTER 7: THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
OUTLINE OF U.S. HISTORY
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The Republicans prosecuted the war with little regard for civil liberties. In September 1862, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and imposed martial law on those who interfered with recruitment or gave aid and comfort to the rebels. This breech of civil law, although constitution- ally justified during times of crisis, gave the Democrats another opportunity to criticize Lincoln. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton enforced martial law vigorously, and many thousands — most of them Southern sympathizers or Democrats — were arrested.
Despite the Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg in 1863, Democratic “peace” candidates continued to play on the nation’s misfortunes and racial sensitivities. Indeed, the mood of the North was such that Lincoln was convinced he would lose his re-election bid in November 1864. Largely for that reason, the Republican Party renamed itself the Union Party and drafted the Tennessee Democrat Andrew Johnson to be Lincoln’s running mate. Sherman’s victories in the South sealed the election for them.
Lincoln’s assassination, the rise of Radical Republicanism, and Johnson’s blundering leadership all played into a postwar pattern of politics in which the Republican Party suffered from overreaching in its efforts to remake the South, while the Democrats, through their criticism of Reconstruction, al- lied themselves with the neo-Confederate Southern white majority. Ulysses S. Grant’s status as a national hero carried the Republicans through two presi- dential elections, but as the South emerged from Reconstruction, it became apparent that the country was nearly evenly divided between the two parties.
The Republicans would be dominant in the industrial Northeast until the 1930s and strong in most of the rest of the country outside the South. However, their appeal as the party of strong government and national develop- ment increasingly would be perceived as one of allegiance to big business and finance.
When President Hayes ended Reconstruction, he hoped it would be pos- sible to build the Republican Party in the South, using the old Whigs as a base and the appeal of regional development as a primary issue. By then, how- ever, Republicanism as the South’s white majority perceived it was identified with a hated African-American supremacy. For the next three- quarters of a century, the South would be solidly Democratic. For much of that time, the national Democratic Party would pay solemn deference to states’ rights while ignoring civil rights. The group that would suffer the most as a legacy of Reconstruction was the African Americans.
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8 GROWTH
AND TRANSFORMATION
C H A P T E R
Building the transcontinental railroad, 1868.
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Between two great wars — the Civil War and the First World War — the United States of America came of age . In a period of less than 50 years it was transformed from a rural re- public to an urban nation . The fron- tier vanished . Great factories and steel mills, transcontinental railroad lines, flourishing cities, and vast agricultural holdings marked the land . With this economic growth and affluence came corresponding problems . Nationwide, a few busi- nesses came to dominate whole in- dustries, either independently or in combination with others . Work- ing conditions were often poor . Cities grew so quickly they could not properly house or govern their growing populations .