A Nation Torn Apart — The Civil War and Slavery

Last time, we looked at the young republic expanding westward, ever westward, and the heavy price the Native peoples were made to pay at its feet. Expansion brought new lands to the nation one after another, but it also made a certain question unavoidable. In the regions newly joining the nation, would slavery be permitted, or not — ? Over this question, north and south deepened their conflict for a long time, and before long they were driven to a point where compromise could no longer help. What we trace in this chapter is the story of the greatest internal war in American history, in which fellow countrymen turned their guns on one another. Four years in which the ideal of the nation’s founding and its greatest contradiction collided head-on, and an immense amount of blood was shed. And we look all the way to the bitter ending, in which the freedom that should have been won was once again stripped away.

A South and North Being Torn Apart

In nineteenth-century America, the north and the south walked entirely different paths. In the north, industry and commerce developed, and a society of laborers working for wages spread. In the south, by contrast, the great plantations centered on cotton were the pillar of the economy, and that labor was supported by many Black people held as slaves. When the workings of the economy differ, interests and values diverge as well. Above all, how to handle slavery lay at the very core of the conflict between the two.

What made the problem all the more serious was the westward expansion we saw last time. Whether to permit slavery in the lands newly joining the nation was a pressing matter that swayed the balance of power between north and south. Between a south that wished to spread slavery and a north that wished to halt its expansion, compromises were attempted again and again. Yet such arrangements only postponed the conflict and could not fill the fundamental rift. Each time a new state was added, the tension rose.

What deserves attention here is that many people in the north did not, from the outset, aim at the emancipation of Black people itself. There were people who called for abolition out of moral outrage at slavery, but the center of the initial conflict was rather the political question of whether the Union could be held together and whether slavery could be kept from spreading west. The process by which the war’s aim gradually deepened toward ‘the abolition of slavery’ is said to be an indispensable perspective for understanding this internal war.

Positions on slavery were not uniform within the north and the south either. There were people in the north who profited from ties to the southern economy, and there were many farmers in the south who held no slaves. And yet, the reason society as a whole was drawn toward two camps is said to be that slavery, beyond a mere system of labor, was inseparably bound to the life, the pride, and the vision of the future of each region. The reason the rift could not be filled even through repeated compromise was that this problem was a deep-rooted one spanning economics, morality, and politics all at once.

War, and the Emancipation Proclamation

When Abraham Lincoln, who took the position of opposing the spread of slavery, was chosen as president, the southern states one after another declared their secession from the Union. They set up their own government and parted ways with the north. And in 1861, the war is said to have been ignited when the southern army attacked a federal fort. People of the same country, divided in two, taking up arms — it was the beginning of the Civil War.

The war dragged on far beyond initial expectations and grew in intensity. This internal war, said to have produced several hundred thousand dead between the two armies, became more gruesome than any war America had experienced before. Amid this, in 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. With it, the cause of the war became clearly linked not only to preserving the Union but also to the ideal of abolishing slavery.

The tide of war eventually leaned toward the north. In 1865, the Confederate commander-in-chief General Lee surrendered, and the four-year war finally came to an end. The Union was preserved, and a great step toward the abolition of slavery was taken. Yet before the afterglow of that victory had cooled, a tragedy occurred. Just after the war’s end, Lincoln fell to an assassin’s bullet. At the very moment it needed him most, the nation lost the leader who was to guide the difficult Reconstruction that was about to begin.

Hard-Won Freedom, and the Collapse of Reconstruction

When the war ended, the United States faced the great task of rebuilding a divided nation and welcoming the emancipated people into society. This period is called Reconstruction. Amendments were added to the Constitution in quick succession, and the ideals of the prohibition of slavery, equality under the law, and the prohibition of discrimination in voting rights by race were carved into the nation’s supreme law. On paper, Black people had become free and equal citizens.

But there was a deep gulf between ideal and reality. Across the south, laws were created that effectively restricted the freedom of emancipated Black people, and discrimination continued in many scenes of life and work. Furthermore, secret societies advocating white supremacy were formed, and they tried to obstruct Black people’s voting and participation in society through violence. The federal government put in place laws to crack down on such violence, but their effect was limited, and over time the north’s interest faded as well.

Even so, it is not as though there was no real progress during the period of Reconstruction. The emancipated people built their own churches and schools, learned to read and write, and tried to take part in politics. Black members were elected to the legislatures of the south, and although for only a very short while, there was a sight of people advancing as equal citizens. In that sense, this era can be called a time when hope and frustration stood back to back. The process by which a freedom they had begun to grasp was once again narrowed left behind the heavy lesson that simply changing institutions cannot easily change the consciousness of society.

In this way, America came through its greatest internal war. The Union was preserved, and the contradiction that had existed since the nation’s founding — slavery — was, for the time being, given a legal settlement. It was a great step toward drawing closer to the ideal of the founding. Yet the freedom that had been won remained incomplete, and deep wounds and unresolved tasks were left within the nation. Even so, this country did not stand still. Even while wounded by war, railroads ran across the continent, the smoke of factories covered the sky, and America before long pressed on with tremendous momentum toward becoming one of the world’s foremost industrial powers. That age of rapid growth, full of light and shadow, we will trace next time.