the end of the civil war essay

Sign Up Today

Start your 14 day free trial today

The History Hit Miscellany of Facts, Figures and Fascinating Finds

• America 1765 - 1865

When and How Did The American Civil War End?

22 Sep 2021

@histluketomes.

On 9 April 1865 the American Civil War , having claimed the lives of up to three-quarters of a million people, effectively came to an end when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S Grant.

General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox

By Spring 1865 the Confederate army was exhausted. General Lee was surrounded and his line of retreat to Lynchburg was blocked. His subordinate officers urged Lee to scatter his army and continue the war using guerrilla tactics. But it was clear to Lee that he was out of options.

‘There is nothing left for me to do but to go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths.’ General Robert E. Lee

At 1pm on Palm Sunday, April 9 1865, Lee rode into the small settlement of Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

General Lee Surrendering to Grant

Image Credit: National Portrait Gallery Collection

The surrender in Appomattox Court House actually took three days in total. On the first day, April 9, Lee surrendered to Grant at the Mclean farmhouse. Grant and Lee were the generals-in-chief of all the Union and Confederate forces fighting across the country.

The terms of surrender

However, neither had the political authority to bring the war to a final conclusion. The talks between Grant and Lee at Appomattox Court House dealt only with the surrender of Lee’s army in Virginia. Under Grant’s terms, the rolls listing the Confederate officers and men were to be handed over.

Paroles were offered on the promise that the men,

‘will not take up arms against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged … the arms, artillery and public property, to be packed and stacked and turned over to the officers appointed by me … each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes … so long as they observe their parole and the laws in force, where they made reside.’

At 4.30pm, General Grant send the following message to the United States War Department:

‘General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia this afternoon, upon terms imposed by myself…’.

Ulysses S. Grant by Balling (1865)

Image Credit: Ole Peter Hansen Balling, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The last weeks of the Civil War

The surrender of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia left three major Confederate forces in the field: Joseph E. Johnston’s army in North Carolina, Richard Taylor’s army in eastern Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, and Edmund Kirby Smith’s Army of the Trans-Mississippi west of the Mississippi River.

Most of the Confederate forces had given up by May, 1865, but it took seven weeks from Lee’s surrender at Appomattox for the last Confederate force to lay down its arms.

Peace eventually came when each of the seceded states returned to the Union and accepted the terms on which that Union was based. This meant, notably, accepting the Thirteenth Amendment of January 1865, which abolished slavery in the United States.

You May Also Like

Mac and Cheese in 1736? The Stories of Kensington Palace’s Servants

The Peasants’ Revolt: Rise of the Rebels

10 Myths About Winston Churchill

Medusa: What Was a Gorgon?

10 Facts About the Battle of Shrewsbury

5 of Our Top Podcasts About the Norman Conquest of 1066

How Did 3 People Seemingly Escape From Alcatraz?

5 of Our Top Documentaries About the Norman Conquest of 1066

1848: The Year of Revolutions

What Prompted the Boston Tea Party?

15 Quotes by Nelson Mandela

The History of Advent

Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation and Freedom

• Explore the Collection
• Collections in Context
• Teaching the Collection
• Advanced Collection Research

Civil War, 1861-1865

Jonathan Karp, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, PhD Candidate, American Studies

The story of the Civil War is often told as a triumph of freedom over slavery, using little more than a timeline of battles and a thin pile of legislation as plot points. Among those acts and skirmishes, addresses and battles, the Emancipation Proclamation is key: with a stroke of Abraham Lincoln’s pen, the story goes, slaves were freed and the goodness of the United States was confirmed. This narrative implies a kind of clarity that is not present in the historical record. What did emancipation actually mean? What did freedom mean? How would ideas of citizenship accommodate Black subjects? The everyday impact of these words—the way they might be lived in everyday life—were the subject of intense debates and investigations, which marshalled emerging scientific discourses and a rapidly expanding bureaucratic state. All the while, Black people kept emancipating themselves, showing by their very actions how freedom might be lived.

Self-Emancipation

The Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863, and the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, abolished slavery in the secessionist Confederate states and the United States, respectively, but it is important to remember that enslaved people were liberating themselves through all manners of fugitivity for as long as slavery has existed in the Americas. Notices from enslavers seeking self-emancipated Black people were common in newspapers throughout the Americas, as seen in this 1854 copy of the Baltimore Sun .

The question of how formerly enslaved people would be regarded by and assimilated into the state as subjects was most obviously worked out through the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was meant to support newly freed people across the South. Two years before the Bureau was established, however, there was the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission. Authorized by the Secretary of War in March 1863, the Inquiry Commission was called in part as a response to the ever-increasing number of refugees—who were still referred to at the time as “contraband”—appearing at Union camps. The three appointed commissioners—Samuel Gridley Howe, James McKaye, and Robert Dale Owen—were charged with investigating the condition and capacity of freedpeople.

Historians are still working to understand the scale of refugees’ movements during the Civil War. Abigail Cooper estimates that by 1865 there were around 600,000 freedpeople in 250 refugee camps. Many of the camps were overseen by the Union, while others were established and run by freedpeople themselves. Conditions in the camps could be brutal. In 1863, the Inquiry Commission heard that 3,000 freedmen had fortified the fort in Nashville for fifteen months without pay. Rations were slim. In spite of these conditions, the camps were also sites where Black people profoundly restructured the South by their very movement and relationships.

Port Royal Experiment

During the Civil War, the U.S. government began an experiment in the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Plantation owning enslavers had abandoned their lands, leaving behind over 10,000 formerly enslaved Black people. With the help of abolitionist charities from the North, these Black farmers cultivated cotton for wages in the same places they had formerly been held in bondage. Their work was so successful that it inspired international calls for support, like this letter published in Manchester, England. The short-lived success of this experiment was largely ended at the government's hands, when the lands were returned to White ownership.

The Inquiry Commission, a large portion of whose records are held at Harvard, focused many of their efforts on the camps. It was not clear how, exactly, they should go about their work. The Commission was established before the field of sociology emerged with its institutionalized tools for the supposedly scientific study of populations. A federal body had never before been responsible studying people who were or had been enslaved. The commissioners travelled across the American South and Canada, observing and interviewing freedmen. They sent elaborate surveys to military leaders, clergy, and other White people who interfaced with large numbers of people who had escaped slavery. Through this work, the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission made Black people into subjects of the United States’ scientific gaze. Their records are an invaluable record of life under slavery; they also reinscribed underlying racial logics.

Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom has a collection of 189 objects related to the Commission’s inquiry . The vast majority of them are responses to their survey, written by White people the Commission identified as having special knowledge of freedmen. The view of slavery from this vantage point is limited. Most if not all of the respondents recount conversations with people who were or had been enslaved, but these accounts are all mediated by their authors and the Commissioners. There’s no telling what the quoted enslaved people would or wouldn’t have shared with these people, or why. If some shape of life under slavery emerges from reading these survey responses, it is a necessarily distorted one. The American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission is emblematic of a style of scientific discourse that set its sights on Black people and the cultural meanings of race without concern for the views of Black people. In this field, Whiteness was necessary for expertise.

