8 - After the War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
The Republican Conservatives wanted to end the war as quickly as possible without deranging the essential political and social patterns of the nation. They were neither Abolitionists nor egalitarians: the unequal status of the Negroes and poor southern whites were of no interest to them. But, as spokesmen for industrial capitalism, the war furnished them with the opportunity to round out the economic program of the class which they represented. Industrial capitalism was now in control of the state.
Louis M. Hacker, 1940In the aftermath of the war, most people in the North genuinely wanted to put the conflict behind them. They hoped to bind up the wounds of war and return to the bustling prosperity that had characterized the last years of the antebellum decade. But the Civil War had unleashed forces of social change that went far beyond the expectations of all but a few Americans in 1860. The war was, in the words of Charles and Mary Beard, a “Second American Revolution.” Four million black Americans were now free, and they were eager to play a role in restructuring the defeated society of the postwar South. For a brief instant some leaders in the North were willing to make an effort to give them that role, but those efforts fell short. Radical Reconstruction was a bold experiment that failed.
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- Conflict and CompromiseThe Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation and the American Civil War, pp. 253 - 288Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989