However, the proclamation freed only enslaved people in areas of rebellion and left more than seven hundred thousand in bondage in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri as well as in Union-occupied areas of Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia. Initially proposed as a war aim, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation committed the United States to the abolition of slavery. Unsurprisingly, these were also the places that were exempted from the liberating effects of the Emancipation Proclamation. 3 These so-called Lincoln governments sprang up in pockets where Union support existed like Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas. When just 10 percent of a state’s voting population had taken such an oath, loyal Unionists could then establish governments. 2 With a sense that Union victory was imminent and that he could turn the tide of the war by stoking Unionist support in the Confederate states, Lincoln issued a proclamation allowing southerners to take an oath of allegiance. President Abraham Lincoln began planning for the reunification of the United States in the fall of 1863. Reconstruction-the effort to restore southern states to the Union and to redefine African Americans’ place in American society-began before the Civil War ended. Baker, The ‘Rail Splitter’ at Work Repairing the Union, 1865. This political cartoon reflects this viewpoint, showing Lincoln and Johnson happily stitching the Union back together with little anger towards the South. Lincoln’s Presidential Reconstruction plans were seen by many, including Radical Republicans in Congress, to be too tolerant towards what they considered to be traitors.
With the war coming to an end, the question of how to reunite the former Confederate states with the Union was a divisive one. In the South, limits on human freedom endured and would stand for nearly a century more. Resistance continued, and Reconstruction eventually collapsed. When Black Americans and their radical allies succeeded in securing citizenship for freedpeople, a new fight commenced to determine the legal, political, and social implications of American citizenship.
African Americans and Radical Republicans pushed the nation to finally realize the Declaration of Independence’s promises that “all men are created equal” and have “certain unalienable rights.” White Democrats granted African Americans legal freedom but little more. It was a moment of revolutionary possibility and violent backlash. The era witnessed perhaps the most open and widespread discussions of citizenship since the nation’s founding. The answers to many of Reconstruction’s questions hinged on the concepts of citizenship and equality. How would these states be brought back into the Union? Would they be conquered territories or equal states? How would they rebuild their governments, economies, and social systems? What rights did freedom confer on formerly enslaved people? Some of the material was burned, I know, but miles and miles of iron have actually disappeared, gone out of existence.” 1 He might as well have been talking about the entire antebellum way of life. “We had passably good roads, on which we could reach almost any part of the State, and the next week they were all gone-not simply broken up, but gone. “It passes my comprehension to tell what became of our railroads,” one South Carolinian told a northern reporter. Economic Development during the Civil War and ReconstructionĪfter the Civil War, much of the South lay in ruins.