The surveys are most revealing as records of how these agents of the federal government conceived of the question of freedom—what they called, “one of the gravest social problems ever presented a government.” What kinds of questions did they ask? The forms had forty-two questions. Some asked for geographic and population data. Others asked for information about life before emancipation: did freedmen carry signs of previous abuse (they did) and did their masters have an effect on enslaved peoples’ families (they invariably did)? The vast majority of the questions, however, asked for the respondent’s opinions and general observations of the formerly enslaved refugees. The Commission wanted to know about these peoples’ strength, endurance, intellectual capacity, attachments to place, as well as their religious devotion, their general disposition, work ethic, and ways of domestic life. The list ended with the most important question, which the previous ones had apparently prepared the respondent to answer to the best of their abilities: “In your judgement are the freedmen in your department considered as a whole fit to take their place in society with a fair prospect of self-support and progress or do they need preparatory training and guardianship? If so of what nature and to what extent?”

Slow Stretching Emancipation

The Emancipation Proclamation was widely celebrated by enemies of slavery, though it did not emancipate all enslaved Black peoples. Celebrations were held in Northern cities like Philadelphia and Boston . News of emancipation was slow moving, even in areas that were covered by the proclamation. In areas under Union control, like Port Royal, Black people were informed of their new legal status on January 1st, but in areas under Confederate control the proclamation was often kept secret from enslaved people or entirely ignored. In his memoir, Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington described his experience learning of the proclamation:

After the reading we were told that we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long praying, but fearing that she would never live to see. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography, pg. 21

From the questions the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission asked, it is clear that they imagined the freemen’s “fitness” to hinge on their ability to work for wages, own land, and maintain standard familial structures. The surveys asked whether freedmen “seemed disposed to continue their domestic relations or form new ones.” They asked whether, under slavery, enslaved children were taught to respect their parents. Commissioners wished to know if family names were common, and, if so, how they travelled through generations. The question about laboring for wages, which appeared towards the end of the questionnaire, was deeply connected to the question of what should come after slavery. If wages would not be successful in turning freedmen into laborers, a system of apprenticeship might be considered. The commissioners’ fixation on land was a result of the longstanding connection in the United States between citizenship and landowning. It was also a response to fears of Black migration. In all, the surveys show that the question of freedmen’s fitness was one of their assimilation into the intertwined relations of the capitalist wage and the family, as recognized by the state and church.

While the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission went about their work, freedpeople made their lives in ways that both answered the Commission’s questions and exceeded them. Some people found their way to camps to join the war effort; others went in search of family and still others made homes where they were. Washington Spradling, for example, told the Commission in 1863 how freedpeople in Kentucky pooled resources to pay for funerals and buy their relatives out of slavery, all under the oppression of new police powers. Across the South, as the Civil War raged, Black people brought about emancipation. They could not wait for the state’s commissions and reports. However, shades of their experiments in freedom are visible in the reports of the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission.

ESSAY –End of Civil War

In 2015, Matthew Pinsker wrote a short essay for the Smithsonian / Zocalo Public Square series, “What It Means To Be American,” on the subject of the debates about civil rights that erupted among abolitionists at the end of the Civil War.  The piece begins with a description of a little known episode that marked the end of the conflict: the Union flag-raising ceremony at Fort Sumter on April 14, 1865, attended by leading abolitionists, including Henry Ward Beecher and William Lloyd Garrison.  The House Divided Project has digitized and reexamined photos from that ceremony and offers new insights about Garrison’s presence at Sumter.  Combining the essay with the photo post offers a powerful gateway into the study of Reconstruction and the enduring challenges of race and equality in American history.

• Did the End of the Civil War Mean the End of Slavery?
• Where was William Lloyd Garrison?

Post navigation

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

A Brief Overview of the American Civil War

The Civil War is the central event in America's historical consciousness. While the Revolution of 1776-1783 created the United States, the Civil War of 1861-1865 determined what kind of nation it would be. The war resolved two fundamental questions left unresolved by the revolution: whether the United States was to be a dissolvable confederation of sovereign states or an indivisible nation with a sovereign national government; and whether this nation, born of a declaration that all men were created with an equal right to liberty, would continue to exist as the largest slaveholding country in the world.

Northern victory in the war preserved the United States as one nation and ended the institution of slavery that had divided the country from its beginning. But these achievements came at the cost of 625,000 lives--nearly as many American soldiers as died in all the other wars in which this country has fought combined. The American Civil War was the largest and most destructive conflict in the Western world between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the onset of World War I in 1914.

The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. The incoming Lincoln administration and most of the Northern people refused to recognize the legitimacy of secession. They feared that it would discredit democracy and create a fatal precedent that would eventually fragment the no-longer United States into several small, squabbling countries.

The event that triggered war came at Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay on April 12, 1861. Claiming this United States fort as their own, the Confederate army on that day opened fire on the federal garrison and forced it to lower the American flag in surrender. Lincoln called out the militia to suppress this "insurrection." Four more slave states seceded and joined the Confederacy. By the end of 1861 nearly a million armed men confronted each other along a line stretching 1200 miles from Virginia to Missouri. Several battles had already taken place--near Manassas Junction in Virginia, in the mountains of western Virginia where Union victories paved the way for creation of the new state of West Virginia, at Wilson's Creek in Missouri, at Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, and at Port Royal in South Carolina where the Union navy established a base for a blockade to shut off the Confederacy's access to the outside world.

But the real fighting began in 1862. Huge battles like Shiloh in Tennessee, Gaines' Mill , Second Manassas , and Fredericksburg in Virginia, and Antietam in Maryland foreshadowed even bigger campaigns and battles in subsequent years, from Gettysburg in Pennsylvania to Vicksburg on the Mississippi to Chickamauga and Atlanta in Georgia. By 1864 the original Northern goal of a limited war to restore the Union had given way to a new strategy of "total war" to destroy the Old South and its basic institution of slavery and to give the restored Union a "new birth of freedom," as President Lincoln put it in his address at Gettysburg to dedicate a cemetery for Union soldiers killed in the battle there.

For three long years, from 1862 to 1865, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia staved off invasions and attacks by the Union Army of the Potomac commanded by a series of ineffective generals until Ulysses S. Grant came to Virginia from the Western theater to become general in chief of all Union armies in 1864. After bloody battles at places with names like The Wilderness , Spotsylvania , Cold Harbor , and Petersburg , Grant finally brought Lee to bay at Appomattox in April 1865. In the meantime Union armies and river fleets in the theater of war comprising the slave states west of the Appalachian Mountain chain won a long series of victories over Confederate armies commanded by hapless or unlucky Confederate generals. In 1864-1865 General William Tecumseh Sherman led his army deep into the Confederate heartland of Georgia and South Carolina, destroying their economic infrastructure while General George Thomas virtually destroyed the Confederacy's Army of Tennessee at the battle of Nashville . By the spring of 1865 all the principal Confederate armies surrendered, and when Union cavalry captured the fleeing Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Georgia on May 10, 1865, resistance collapsed and the war ended. The long, painful process of rebuilding a united nation free of slavery began.

Learn More:  This Day in the Civil War

Death by Fire

Silent Witness

Augmented Reality: Preserving Lost Stories

Related battles, explore the american civil war.

Home — Essay Samples — War — American Civil War — The American Civil War: A Historical Overview

The American Civil War: a Historical Overview

• Categories: American Civil War

About this sample

Words: 691 |

Published: Jan 29, 2024

Words: 691 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Causes of the civil war, major events of the civil war, key figures and leaders, impact and consequences, legacy of the civil war, references:.

