War and Reconstruction

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This addresses what is commonly referred to as the American Civil War and the formal Reconstruction period ending with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877.  It will also address the conquest of the Plains Indians during and after the war which saw former Union officers and soldiers play a major role.  The war saw fundamental changes in the nature of warfare that foreshadowed WWI relating to the size of forces, the presentation of war goals to the public, the expanded role of non-combatants in supplying the resources of war, and the weapons and strategies of war. The American war would see technological innovations like rifled barrels for rifles and cannons, the use of railroads to provision and rapidly move troops, and fundamental changes in method from formation fighting to trench warfare. It would also see war be waged directly against civilians and civilian food supplies and property which was a trend that would only increase moving forward in time.

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Out of the war a federation of states would be transformed into a modern nation state with state sponsored Industrial Capitalism leading this new United States to gradually achieve world dominance following to extremely destructive World Wars in the 20th century. It would cement the dominance of one cultural group over the nation and see attempts through reconstruction and the management of western Indian populations to create a common American culture and primary allegiance to the nation state as opposed to regional ethno-religious identities and clans or tribal associations (sometimes referred to as cultural imperialism). While the industrial north made rapid progress after the war, the wages and standard of living of industrial workers generally would lag and the South as a general region would languish in poverty for the next one hundred years. This was caused by both direct policy actions transferring income and wealth out of the area and indirect impact of such things as monetary policy and migration. It is generally perceived that the greatest failure of reconstruction was the lack of commitment to force racial equality on the South but that assumes this was the objective in the first place which is a difficult case to make considering that the these conditions didn’t remotely exist in the North at the time.

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Key Questions

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• Does slavery as a moral issue provide a reasonable explanation as a sole or primary cause of the war?  What other factors were present?

• How does the American war fit into changes in world political alignments leading to modern nation states and increasing nationalism of the period?  How did it change the nature of warfare going forward?

• How deep were the religious and cultural differences between the Puritan North and the culturally and religiously diverse South.

• Was Protestant Christianity declining in the North prior to the war?

• Who made up the Union Army and why did they fight?

• Who made up the Confederate Armies and why did they fight?

• Were massive war crimes committed against Southern Civilians and how did the way in which the Union carried out the war change warfare?

• What was the role of the press in initiating the war and does this represent a pattern extending through to modern times?

• Was the North or the Yankee morally superior?

• Did Lincoln ever give up on colonization? Was Lincoln a slave owner?

• How did reconstruction attempt to reshape Southern cultures and religions to replicate Yankee culture and what were the long term effects of war and reconstruction on the South?

• Did reconstruction fail because it didn’t bring about racial equality or was the real intent of Reconstruction to ensure political and economic dominance?

• Who were the Klan, how long did they exist, how significant were they, and how do they relate the Union League (which few people are even aware of)?

• Were the Indian wars an extension of New England cultural domination?

• To what extent were the Plains Indians Christianized prior to the Indian wars of the later 1800’s?