Immigrants also began seeing the fast-growing nation as a land of opportunity and began coming here in record numbers. For many years Southern lawmakers had blocked the passage of land-grant legislation.
But they weren't around after secession, and in Congress passed a series of land-grant measures that would forever change America's political, economic and physical landscape:. The same year brought another innovation — a national paper currency — that would literally bankroll the rapidly expanding government and at the same time grease the wheels of commerce from coast to coast.
In , with the Union's expenses mounting, the government had no way to continue paying for the war. Chase told Congress. Edmund D. Taylor, who would later became known as "the father of the greenback. Ever wonder why we display flags and memorialize fallen solders just as summer gets under way?
Flowers, that's why. The first memorial days were group events organized in in both the South and North, by black and white, just a month after the war ended. Quickly evolving into an annual tradition, these "decoration days" were usually set for early summer, when the most flowers would be available to lay on headstones. Decoration days helped the torn nation heal from its wounds.
People told — and retold — their war stories, honored the feats of local heroes, reconciled with former foes. No matter where you are on Memorial Day, a national moment of remembrance takes place at 3 p. Abraham Lincoln was a techie. A product of the Industrial Revolution, Lincoln is the only president to have held a patent for a device to buoy boats over shoals. He was fascinated with the idea of applying technology to war: In , for example, after being impressed by a demonstration of ideas for balloon reconnaissance, he established the Balloon Corps, which would soon begin floating hot-air balloons above Confederate camps in acts of aerial espionage.
Lincoln also encouraged the development of rapid-fire weapons to modernize combat. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson, the author of Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief, notes that Lincoln personally tested the "coffee-mill gun," an early version of a hand-cranked machine gun.
But above all, Lincoln loved the telegram. Invented just a few decades earlier, the telegraph system had gone national in As Tom Wheeler recounts in his book, Mr. Twice daily throughout his presidency, Lincoln walked to the telegraph office of the War Department on the site of today's Eisenhower Executive Office Building, just west of the White House to receive updates and to send orders to his generals on the front. He sent this one to General Ulysses S. Grant on Aug.
Before Lincoln's day, letters and speeches were often long-winded. With the telegraph came the need for concise communication. After all, every dot and dash of Morse Code carried a cost.
Gone were the "wherefores," "herewith" and "hences. Lincoln's Gettysburg and Second Inaugural addresses both demonstrate this new economy of phrase. Not only did Lincoln's wartime dependence on the telegraph eventually lead to a wave of investment in new communication devices, from the telephone to the Internet the latter invented, not coincidentally, for military use , but it also signaled the evolution of a language that morphs as quickly as the devices that instantaneously tweet our words around the globe.
A cover of Puck magazine employs the donkey and elephant as satirical stand-ins for the political parties that took permanent hold during the Civil War. Before , you might have been a Whig. Or a Free Soiler.
But that year the Republican Party was founded by anti-slavery activists and refugees from other political parties to fight the iron grip of powerful southern Democrats. As the name of their party suggests, these activists believed that the republic's interests should take precedence over the states'. In the years before the war, many northern Democrats defected to join the new party — and, in , to elect Abraham Lincoln as the first Republican president — while southern Democrats led the march to secession.
The Democratic and Republican parties both survived the war and have held their spots as the dominant U. The "Solid South," as it was known, protected the interests of agrarian Southern whites and consistently elected Democrats to Congress from Reconstruction through the early s, when the national Democratic Party's support of the civil rights movement allowed the Republican Party to begin making new political inroads below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Within a few years, North and South swapped party hats. Conservative southerners grew disenchanted with the Democratic Party's increasingly progressive platforms. Republicans capitalized on this with their "Southern Strategy," an organized plan to make headway there on a socially conservative, states' rights platform. In reverse, historically Republican strongholds in the Northeast began voting Democrat, establishing the pattern of red and blue that we see on election-night maps today.
This photograph shows a dead Confederate sharpshooter after the Battle of Gettysburg. The Civil War was the first war in which people at home could absorb battle news before the smoke cleared. The region that became the territories of Kansas and Nebraska was part of the Louisiana Purchase, acquired by the United States from France in Considered by northerners to be an inviolable compact, the Missouri Compromise had lasted 34 years.