• McPherson, J. (1988). Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press.
• Foner, E. (2015). Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. Harper Perennial.
• Grose, H.R. (2019). Civil War Leadership and Mexican War Experience: Generals Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, and Robert E. Lee. Routledge.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr. Karlyna PhD

Verified writer

• Expert in: War

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

4 pages / 1727 words

1 pages / 546 words

8 pages / 3627 words

3 pages / 1234 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on American Civil War

The Day Lincoln Was Shot Analysis On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. The assassination of President Lincoln was a tragic and pivotal moment in [...]

Ante Bellum sermons, or sermons delivered before the American Civil War, hold a significant place in the history of American religious discourse. These sermons were delivered during a time of great social and political upheaval, [...]

The Cornerstone Speech, delivered by Alexander H. Stephens in 1861, is a significant historical document that sheds light on the beliefs and motivations of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. This speech has been the [...]

Ralph Waldo Emerson's work has long been the subject of academic analysis and interpretation. However, much of his work is often misunderstood, leading to misinterpretations and myths about his philosophies, particularly [...]

In his book, "Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War," Charles B. Dew seeks to unravel the complex motivations and ideologies behind the secession of the Southern states leading up [...]

Antebellum is a Latin idiom that means ‘before the war.’ It was employed in the background of the history of the United States to offer clarification regarding the time that led to the Civil War . Many consider the [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• Search Menu
• Advance articles
• AHR Interview
• History Unclassified
• Author Guidelines
• Submission Site
• Join the AHR Community
• About The American Historical Review
• About the American Historical Association
• Editorial Board
• Advertising and Corporate Services
• Self-Archiving Policy
• Dispatch Dates
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

• < Previous

Finding the Ending of America’s Civil War

William A. Blair is the Walter L. and Helen P. Ferree Professor of Middle American History at the Pennsylvania State University, where he also serves as the Director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center. He also is the founding editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era . His most recent book, With Malice toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize.

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

William A. Blair, Finding the Ending of America’s Civil War, The American Historical Review , Volume 120, Issue 5, December 2015, Pages 1753–1766, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.5.1753

• Permissions Icon Permissions

I magine for a moment this unlikely scenario . Before the presidential election of 1864, Russia, England, and France bring the Union and the Confederacy to the negotiating table. The international powers proclaim their concern over the seemingly endless slaughter, as well as the possibility of even greater barbarity through a slave uprising. More to the point, the foreign powers hope to expand their spheres of influence in the Western Hemisphere, restore the flow of cotton from the South, increase trade throughout the Pacific Rim, and discredit the validity of republican governments. War weariness in the North causes Abraham Lincoln and his advisers to consider terms. Meeting on board a Russian warship off the northwest coast, the president and Secretary of State William Henry Seward confer with Confederate emissaries to hammer out a settlement. The Confederates give up their claim to sovereignty and rejoin the Union. The Lincoln administration refuses to budge on the question of antislavery, but agrees to float bonds worth $400 million to ease the financial sting for planters, who are allowed to drag out this version of compensated emancipation over five years. The talks nearly break down over the issue of human rights: the punishment of certain Confederates for war crimes, including the treatment of prisoners of war, and reparations for the freedpeople. The international arbitrators push the issue of truth and reconciliation into the next phase, gaining a promise from former Confederates to broach the subject as they refashion their state governments, while establishing a monitoring agency to assess how both sides live up to their promises.

And the end of the war came. 1

Such might have been an outcome of America’s Civil War, but only if it had occurred in the twentieth or twenty-first century and followed the patterns of more recent conflicts. Since World War II, more than 70 percent of armed conflicts have been internal ones. 2 But ending these wars through negotiations has been problematic. The most common way for them to conclude has been through third-party intervention: either the United Nations or some coalition of international forces and other institutions. They typically produce a settlement agreed to by both parties. Often, redress for human rights violations or justice for wrongdoing becomes part of the settlement, or at least figures prominently in the discussions for peace. 3 Consequently, modern conflict resolutions contain the expectation of a return to normalcy by the warring nation, which should have a functioning system of justice in place. The reality of a “permanent” settlement, however, has been discouraging. Scholars have indicated that 62 percent of all civil wars between 1940 and 1992 led to a signed bargain. Only half of those agreements were ever implemented. Here again, third parties have proven instrumental for success. “Only if a third party is willing to enforce or verify demobilization,” writes Barbara F. Walter, “and only if the combatants are willing to extend power-sharing guarantees, will promises to abide by the original terms be credible and negotiations succeed.” 4

The United States’ Civil War featured none of the above: no possibility of third-party pressure beyond 1862, no negotiations between warring parties that led to a signed bargain, no resolution of human rights issues as part of a settlement—and no settlement at all, actually. It was a war won by military conquest and a peace whose contours were determined by military force—the coercive power of an internationally recognized nation versus discussion of terms among combatants of equal political status. Through victory by arms, the nation has endured to this day, albeit with significant bumps along the road to reunion. Lest one think that this makes the Civil War exceptional in comparison to current conflicts, one scholar has shown that wars ending in victory between 1940 and 2000 were “nearly twice as likely to remain settled than those concluded through negotiated settlement or a cease-fire/stalemate.” 5 It is perhaps an unwelcome realization that force rather than reason has enjoyed the edge in holding fractious countries together.

Had other nations intervened in the U.S. Civil War, they quickly would have realized that the conflict had opened thorny issues that extended beyond a cease-fire. Ending slavery, although important, was one among many concerns to resolve. Northern leaders also had to decide on the status of the rebels—whether they would return quickly as part of the electorate, deserved punishment of some kind, or should have confiscated property returned. A much harder problem was how to determine whether the rebels truly accepted the authority of the United States government. The allegiance of the former Confederates remained suspect and a point of inquiry by the Congress’s Joint Committee on Reconstruction deep into 1866. At the same time, African Americans’ securing of political rights equal to those of white people was not a foregone conclusion. Most white northerners believed that the freedpeople would benefit from a period of tutelage in which they could prove that they had embraced free labor ideology. The status of black Americans had created much debate during the war; freedom left many questions concerning citizenship and rights unanswered. 6

Consequently, historians from time to time have questioned when the U.S. Civil War actually ended. International wars close with a declared winner—either through a settlement or conquest, with the defeated entity establishing governmental stability that limits the possibility of future conflict. But in an intra-national fight, the to-do list for the end of a conflict can become much more expansive. And it can become even more complicated when the conflict has been fought as if it were a war between nations, with both sides respecting certain rules such as an exchange of prisoners. Can the rebels be treated as traitors who deserve possible execution? Does civil war end with a cease-fire between armies, or does it require the acceptance and creation of governmental relations that conform to the desires of the victors? What if the defeated faction mounts an insurgency designed to preserve whatever strands of the prewar status quo it can hold on to? Does ending the civil war require winning the hearts and minds of the conquered people, or simply gaining allegiance, no matter how unwillingly?

