A Few Lessons from American History. Reader for Students of English

Sectional Conflict (1816–1860)

Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, most of Colorado, and part of Wyoming. The northern third of Mexico had become the southwestern quarter of the United States.

Divisions over slavery in the Mexican Cession were resolved in the Compromise of 1850. It consisted of laws admitting California as a free state, creating Utah and New Mexico territories with the question of slavery in each to be determined by popular sovereignty, ending the slave trade in Washington, D.C. To pacify slave-state politicians, who would have objected to the imbalance created by adding another free state, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed. Of all the bills that made up the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was the most controversial. It required citizens to assist in the recovery of fugitive slaves and denied a fugitive’s right to a jury trial. Also, according to the act, there would be more federal officials responsible for enforcing the law.

In the 1850s as slavery issue came to dominate politics, the Whig Party quickly collapsed unable to keep together its northern and southern members. The newly created Republican Party adopted many of the Whig Party’s progressive programs such as national banks, railroads, and high tariffs. It also struggled to save the Union, abolish slavery and enfranchise the freedmen.

Over the decades, many compromises had been made to avoid disunion. However in 1857 there was yet another important national debate over slavery. The question was raised before the Supreme Court in case of Dred Scott v. Sandford.

Dred Scott was a slave from Missouri who had been taken to the free state of Illinois for several years in the 1830s, before returning to Missouri. In 1846, Scott sued for his freedom on the grounds that he had lived in a free state and a free territory for a prolonged period of time. Finally, after eleven years, his case reached the Supreme Court. At stake were answers to critical questions, including slavery in the territories and citizenship of African-Americans. The Court ruled that as a black man Scott was excluded from United States citizenship and could not, therefore, bring suit. The Court also ruled that Congress never had the right

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LESSON 7

Civil War and Reconstruction (1860–1877)

In the election of 1860 Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. Lincoln had become known nationally when he staked out the Republican position on slavery in the territories and held his own in a series of public debates in a Senate race with Douglas in 1858. The election results were sectional. Lincoln carried every Northern state and thus won an overwhelming victory in the Electoral College – and he did so without a single electoral vote from a slave state. The Republican Party with an antislavery platform had elected a president of the United States.

White Southerners fully realized what had happened: National politics now pitted the North against the South, and the North had a solid and growing majority. The South would never again control the federal government or see it controlled by friendly Northerners. Many saw no alternative to seceding from the Union.

Southerners justified secession with what was called the compact theory. This theory held that the Constitution had created not a perpetual union but a compact between independent states that retained their sovereignty. The compact could be broken in the same way that it had been created: with state conventions called for that purpose. By this means South Carolina seceded from the Union in late December 1860. By February 1 (before Lincoln’s inauguration) six more states from the Deep South had left the Union.

Northerners denied the right of secession. Secession, Lincoln argued, was revolution. Many Southerners agreed and claimed that they were exercising their right to revolt against oppressive government.

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LESSON 7

Congress tried to come up with compromise measures in early 1861, but there was no way of compromising in the argument over secession. The seven states of the lower South (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) formed themselves into the Confederate States of America. Their Constitution was nearly identical to the Constitution of the United States, although it affirmed state sovereignty, guaranteed slavery, and limited the president to a single six-year term.

In his inaugural address, Lincoln was conciliatory without compromising on secession. He also hinted that the national government would use force to protect military garrisons in the Confederate states. When he tried to resupply one of the garrisons, the South Carolina militia fired thousands of artillery rounds into the fort, forcing its surrender. With that, the Civil War began.

With the beginning of the war, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas seceded and joined the Confederacy. Unionist legislative majorities kept the remaining slave states of Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware, and Missouri from joining the rebel states. Meanwhile the western part of Virginia seceded from that state when Virginia seceded from the Union and became the new state of West Virginia. Thousands of men from these border states, however, travelled south and joined the Confederate Army.