But in southerners broke it by forcing Stephen A. Douglas anticipated that his capitulation to southern pressure would "raise a hell of a storm" in the North. The storm was so powerful that it swept away many northern Democrats and gave rise to the Republican party, which pledged to keep slavery out of Kansas and all other territories. An eloquent leader of this new party was an Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, who believed that "there can be no moral right in the enslaving of one man by another.
But they intended to prevent its further expansion as the first step toward bringing it eventually to an end. The interior of Fort Sumter on April 17, , days after the Confederacy bombed it.
The United States, said Lincoln at the beginning of his famous campaign against Douglas in for election to the Senate, was a house divided between slavery and freedom. Lincoln lost the senatorial election in But two years later, running against a Democratic party split into northern and southern factions, Lincoln won the presidency by carrying every northern state. It was the first time in more than a generation that the South had lost effective control of the national government. Southerners saw the handwriting on the wall.
A growing majority of the American population lived in free states. Pro-slavery forces had little prospect of winning any future national elections. The prospects for long-term survival of slavery appeared dim. To forestall anticipated antislavery actions by the incoming Lincoln administration, seven slave states seceded during the winter of — Before Lincoln took office on March 4, , delegates from those seven states had met at Montgomery, Alabama, adopted a Constitution for the Confederate States of America, and formed a new government with Jefferson Davis as president.
As they seceded, these states seized most forts, arsenals, and other Federal property within their borders—with the significant exception of Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. When Lincoln took his oath to "preserve, protect, and defend" the United States and its Constitution , the "united" states had already ceased to exist.
When Confederate militia fired on Fort Sumter six weeks later, thereby inaugurating civil war, four more slave states seceded. Secession and war transformed the immediate issue of the long sectional conflict from the future of slavery to the survival of the Union itself. Lincoln and most of the northern people refused to accept the constitutional legitimacy of secession.
We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. And the war came. The articles that follow focus on key aspects of the four-year conflict that not only preserved the nation, but also transformed it.
The old decentralized republic in which the federal government had few direct contacts with the average citizen except through the post office became a nation that taxed people directly, created an internal revenue bureau to collect the taxes, drafted men into the Army, increased the powers of federal courts, created a national currency and a national banking system, and confiscated 3 billion dollars of personal property by emancipating the 4 million slaves.
Eleven of the first 12 amendments to the Constitution had limited the powers of the national government; six of the next seven, beginning with the 13th amendment in , vastly increased national powers at the expense of the states.
The first three of these postwar amendments accomplished the most radical and rapid social and political change in American history: the abolition of slavery 13th and the granting of equal citizenship 14th and voting rights 15th to former slaves, all within a period of five years.
This transformation of more than 4 million slaves into citizens with equal rights became the central issue of the troubled year Reconstruction period after the Civil War, during which the promise of equal rights was fulfilled for a brief time and then largely abandoned. During the past half century, however, the promises of the s have been revived by the civil rights movement, which reached a milestone in with the election of an African American President who took the oath of office with his hand on the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln used for that purpose in The Civil War tipped the sectional balance of power in favor of the North.
From the adoption of the Constitution in until , slaveholders from states that joined the Confederacy had served as Presidents of the United States during 49 of the 72 years—more than two-thirds of the time.
Twenty-three of the 36 Speakers of the House and 24 of the presidents pro tem of the Senate had been southerners. We see, then, that the Civil War was indeed a global event—with global implications. Most historians point out that if the Confederacy had won, slavery in the western hemisphere would have continued for at least another half century.
Instead, with the Emancipation Proclamation, and then the 13th Amendment, and the end of slavery in the United States, only Brazil an independent former colony of Portugal and Cuba a colony of Spain continued to maintain a system of human slavery. But with emancipation in the United States, America was in a position to take the lead on global ethical and moral issues—on global human rights.
In the decades after the Civil War, then, the United States was able to use its newly-found moral standing to end, once and for all, the Atlantic slave trade in collaboration with Great Britain and to pressure Spain to end slavery in Cuba.
Once slavery in Cuba had ended in , two decades after the end of the Civil War , Brazil could see the handwriting on the wall and ended its slave system two years later. The Civil War, then, had monumental implications for the role of the United States in the world area.
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