The United States solidified victory, and answered some of the post-battle questions, through the adoption by Republican politicians and thinkers of a constitutional position that recognized a state of war as lasting beyond the surrenders of armies. Democracies assume self-determination and voter participation as hallmarks. Federalism, the constitutional arrangement of sovereignty that survived the war, dictated that the individual states control requirements for voting, office-holding, and such forms of civic participation as serving on juries or testifying at trials. Yet it was not always in the interests of the U.S. to have former rebels voting when the freedpeople could not, or for the traitors to be administering a legal system that allowed for an insurgency to coalesce. Constitutionalism became an inconvenience, with even Radicals understanding that peace restored the supremacy of civil over military rule, narrowing what could be done to the traitors. Republicans resolved the contradiction between the rights of self-determination and coercion through military force by declaring that wartime continued. 7 Instead of large battles with a uniformed enemy, the situation caused the U.S. Army to conduct small wars—low-intensity incursions and constabulary actions—that kept the conflict alive. 8

Could the war have ended by peaceful means before the spring of 1865? Probably not, because of the nature of the war aims on both sides. And did the ending of the fighting between the larger armies secure the goals of victory for the Union? The answer is mixed. For many of the loyal citizenry, the restoration of the Union with the destruction of slavery likely was enough. But others, especially hard-line Republicans, saw the war as concluding only with the final admission to the U.S. Congress of representatives from the reconstructed states in 1871. 9

A war that was cast by the S outh as a legal quarrel over the true meaning of the Constitution and the intent of the Founding Fathers proved every bit as intractable to resolve as an ethnic or religious conflict. The U.S. Civil War was a nationalistic independence effort conducted by southerners to protect slavery. Nationalist independence movements had become typical in the nineteenth century, and according to Don Doyle, roughly half of the members of the United Nations today began “as breakaway states. What is cheerfully referred to as the family of nations has been largely the product of hostile divorces, forced marriages, and patricidal violence.” 10 But the Confederacy’s aim of creating an independent nation with slavery created difficulties for negotiating an end to the war. As James McPherson has noted, “The American Civil War could not end with a negotiated peace because the issues over which it was fought—Union versus Disunion, Freedom versus Slavery—proved to be non-negotiable.” 11

Nonetheless, some tried. With the exception of third-party intervention and human rights discussions, the counterfactual history that opens this essay features actual scenarios that played out during the war. Although the possibility passed by 1863, the North worried that European powers might intervene. The Lincoln government floated plans to allocate $400 million as a means to ease the financial loss of emancipation for slaveholders. 12 Lincoln and Seward met with Confederate emissaries on board a steamer to discuss terms, and the fighting ended with widespread amnesty for the rebel traitors. After the fighting stopped, reparations for freedpeople came up in Congress in the form of land redistribution, but this approach lacked support beyond Radical Republicans. What never came about, however, was a settlement between North and South that contained not only a cease-fire between governments but also a consensus even among northerners regarding the political and social alignments that should occur within the defeated Confederacy.

If the peacemakers are blessed, as Jesus observed in his Sermon on the Mount, they received no such consideration during the American Civil War. In fact, the greatest proponents among northerners for a peaceful settlement earned charges of disloyalty. During the conflict, the Democratic Party divided between those who advocated a war for reunion but opposed the Lincoln administration’s policies for fighting it, and those who pushed for a compromise settlement. The peace wing, which earned the epithet of “Copperheads,” gained strength during a dark time in 1864 when the war appeared to have reached a stalemate and the body count from the battlefield was rising faster than ever. Had the Democrats defeated Lincoln in the 1864 election, the platform promised that every effort would be made to halt the hostilities—to call some unspecified convention of states or pursue other peaceable means to restore the Union. Most observers understood at the time that this meant reunion with slavery. The Republicans struck back by decrying the compromise proposals as evidence of disloyalty. 13 Today, the Civil War Peace Democrats remain easy targets for vilification by historians because they condoned the continuation of slavery in favor of union.

Similar, smaller movements occurred in the Confederacy. By the fall of 1862, several southern congressmen began to broach the possibility of negotiations to end the war. In September 1862, Congressmen Henry S. Foote of Tennessee and Hines Holt of Georgia proposed to send commissioners to Washington to seek peace. There was not enough sentiment in support of the venture at the time. Peace also became part of several state elections. The most famous state battle occurred in 1864 in North Carolina, where William Woods Holden, the editor of the Raleigh Standard , opposed Zebulon Vance for the governor’s office. Holden had espoused peace in 1863, just after the Battle of Gettysburg, but pressure from the citizenry had caused him to call off rallies that promoted a negotiated settlement. In the gubernatorial race the next year, Holden ran on a platform advocating that a state convention be held to determine whether to begin peace talks with the Union. A state proposing to conduct unilateral negotiations with the Lincoln government was tantamount to a secession movement from the Confederacy. Like the northern Copperheads, Holden was vilified as a traitor. North Carolinians favored the incumbent Vance, taking their chances on continuing the war at a time when defeat of the Republicans in the presidential election still seemed possible. 14

The Confederacy also made a last-ditch effort to court foreign intervention. In December 1864, Jefferson Davis and his secretary of state, Judah P. Benjamin, decided that the time had come to give up slavery in exchange for aid from Europe. Most likely they sought recognition as a nation from the international community rather than armed intervention. Even recognition would feed morale and allow for the flow of much-needed goods for the war effort. It was unclear how Davis and Benjamin could promise even a gradual emancipation, because the Confederate constitution did not allow for legislation to deny or impair “the right of property in negro slaves.” The supposedly constitution-loving leaders had shinnied out to the thin end of a legal limb. Whatever the case, in January 1865, Confederate congressman Duncan F. Kenner—a Louisianan and one of the largest slaveholders in the South—traveled through New York in disguise so he could gain passage to Europe and confer with Confederate ambassadors. To make a long story short, the French said they would follow the British lead, and the British declined to intervene. Everyone could see that the Confederacy’s foundation was crumbling. 15

The United States made contact with Confederate agents, who sent out feelers for a negotiated peace. In July 1863, for example, Vice President Alexander Stephens went to Union lines ostensibly to discuss the exchange of prisoners, but in reality he was testing the waters for peace. It came to naught, as Lincoln suspected that more was afoot than a discussion about prisoners. In July 1864, a meeting took place among newspaper editor Horace Greeley, Lincoln’s personal secretary John Hay, and Confederate emissaries of questionable authority in Niagara, Canada. Conducted during a low point for the Union military campaigns, the event was concocted to try to embarrass Lincoln politically, with his enemies believing that he would not trade terms with traitors and thus would look as if he intended to waste more northern blood and treasure. Instead, Lincoln made it known that he would gladly consider peace, but only if it meant a reunited nation with the end of slavery. 16 So much for Confederate independence or a return to the antebellum status quo.

The most significant talks occurred in early February 1865 among high officials of both warring nations. For the Union, the officials could not have been any higher—President Lincoln appeared with Secretary of State William Henry Seward at Hampton Roads, Virginia. They met on board a Union steamer with Confederate vice president Stephens, former U.S. Supreme Court justice John A. Campbell, and rebel senator R. M. T. Hunter of Virginia. The southern emissaries were shocked to learn that the U.S. Congress had just sent the Thirteenth Amendment to the states to ratify in order to end slavery permanently. The talks fizzled when Jefferson Davis’s hopes of independence with slavery intact came up against Lincoln’s two non-negotiable conditions: reunion and abolition. There had been no chance for an agreement, because the respective minimum demands were irreconcilable. Davis and his representatives tried to make political hay out of rejecting what they considered to be “unconditional surrender,” and they tried to raise flagging spirits, but it was becoming clear that the Confederate experiment was tottering on increasingly unstable legs. At this meeting Lincoln raised the prospect of appropriating $400 million to compensate the South at least partially for the loss of its slaves. Upon returning to Washington, Lincoln raised the issue with the cabinet, which unanimously scuttled the plan. 17