On paper, the North possessed overwhelming military superiority over the South. The North had a free population of about 22 million. The South had a population of 9 million, including almost 4 million slaves. The North was a modern industrial power; the South was overwhelmingly rural. The North possessed nine-tenths of the nation’s industrial capacity, four-fifths of its bank capital, and three-fourths of its taxable wealth. The paper currency of the North inflated by only 80 percent during the whole war. The South, on the other hand, had to finance the war by printing paper money that inflated 9,000 percent in four years.

Yet the South had advantages as well. To succeed, the South did not have to invade and conquer the North. The South had only to prolong the war until the North gave up and went home.

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Civil War and Reconstruction (1860–1877)

In addition, northern armies had to operate in hostile territory in which transportation and communications were very difficult. The South also had General Robert E. Lee, an almost mystically skilled commander who constantly outthought his attackers and forced them to assault him under bad conditions. Finally, improved weapons gave a lethal advantage to entrenched defenders over opponents who attacked them across open ground. Union soldiers did most of the attacking.

At first, the Union and the Confederacy fought only over the question of secession. The leaders of both sides wanted to avoid talking about slavery which all of them knew was the root cause of the war. Southerners did not present the war as a defence of slavery for two reasons. First, most white Southerners owned no slaves and might not fight to protect slavery. Second, the South was trying to win recognition and help from Britain and France neither of which would have supported a war for slavery. The North included many abolitionists, but it also included Democrats and border-state slaveholders who would fight for the Union but not for abolition.

During the war slaves grew most of the South’s food and performed work that made white Southerners free for military service. At the same time, thousands of slaves started running away from their masters and fleeing to Union lines. Union Army commanders called these escaped slaves contrabands (captured property). As the number of contrabands grew, President Lincoln proposed a gradual, compensated emancipation of slaves in border states. Lincoln hated slavery on moral grounds. But he could justify emancipation only as a military necessity in the war to save the Union.

In an Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, Lincoln declared that slaves in all states that remained in rebellion were ‘forever free’. It transformed the Union Army into an army of liberation fighting to end slavery as well as to preserve the Union.

In January 1865 Congress passed the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery forever. It was ratified and became part of the Constitution in December 1865.

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LESSON 7

The Civil War finally established the United States as a nation. However, the unification of the country went further than most Northerners had wanted. The enormous government debt incurred during the war, followed by the postwar occupation of the South, created a central government more powerful than even the most nationalistic Americans had imagined before the war.

The Civil War had long-term economic and social results as well. The South was the theatre of war, and the physical destruction of that region was enormous. White Southerners lost their plantation labour system and their huge investment in slaves. Egyptian and Indian cotton had entered world markets during the war, and American cotton never regained its pre-war dominance. The South remained the poorest region of the United States for a very long time. The Northeast’s economic dominance was secured by the war, and the war seems to have sped Northern economic development.

Reconstruction

As the Civil War ended, the United States faced unprecedented tasks: to bring the defeated Confederate states back into the Union and to determine the status in American society of almost 4 million former slaves. These goals dominated the years from 1865 to 1877, the era known as Reconstruction. During these years, Congress imposed a legislative revolution that transformed the South.

The process of Presidential Reconstruction had in fact begun in 1863 when President Lincoln announced a plan to restore the Southern states to the Union. In March 1865 a law was passed by Congress that created the Freedmen’s Bureau. Its purpose was to help the Southern blacks and whites make a transition from a society based on slavery to the one allowing freedom. The Bureau’s responsibilities included introducing a system of free labor, overseeing some 3,000 schools for freed persons, settling disputes and enforcing contracts between the usually white landowners and their black labor force, and securing justice for blacks in state courts.

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Civil War and Reconstruction (1860–1877)

After Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, President Andrew Johnson announced his restoration plan. His plan disqualified former Confederate civil and military officers from holding office but brought the ex-Confederate states back into the Union on undemanding terms. Johnson gave pardons to thousands of Southerners. These pardons permitted former Confederates to vote and hold office.

In 1865 former Confederate states passed ‘black codes’ that reduced the freed slaves’ rights. But when the 39th Congress, dominated by Republicans, convened in December 1865, Republicans planned to revoke the black codes and to replace Johnson’s program. Congress started to control Reconstruction making it Radical.

