The quick unravelling that followed Lincoln’s election underscored the deep racial divisions in the nation. By June 1861, the number of states seceding from the Union rose to 11.
The threat of abolition was the reason that seven states seceded from the Union following Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 (although Lincoln made no promise to end slavery). Serious students of US history understand how fundamental slavery was to the existence of the Confederacy. Despite Reconstruction, racial divisions persist and the legacy of the war remains at the centre of debates about Confederate statues and flags. Although the nation was already divided along racial lines long before 1861, the conflict exacerbated this discord. Racial divisions in the United States are the Civil War’s most enduring legacy.
Blain, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom. Confederate iconography continues to haunt America So, far from uprooting and changing anything, the Civil War left far too much the same. In this respect, as in others, the Civil War’s legacy was one of suffering and stagnation. And military strength, rather than underpinning a strong, positive, outward-looking central state, gradually evolved into an overly defensive, negative, inward-focussed one.
Ultimately, the power of the state to secure its own existence was confirmed between 18, but the uses to which that power was put after 1865 often had a stronger resonance internationally, certainly in the 20th century, than domestically. But historians are increasingly uncovering the destructive long-term costs, physical and psychological, to those involved in the Civil War, combatants and non-combatants alike. America had long placed its faith in the power of the people in arms and in their relinquishing of said arms once the danger was over. Then, as now, there was often a disconnect between what the law allowed and what the government and the people actually did.ĭespite the downsizing of the military after 1865, the war confirmed and reinforced the martial strain in the American national character. Although the Civil War did expand the power of the American state, increasing the number of federal employees almost tenfold, the power of this state was limited in significant ways. Largely this tendency revolves around slavery and emancipation in respect of the betrayal of the opportunity that the war provided to secure social, economic and political equality for all. Twain initiated a tendency to accord the Civil War a more profound legacy than it merits. At the time of writing, the United States’ centenary as a separate, political state was still three years away. Yet whatever America’s civil conflict did, it did not uproot centuries-old institutions. This quotation frequently pops up in discussions of the war’s legacy.
In The Gilded Age, the novel that named the postwar era, Mark Twain observed that the Civil War had ‘uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations’. Susan-Mary Grant, Professor of American History at Newcastle University
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