Other overtures featured dubious solutions on the part of the Union. Francis P. Blair Sr., an important antebellum editor and elder statesman, conducted a visit with Jefferson Davis in Richmond on January 12, 1865, that served as a prelude to the February meeting at Hampton Roads. Blair proposed that Lincoln should play to the common Americanism between Yankees and rebels by having them unite to fight a foreign enemy—the French-supported monarchists who were conducting their own civil war against the republicans in Mexico. It was unclear what was to happen once victory was achieved over the monarchists—whether the Confederate force would rule over Mexico or annex the territory for the U.S. The implication from Blair was that Davis, if he wished, could be installed as a dictator. Although this issue was raised during the February meeting with Confederate emissaries, it was quickly shoved aside by Lincoln. 18

Lincoln came up with a less bizarre, although convoluted, inducement to end the fighting. Visiting Richmond after its fall to the Union in early April, the president spoke with John A. Campbell, the Confederate assistant secretary of war, about a way to settle the fighting piecemeal by taking a state-by-state approach that at the same time refused to recognize the legitimacy of the governments called upon to act. Lincoln encouraged Campbell to urge “the gentlemen who have acted as the legislature of Virginia in support of the rebellion” (translation: they were not lawmakers of a legitimate government) to withdraw the state’s troops from the Confederate insurgency. If they did, he promised to relinquish the confiscation of property. What this meant is anyone’s guess, and no one had the chance to find out, as Lincoln withdrew his offer after the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. 19

Perhaps stunning was the realization among high-ranking Confederate military officers, including Robert E. Lee, that by the winter of the Confederacy’s greatest discontent, the time might have come to seek the best political solution to end the strife and save southern lives. Historian Mark Grimsley has argued that southern generals, even more than their civilian counterparts, knew by the winter of 1865 that it was time to say “enough.” They recognized the need to seek the best terms possible. Lee apparently spent the greater portion of one night after the talks at Hampton Roads discussing the situation with Senator Hunter, who had been at the meeting. “He said,” according to Hunter, “if I thought there was a chance for any peace which would secure better terms than were likely to be given after a surrender at discretion, he thought it my duty to make the effort.” The general told the senator that it was Hunter’s duty to enter a resolution in the Senate to that effect. Lee said that he could not recommend negotiations openly because “it would be almost equivalent to surrender.” Hunter pressed him to say something to the president, to which Lee made no reply. Hunter concluded: “In the whole of this conversation he never said to me he thought the chances were over; but the tone and tenor of his remarks made that impression on my mind.” 20

The large-scale fighting between the Confederacy and the Union during the U.S. Civil War closed with the surrenders of four Confederate armies—at Appomattox, Virginia; at Durham Station, North Carolina; at Galveston, Texas; and at Citronelle, Alabama. The terms were lenient: If soldiers laid down their arms and obeyed the laws of the United States, they remained safe from prosecution. Where this left the civilian population, especially the leaders of the rebellion, was unknown—as was the status of civic participation by white and black people in the South. But no one was hanged for treason against the United States.

Even if foreign commissioners had presided over the surrenders, and the subsequent settlement, the ending of the war might have been just as lenient, provided that certain persons had served as the arbitrators. Europe was struggling in the aftermath of the revolutions in 1848–1849 with tensions between monarchists and republicans. Internationally, sentiment existed for a merciful end to America’s Civil War partly because of the example that would be set by a republic that could prove its strength by absorbing rather than executing its enemies. The Duke of Argyll hoped that the U.S. would not resort to capital punishment. John Bigelow, the U.S. consul in Paris, reported from France that he had encountered no one who believed it wise to execute Jefferson Davis. In Brussels, Henry S. Sanford, another diplomat, suggested that whatever course the United States followed could have repercussions on “the treatment of those condemned hereafter for revolutionary enterprises.” 21 One of the more remarkable letters came from Agénor de Gasparin, a prominent French politician and reformer. As an Orléanist, he was no republican, but he leaned toward a constitutional monarchy. Still, he considered the U.S. to be part of the world’s progressive community. To Seward, Gasparin articulated ideas that anticipated exactly how Reconstruction would take shape: he hoped that the U.S. would abolish slavery, preserve its free institutions, reestablish the southern states with rights intact, and recognize the newly freed blacks’ rights of citizenship. He concluded, “Do not consent to resort to reprisals, to dictatorships or to wars. Nothing will equal in beauty this liberal conclusion of a civil war.” 22

The leniency toward former enemies had begun without the United States taking the counsel of Europe. It was a leniency crafted to end the fighting, to encourage reunion, and to deny further resistance by creating martyrs or by encouraging Confederates to seek foreign partners to continue the fight, such as through an alliance with the French in Mexico. Lincoln feared potential anarchy in the South and hoped that there would be respect for the national authority and the laws of the land. Additionally, legal minds grasped the problem of trying the rebels for treason. Trials would be conducted in Richmond, where it would be difficult to secure a conviction from a jury of the peers of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. 23 Under the circumstances, it was best to let the enemy down gently.

And the end of the war came.

I f the war did not end with the surrenders , then when did it end? Only recently has the question gained fresh currency. More than four decades ago, historian Avery Craven made the bold statement “The American Civil War did not end at Appomattox,” adding: “Until the Negro’s place in American life was fixed, the war was not over.” 24 But he remained a minority voice, as the sheer weight of scholarship has leaned toward portraying the surrenders of the Confederate armies as the end of the war. Although violence continued in the South—much of it aimed at either controlling elections or preserving the racial order—historians have disagreed over whether to interpret this as a continuation of warfare. On the one hand, those who see the end of the war with the surrenders in 1865 argue that the rebels did not secede again, and also that the violence involved only a tiny fraction of the South’s white males. At the same time, according to the argument, the violence featured minimal interstate cooperation, belying the notion of a concerted, organized leadership. On the other hand, the violence did fulfill the goal of conducting what one historian has called a counterrevolution that overturned the Republican state governments in favor of a regime friendlier to the interests of the former Confederates. More recently, Gregory P. Downs has revived the provocative idea that we should consider the end of wartime as coming around 1870, with the admission of the last southern states under Radical Reconstruction. 25

Two factors make it plausible to consider the war as having lasted beyond the surrenders. First, there was support among key players at the time for defining the post-surrender South as still living in a condition of wartime. Second, violence persisted in a form of warfare that we know today as an insurgency.

Concerning the first element, numerous Republicans pressed for considering the war as ongoing so that they could enact the hardest measures allowed under the auspices of the war powers clause of the Constitution. The war ended without an understanding of the terms under which the country would reunite. There remained the need to establish true peace, respect for the law, the protection of the freedpeople, and the acquiescence of the former Confederates in allegiance to national authority. 26 The most articulate, and influential, argument that called for considering the Civil War as continuing beyond the surrenders came from Richard Henry Dana Jr. On June 12, 1865, the former U.S. attorney and author of Two Years before the Mast delivered a famous speech at Faneuil Hall in Boston at a rally for black enfranchisement in which he asserted that the war was not over. “A war is over when its purpose is secured,” he declared, adding, “It is a fatal mistake to hold that this war is over, because the fighting has ceased.” He added that a victorious nation did not retreat and give up possession of the enemy country only because the fighting had ceased. “No; it holds the conquered enemy in the grasp of war until it has secured whatever it has the right to require.” 27 The position did not appeal to Democrats or to conquered Confederates. But the consideration that a state of war still existed until all goals had been achieved became an ideal adopted by a range of Republicans, including House Speaker Schuyler Colfax, Senator William Pitt Fessenden, Representative George S. Boutwell, and William Lawrence of the House Judiciary Committee. The “Grasp of War” theory, according to constitutional specialist Michael Les Benedict, became the favored rationale in dealing with the rebels because it offered the greatest constitutional flexibility while respecting fundamental principles. 28

