Civil War Dbq

By February of 1861 six states had seceded from the Union (Glass, 2008). The Civil War was impacted by Southern and Northern leaders. Two of the leaders in the South were Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and in the North the Union was led by Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. A few years after Lincoln’s election, the North and South swapped their party labels as the conservatives from the South grew dissatisfied with the Democratic Party's increasingly progressive platforms. Conversely, the historically Republican strongholds in the Northeast began voting Democrat.
The Union led by Lincoln and Grant, opposed slavery and the won against the Confederacy during the Civil War. In 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." The Southerners reflected on the consequences of the immediate liberation of slaves. If all slaves were emancipated and free labor were abolished suddenly in the South, cotton could not be tended to and harvested and would ultimately result in the fall of the Southern economy. The slave owners were heavily reliant on free labor for profit. Without the production of cotton in the South, Northern

textile mills would eventually fall soon after, economic destruction would overtake the nation. In other words, their economy, principally controlled by agriculture, would collapse and destroy the South.

After the Civil War period, came the era of Reconstruction (1863-1877), where efforts were made to rebuild the South.

The end of the Civil War brought legal end to slavery, but it did not immediately affect the economy, policy or social differences. Some policies of the Reconstruction era may have even exaggerated the differences between the states. For example, the federal pension system, in 1862, that sought to provide support to veterans, was offered only to Union Army veterans. As such, Union veterans -including African-American veterans- earned financial security in the latter half of the 1800s, while their Confederate counterparts were less well off. Post-war Southern society, was faced with federal occupation for nearly a

decade.
After the Emancipation Proclamation granted freedom to the slaves, the issue of slavery continued to divided the South and North. Thereafter the federal occupancy, racial resentment brewed, and the white supremacist and racist Ku Klux Klan wreaked havoc in the region in a way it had not before. For a brief time after the war, African-American voting rights were reasonably well protected, but by 1890 the KKK and others severely limited African-American voting rights in the South. In addition, the of Reconstruction saw an uprising of Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the South.
The racial, political and geographic divisions in the country over the Civil War, still exist a century and a half later. In addition, America’s voting patterns are split according to region that confirm the rigid notions that many have about the conservative views of the South and liberal views of the Northeast. Many important demographic aspects determine whether cities vote for liberals or conservatives, with race being the most important one. Cities with mainly large African American populations end up as the most liberal cities in America (Steele, 2011). Currie (2017) says the fundamental tensions from and after the Civil War have contributed substantially to radically different patterns of life and death between the races and have constituted a genuine social and public health emergency in modern day United States.

There is still a strong post-civil war resentment of federal government influence in civic and social matters primarily in the south. In spite of, many states having heavy federal government investment and facilities brought on by the Great Depression, New Deal legislation, and military installations. Many citizens are dependent upon government jobs and poverty programs across all of the southern tier. The Democratic and Republican parties both survived the war and have held their spots as the leading U.S. political parties ever since.