In 1866 Congress passed a law over the president’s veto: the Civil Rights Act to protect the rights of freed slaves. The act declared that all persons born in the United States were now citizens, without regard to race, color, or previous condition. As citizens they could make and enforce contracts, sue and be sued, give evidence in court, and inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property. Persons who denied these rights to former slaves were guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction faced a fine not exceeding $1,000, or imprisonment not exceeding one year, or both.

Congress then turned its attention to amending the Constitution. In 1867 they approved the 14th Amendment, which protected rights of American citizens regardless of race or colour. The second part of the amendment provided for a reduction of a state’s representatives if suffrage was denied to men. In 1866 all Southern states except Tennessee refused to ratify the amendment. Congress then passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867. The Act divided the South into five military districts under commanders empowered to employ the army to protect black property and citizens. In July 1868 the 14th Amendment was ratified.

The 15th Amendment that was passed in 1869 and ratified in 1870 gave African American men the right to vote. In 1877 northern troops were withdrawn from Southern states.

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LESSON 8

Spanish-American War and the Progressive Era

(1898–1930)

The Spanish-American War, fought in 1898, marked a turning point in US history. It left the United States exercising control or influence over islands in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific.

From 1895–1898, the violent conflict in Cuba captured the attention of Americans because of the economic and political instability that it produced in a region within such close geographical proximity to the United States. After the U.S. battleship Maine exploded and sank in Havana harbor under mysterious circumstances on February 15, 1898, U.S. military intervention in Cuba became likely. On April 22, 1898 Spain declared war on the United States, and the U.S. Congress voted to go to war against Spain on April 25. The conflict was a ‘splendid little war’ for the United States. The war officially ended when the US and Spanish governments signed the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898. Apart from guaranteeing the independence of Cuba, the treaty also forced Spain to cede Guam and Puerto Rico to the United States. Spain also agreed to sell the Philippines to the United States for the sum of $20 million. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty on February 6, 1899, by a margin of only one vote.

The USA also used the war as a pretext to annex the independent state of Hawaii. In 1893, American residents of the Hawaiian Islands had led a coup against native Queen Liliuokalani and established a new government. They promptly sought annexation by the United States, but President Grover Cleveland rejected their requests. In 1898, however, President McKinley and the American public were more favorably disposed toward acquiring the islands.

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LESSON 8

Supporters of annexation argued that Hawaii was vital to the US economy, that it would serve as a strategic base that could help protect U.S. interests in Asia, and that other nations were intent on taking over the islands if the United States did not. At McKinley’s request, a joint resolution of Congress made Hawaii a U.S. territory on August 12, 1898.

In fact, at the end of the 19th century the United States found itself in a colonial role which required a new foreign policy. President Theodore Roosevelt supported expansion of US influence abroad. In 1901 he expressed the idea of negotiating peacefully, simultaneously threatening with the ‘big stick’, or the military. This became known as Big Stick Policy.

Roosevelt intervened in Latin America to build a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; the canal would link U.S. East Coast ports with East Asia. The United States negotiated a treaty with Colombia for rights to build a canal in Panama, at that time controlled by Colombia. When the Colombian Congress rejected the treaty, Roosevelt encouraged Panamanian desire for independence from Colombia. This tactics succeeded, and a revolution occurred. The United States promptly recognized the new government of Panama and negotiated a treaty that enabled Americans to build the Panama Canal.

Relations with Japan also became an issue during Roosevelt’s administration. A conflict erupted in 1906 over Japanese immigration to the United States. Prejudice against Japanese immigrants caused a crisis when San Francisco forced Asian children into a separate school. The Japanese government protested. In a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ in 1907, both nations agreed to discourage immigration from Japan. In 1908 Japan and the United States agreed to respect the territorial integrity of China and the Open Door Policy.

Theodore Roosevelt was one of the three progressive presidents (together with William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson). Roosevelt and Taft were Republicans and Wilson was a Democrat. Progressives believed that people and government had the power to

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