There were additional signs that the condition of wartime continued during Reconstruction. For more than a year after the greater fighting ceased, much of the Confederacy existed in a limbo between military and civil law, even after the fall 1865 elections that attempted to restore the insurgent states to the Union. Martial law remained in place, and the Freedmen’s Bureau and provost courts intermingled with civil rule in the former Confederacy, creating what Downs has called a “dual government” in which the army sometimes made arrests, ruled on cases, and overturned elections despite the functioning of civil authority. Attorney General James Speed argued for maintaining martial law—a status that continued for all of 1865 and part of 1866, until Andrew Johnson proclaimed the final restoration of peace and civil authority in the South on August 20, 1866. 29

Also, violence erupted that required what students of military engagements call “small wars,” and what we today see as an insurgency. These kinds of operations often appear in the wake of internal conflicts. Colonel C. E. Callwell popularized the term “small wars” in a book by that title published first in 1896. He defined these operations as “campaigns undertaken to suppress rebellions and guerilla warfare in all parts of the world where organized armies are struggling against opponents who will not meet them in the open field, and it thus obviously covers operations very varying in their scope and in their conditions.” 30 More recently, these operations have earned the title “low-intensity conflict.” Andrew J. Birtle of the U.S. Army Center of Military History has acknowledged the intellectual debt to Callwell but added that experiences of the army in small wars since that study have often been affairs of a quasi-police nature conducted after the large-scale fighting ceased; hence, the term “constabulary operations” has emerged. In extreme cases, according to Birtle, this might have involved the imposition of military government, which could become “programs of social engineering designed to reshape the subject society,” or in other words, exactly what happened in the post-surrender South. 31

Political decisions about the size of the military and its dispersal virtually guaranteed an emphasis on small wars. Northern ideals about republicanism stressed the need to restore civil authority as quickly as possible. 32 Additionally, the size of the national debt that was amassed in prosecuting the Civil War and the shifting strategic priority to continue wars of pacification against Native Americans in the West conspired to drastically reduce the size of the army in the South. The number of soldiers in the former Confederacy dropped from 1 million in April 1865 to 90,000 by the end of January 1866. Subtract the troops stationed at the Mexican border in Texas, and the number falls to 61,000. In early Reconstruction, the army typically fielded roughly 25,000 soldiers in the Southeast, although in the 1870s that figure would decline to 8,000. In comparison, during the 1870s, the United States stationed 25,000 soldiers in the American West; at the end of the nineteenth century, the U.S. left about the same number in the Philippines after the combat stopped. In the U.S. South, the number of troops rarely seemed sufficient to satisfy the needs for protection; however, geography even more than size affected the nature of occupation. Wherever the military presence was small or nonexistent, white southerners could operate with greater impunity. Resistance melted whenever federal troops appeared. 33

It is possible that none of the northerners who espoused the “Grasp of War” theory truly believed that the war continued—that they primarily sought a means of cloaking pragmatic political concerns within the mantle of constitutionalism. But if they did not see wartime continuing at first, they became more convinced that sterner action was necessitated by the violence they saw visited upon both the freedpeople and white Republicans in the South. It is clear that the assaults, assassinations of public officials, and so-called “riots” (always a coded word for the right to murder black people in places such as Memphis and New Orleans) drove moderates toward a more Radical position, leading to military oversight of Radical Reconstruction.

Pacification and constabulary engagement by soldiers via the Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867 seemed increasingly necessary because of an insurgency dedicated to overturning the achievements of the war and preventing black advancement—and a commander in chief who was unwilling to use the martial power that Congress had given him. Historian Mark Grimsley has considered the violence in early Reconstruction as part of an insurgency. He asserted that it took more than a century for scholars to recognize it as such. Insurgencies are not easy to identify, even today. They can be missed during what scholar Robert Thompson refers to as “the build-up phase.” Furthermore, they could be overlooked entirely, according to Grimsley, if they failed to account for a range of coercive measures, including economic threats to black laborers, propaganda through newspapers, and paramilitary measures. 34

“Records Relating to Murders and Outrages,” a collection of the Freedmen’s Bureau in the National Archives, provides horrifying glimpses into this world. The documents demonstrate a continuous application of violence in the world made by the Civil War. In these records collected by military officers stationed in the South, we can see an insurgency, defined as employing terrorism and other means “to challenge the existing government for control of all or a portion of its territory, or force political concessions in sharing political power.” 35 Louisiana provides an example. From the organization of the bureau in 1865 to February 1867, agents reported 70 freedmen killed by white people, 10 killed in riots, 6 killed without knowing the perpetrators, and 210 shot, whipped, stabbed, or beaten. Two freedmen were murdered by another black person. One white person faced the same fate. If anything, the agent believed that the total number of cases was underreported by at least half because of the fears of reprisal. The most chilling statement came in the conclusion by the bureau agent making the report: “In no instance in any of the foregoing cases has a white man been punished for killing or ill treating a freedman.” In one case, Damascas D. Day slashed Mary Stewart, a freedwoman, with a knife on her head, side, and arms. He was brought before the civil authorities in New Orleans for trial, but no witnesses appeared against him, “it being believed they were … kept away by threats.” Thus “he was acquitted and immediately afterwards appointed one of the Grand Jury then in session.” 36 Louisiana was not exceptional. Downs has charted that in parts of Mississippi, Texas, and Alabama, the former rebels killed an average of one black man per day during the summer of 1865. 37

In this build-up phase, the “Murders and Outrages” records are inconclusive about whether white southerners met as a group to plan violent actions to take against the freedpeople. The conflicts seemingly were not organized by a centralized mind, but remained local in nature.

However, these actions took place in a different world, in which the freedpeople were subject to the protection of the law. The white opposition was formulating how to fight back by using economic coercion, black codes, and other means in conjunction with terrorism. Although no official meeting was likely convened to establish a strategy, the silence from higher authorities gave Damascas Day and his peers approval to continue their assaults. They were learning that there would be no consequences for their actions—that, to the contrary, they could be rewarded with positions of community authority, like Day, who became a grand juror and assisted with the regulation of the legal system. The violence against the freedpeople was accepted by local legal and law enforcement officials and white community leaders in general.

Through the implementation of the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which empowered the military to reorganize state governments in the defeated Confederacy, the condition of wartime received its curtain call. As a consequence of the recalcitrance of former Confederates, if not because of the heartfelt goals of a majority of Republicans, black suffrage had come to the South. The newly constituted governments had to endorse the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, adding the precedents of granting federal protection for civil rights and prohibiting discrimination by race in voting. Yet readmission to the Union had been a slow process, taking two years to unfold and involving differing degrees of violence and resistance depending on the state. After the seating of a Georgia senator in Congress in 1871 completed the process for all the former states in rebellion, not even a diehard Radical could legitimately stretch the definition of wartime anymore. 38

This is not to say that violence ended. It was during the launch of Military Reconstruction that the scholarly literature most agrees that an insurgency took place, first through the Klan and then through a counterrevolution after 1870 identified as Redemption, which was the overturning of Republican majorities through intimidation, economic coercion, and violence, employing what Steven Hahn has called “paramilitary politics.” 39

Whether the war ended in the spring of 1865, or with Johnson’s declaration of August 1866, or not until 1871, all of these endpoints featured no negotiated settlements and no intervention by a third party. There was no international institution like the United Nations that had the standing of neutrality and legitimacy to act. European powers that could force such bargaining had a vested interest in securing imperialistic holdings in the Northern Hemisphere. Even the Vatican could not succeed. In October 1862, Pope Pius IX called for an end to the “destructive civil war” and urged archbishops to apply their pressure to achieve conciliation. The appeal was ignored by the United States, which is perhaps not surprising given the anti-Catholic bias in the country. The pontiff had his own bias. He relied on the protection of monarchists against revolutionaries led by Giuseppe Garibaldi. Despite ostensibly having a moral influence on 175 million Catholics at the time, he could not bring the warring sides to the bargaining table. 40 Ultimately, what happened in the United States was primarily homegrown.

