The Civil War radically altered the social fabric of American life. The national political parties that until the early 1850s had pursued compromise to maintain northern and southern wings broke apart. The abolitionist movement gained momentum, and Nat Turner’s slave revolt in Virginia and the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852 raised fears that slavery-based economic systems were threatened.
The secession of seven states in the South and the election of Abraham Lincoln as president, who vowed to oppose the extension of slavery into the western territories, left the pro-slavery forces with little chance of winning future national elections. They responded by declaring their independence from the Union and establishing the Confederate States of America, which no foreign government recognized.
Emancipation, pushed by the abolitionists and the Radical Republicans, was perhaps the war’s most revolutionary development. Although defense of “states’ rights,” southern honor (resentment at perceived northern criticism and condescension), fear of Federal coercion, and a belief that the North and the South represented divergent civilizations were also factors in triggering secession and war, they did not provide sufficient incentive for Southern statesmen to take such a dramatic step.
The Radical Republicans enacted a series of Reconstruction Acts, over Johnson’s vetoes, which laid down the conditions under which former Confederate states could be readmitted to the Union. Constitutional conventions held throughout the former Confederacy provided Black men with the right to vote, and new state governments were established by a coalition of freedmen, supportive white Southerners, and Northern transplants. Violent groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White League fought to undermine these coalitions, and launched a campaign of paramilitary insurgency and terrorism.