Contested Visions: The Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877)

Contested Visions: The Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877)

Fort Sumter (symbolic beginning of war)

Union and Confederate Strategies

• Matching military tactics to political realities• Confederacy ignored possibility of war of

attrition – the successful model offered by Patriots in 1776

• Lincoln recognized the need to take the war to the South dramatically

• Conflict initially defined as a war to restore the Union rather than an anti-slavery crusade

Turning Points/Missed Opportunities of the Civil War

• As argued by historian James McPherson• Summer 1862 – Peninsular Campaign• Fall 1862 – First Confederate invasion of North• Summer/Fall 1863 – Confederacy permanently

on the defensive• Summer 1864 – Fall of Atlanta and Lincoln’s

re-election

Summer 1862

Fall of 1862 – Battles of Antietam and Perryville

Summer/Fall 1863

Summer 1864 – Sherman’s Heyday

Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse(April 1865)

Consequences of the War

Reconstruction

• Began with high hopes for social and political activism on behalf of freed slaves

• Limited by white southern resistance, political corruption, and northern apathy

• Left African-Americans in a distinctly second-class status that would continue into the 1950s-1970s

Freedman’s Bureau

Fifteenth Amendment

Reconstruction Act of 1867

End of Reconstruction – How much has really changed?

Primary sources useful for paper assignments on Reconstruction

• Wade-Davis manifesto against Lincoln’s Reconstruction policy (1864)

• Article entitled “Reconstruction” by Frederick Douglass (1866)

• Appeal to Congress for African-American voting rights by Frederick Douglass (1867)

• Call for moderation by John Sherman (1867)• Southern Republican assessment by Albion

Tourgee (1879)

Primary sources useful for paper assignments on prosecution of war

• Harrison’s Landing letter from George McClellan to Lincoln (July 1862)

• Emancipation Proclamation by Lincoln (1862)• Gettysburg Address by Lincoln (1863)• Grant’s account of first meeting with Lincoln

(1864)Comments on necessity of holding elections by Lincoln (1864)