The end of the Civil War—whether in 1865 or 1871—came about through the coercive measures of a nation-state, seemingly contrary to democratic ideals of self-determination. It was a force, however, that was wrapped in the cloak of leniency at first, and then democratic rituals such as conventions, ballots, and constitutional amendments, implying consent of the governed even if that agreement came about through non-negotiable terms. The use of military oversight directed by the national state provided the only real protection for life, liberty, and property among formerly enslaved people, although it would have taken a far longer commitment to military occupation beyond 1877 to achieve the fullest realization of civil rights. 41 Yet for all of the faults of a non-negotiated settlement with no consideration of issues of human rights, and there are many, the nation had been reunited. Perhaps some at the time could predict how the counterrevolution would unfold. But for the moment, a number of goals had been achieved, among them peace, reunion, and black manhood suffrage.

The author would like to thank Gregory P. Downs, Gary W. Gallagher, Ari Kelman, Mark E. Neely Jr., Evan Rothera, and Michael Vorenberg for their careful readings of this essay.

1 With apologies to Abraham Lincoln, who in his Second Inaugural Address of March 1865 explained how slavery caused the American Civil War, adding succinctly: “And the war came.”

2 Karl DeRouen Jr. and UK Heo, eds., Civil Wars of the World: Major Conflicts since World War II , 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2007), 1: 2. The editors chart 225 armed conflicts between 1946 and 2001, with 163 of them—nearly 72 percent—internal conflicts: “Internal conflict has been the dominant form of conflict throughout most of the post–World War II period and certainly since the late 1950s.”

3 Roy Licklider, “Ethical Advice: Conflict Management vs. Human Rights in Ending Civil Wars,” Journal of Human Rights 7, no. 4 (2008): 376–387, here 377; Richard A. Falk, ed., The International Law of Civil War (Baltimore, 1971), 71; Stephen John Stedman, Donald Rothchild, and Elizabeth M. Cousens, eds., Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements (Boulder, Colo., 2002).

4 Barbara F. Walter, Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Wars (Princeton, N.J., 2002), 5.

5 Monica Duffy Toft, “Ending Civil Wars: A Case for Rebel Victory?,” International Security 34, no. 4 (Spring 2010): 7–36, here 16.

6 Eric Foner’s Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy , new ed. (Baton Rouge, La., 2007), thoroughly outlines the problem of freedom after the Confederate surrenders.

7 Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of Wars (Cambridge, Mass., 2015), 3; Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2014), 13; Michael Les Benedict, “Preserving the Constitution: The Conservative Basis of Radical Reconstruction,” Journal of American History 61, no. 1 (June 1974): 65–90, here 67; Daniel J. Elazar, “Civil War and the Preservation of American Federalism,” Publius 1, no. 1 (1971): 39–58. On the desire for nineteenth-century Americans to have policy matters gibe with “constitutional plausibility,” see Mark E. Neely Jr., Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2011), 5.

8 Mark Grimsley, “Wars for the American South: The First and Second Reconstructions Considered as Insurgencies,” Civil War History 58, no. 1 (March 2012): 6–36. For other works that have considered the violence in the South as either counterrevolution or terrorism, see George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens, Ga., 1984); and Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (New York, 1971).

9 Downs, After Appomattox , 3.

10 Don H. Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New York, 2014), 28.

11 James M. McPherson, “No Peace without Victory, 1861–1865,” AHA Presidential Address, American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (February 2004): 1–18, here 1.

12 David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York, 1995), 560–561.

13 The historiography of the Copperheads has centered on whether the Peace Democrats formed a loyal opposition or were a threat to the nation. For the Copperhead threat as being exaggerated, see Frank L. Klement, The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago, 1960); and Joel H. Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860–1868 (New York, 1977). For the view of Copperheads as a threat to the Union war effort, see Jennifer L. Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York, 2006).

14 Wilfred B. Yearns, “The Peace Movement in the Confederate Congress,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 41, no. 1 (March 1957): 1–18, here 2–3, 7; Horace W. Raper, William W. Holden: North Carolina’s Political Enigma (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 46.

15 Confederate Constitution, Article 1, Section 9, item 4; William J. Cooper Jr., Jefferson Davis, American (New York, 2000), 514–515; Doyle, The Cause of All Nations , 275–280.

16 For an overview of the attempts to raise the peace issue, see Steven E. Woodworth, “The Last Function of Government: Confederate Collapse and Negotiated Peace,” in Mark Grimsley and Brooks D. Simpson, eds., The Collapse of the Confederacy (Lincoln, Nebr., 2001), 13–39; on Niagara, see also Michael Vorenberg, “‘The Deformed Child’: Slavery and the Election of 1864,” Civil War History 47, no. 3 (September 2001): 240–247; James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), 766–767.

17 Woodworth, “The Last Function of Government,” 30–34; Donald, Lincoln , 556–560; Cooper, Jefferson Davis , 510–513.

18 Francis P. Blair Sr., Memorandum of Conversation with Jefferson Davis, January 12, 1865, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress, Series 1: General Correspondence, 1833–1916; Donald, Lincoln , 573.

19 War of the Rebellion: The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies , 128 vols. plus index (Washington, D.C., 1880–1901), ser. 1, 46, pt. 3: 724, 725; Donald, Lincoln , 578–579.

20 “The Peace Commission—Hon. R. M. T. Hunter’s Reply to President Davis’ Letter,” in Robert Alonzo Brock, ed., Southern Historical Society Papers , vol. 4: July to December, 1877 (Richmond, Va., 1877), 303–318, quotation from 308–309.

21 George Douglas Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll, to William Henry Seward, June 9, 1865, microfilm reel 89, William Henry Seward Papers, Circa 1776–1910, mm 83060442, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.; John Bigelow to William Henry Seward, Paris, June 9, 1865, ibid.; H. S. Sanford to William Henry Seward, Brussels, June 13, 1865, ibid.

22 A. de Gasparin to William Henry Seward, May 1, 1865, ibid. For more on European reception of the surrenders, see Doyle, The Cause of All Nations , 292–297.

23 Donald, Lincoln , 573–574; William A. Blair, With Malice toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2014), especially chap. 8.

24 Avery Craven, Reconstruction: The Ending of the Civil War (New York, 1969), 1, 2.

25 For the argument against war continuing beyond the surrenders, see, for instance, Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 206 n. 1. On counterrevolution and the statement that “peace became war carried on by other means,” see Rable, But There Was No Peace , 15; and see also Downs, After Appomattox , 3. The literature as a whole remains tilted toward the war ending with the surrenders. For an excellent analysis of the capitulation by the Confederate Army in the east, which also shows the repercussions and contested images beyond the event, see Elizabeth R. Varon, Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (New York, 2014).

26 Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., The Great Task Remaining before Us: Reconstruction as America’s Continuing Civil War (New York, 2010), 2.

27 Richard Henry Dana Jr., Speeches in Stirring Times and Letters to a Son , ed. Richard H. Dana III (Boston, 1910), 246.

28 Benedict, “Preserving the Constitution,” 72–76. See also Downs, Beyond Appomattox , 67–68, and Summers, The Ordeal of the Reunion , 13.

29 Downs, Beyond Appomattox , 62, 63, 68, 72. On April 2, 1866, Johnson had declared that no armed resistance to the authority of the United States existed, except in the state of Texas. The August proclamation finally recognized that the insurrection had died in Texas.

30 Colonel C. E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice , 3rd ed. (London, 1906), 21.

31 On low-intensity conflict, see Donald W. Hamilton, The Art of Insurgency: American Military Policy and the Failure of Strategy in Southeast Asia (Westport, Conn., 1998), 5–6; Andrew J. Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1860–1941 (1998; repr., Washington, D.C., 2009), 4–5.

32 Andrew F. Lang, “Republicanism, Race, and Reconstruction: The Ethos of Military Occupation in Civil War America,” Journal of the Civil War Era 4, no. 4 (December 2014): 559–589.

33 Downs, Beyond Appomattox , 90–91. For other works on the military in Reconstruction, see James E. Sefton, The United States Army and Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (Baton Rouge, La., 1967); Joseph G. Dawson III, Army Generals and Reconstruction: Louisiana, 1862–1877 (Baton Rouge, La., 1982); William L. Richter, The Army in Texas during Reconstruction, 1865–1870 (College Station, Tex., 1987); William Alan Blair, “The Use of Military Force to Protect the Gains of Reconstruction,” Civil War History 51, no. 4 (December 2005): 388–402.

34 Grimsley, “Wars for the American South,” 9–14, Thompson quotation from 11. Adds another historian of South Carolina, “From 1865 until 1877 they successfully prosecuted what today would be called an insurgency, or a people’s war, to accomplish what they had failed to do through secession and civil war.” See Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia, S.C., 1998), 378.

35 “Differences between Terrorism and Insurgency,” International Terrorism and Security Research, http://www.Terrorism-research.com/insurgency .

36 The Freedmen’s Bureau Online, Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Louisiana, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, 1865–1869, “Miscellaneous Reports and Lists Relating to Murders and Outrages,” March 1867–November 1868, http://freedmensbureau.com/lou isiana/outrages/outrages4.htm .

37 Downs, Beyond Appomattox , 55.

38 For the patterns of readmission of the former states of the Confederacy, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988).

39 Trelease, White Terror ; Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), chap. 6. For a recent work that exposes the cultural values of violence in Redemption, see Carole Emberton, Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence and the American South after the Civil War (Chicago, 2013).

40 Doyle, The Cause of All Nations , 261–265.

41 Blair, “The Use of Military Force to Protect the Gains of Reconstruction.”

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

• Recommend to your Library

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 1937-5239
• Print ISSN 0002-8762
• Copyright © 2024 The American Historical Association
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

College & Research Libraries News  ( C&RL News ) is the official newsmagazine and publication of record of the Association of College & Research Libraries,  providing articles on the latest trends and practices affecting academic and research libraries.

C&RL News  became an online-only publication beginning with the January 2022 issue.

C&RL News  Reader Survey

Give us your feedback in the 2024  C&RL News   reader survey ! The survey asks a series of questions today to gather your thoughts on the contents and presentation of the magazine and should only take approximately 5-7 minutes to complete. Thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback and suggestions for  C&RL News , we greatly appreciate and value your input.

Susan Birkenseer is reference and instruction librarian at Saint Mary’s College of California, email: [email protected]

ALA JobLIST

Advertising Information

• Preparing great speeches: A 10-step approach (214659 views)
• The American Civil War: A collection of free online primary sources (199700 views)
• 2018 top trends in academic libraries: A review of the trends and issues affecting academic libraries in higher education (77647 views)

The American Civil War: A collection of free online primary sources

Susan Birkenseer

The American Civil War began in 1861, lasted until 1865, and was ruinous by any standard. Within months of President Lincoln’s inauguration, seven southern states began the secession from the Union and declared the Confederate States of America. This split in the fabric of the country began a bitter war, concluding in the death of more than 750,000 soldiers. When the South finally surrendered, the Confederacy collapsed, and slavery was abolished. To understand the conflict, take a look back at the primary documents that highlight decisions of generals, the everyday drudgery of soldiers, and the photographic images of battle.

Hundreds of websites offer insight into the American Civil War. This guide is not comprehensive, but it highlights a diverse collection of free websites of primary sources for the study of the war. These websites include digitized newspaper archives for both the Union and Confederate sides of the struggle, collections of letters and diaries, digitized photographs, maps, and official records and dispatches from the battlefields.

• Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1841–1955). An important daily newspaper, the Eagle was unusual for its time since it covered national as well as regional news. The archive is searchable, can be browsed by date, and includes zooming capabilities to see the tiny text up close. The archive is maintained by the Brooklyn Public Library. Access: http://bklyn.newspapers.com/title_1890/the_brooklyn_daily_eagle/ .
• Chronicling America. This site offers access to multiple newspapers from both the Confederate and Union states. Over 1,400 newspapers are in the archive, but not all of them are from the Civil War years. Examples of newspaper titles include: Memphis Appeal (1857–1886), Chattanooga Rebel (1862–1865), New York Sun (1859–1916), and New York Daily Tribune (1842–1866). Search across the newspapers for a range of contemporary stories from both sides of the war. From the Library of Congress. Access: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/#tab=tab_newspapers .

• Richmond Daily Dispatch (1860–1865). This paper was published from the Confederate capital and has a digitized and searchable online archive of 1,384 issues. The site is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Access: http://dlxs.richmond.edu/d/ddr/index.html .
• Secession-Era Editorials. This site from the Furman University history department in South Carolina contains transcribed editorials from contemporary newspapers, all from the 1850s. The specific issues discussed are the Nebraska Bill debates, the caning attack on Senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks, John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry, and the Dred Scott decision. These events all highlight the varied and inflexible opinions of their time from both sides of the conflict. Access: http://history.furman.edu/editorials/see.py .

Maps and photographs

• Civil War Glass Negatives and Related Prints. Approximately 7,000 portraits and battleground images are available. The collection is from the glass negatives of Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, as well as from photographic collections that were purchased by the Library of Congress in 1943. Browse by broad subjects or search by keyword. Access: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/cwp/ .

• Pictures of the Civil War. The new era of photography brought the battles home during the American Civil War. The National Archives has organized the Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner photographs into broad categories for easy browsing. Access: http://www.archives.gov/research/military/civil-war/photos/index.html .

Diaries and letters

• Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. Approximately 20,000 documents, which include correspondence with enclosures of newspaper clippings, drafts of speeches, notes, pamphlets, and other printed material by Lincoln, are available. Most of the material dates from the presidential years. Lincoln had a lively correspondence with many people in his day, so this is a rich resource. Each piece is scanned, with accompanying transcription. Searchable by keyword or just browse the collection. Access: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/malhome.html .
• American Civil War Collection at the Electronic Text Center. This site has transcribed letters from the University of Virginia special collections with links to other collections (some links are only accessible by University of Virginia students). Access: http://etext.virginia.edu/civilwar/ .
• The Civil War Archive: Letters Home from the Civil War. A collection of letters from both Union and Confederate soldiers, organized by name and regiment. Access: http://www.civilwararchive.com/LETTERS/letters.htm .
• The Civil War Collection at Michigan State University. A huge online collection of scanned letters, newspaper articles, images, photographs, diaries, and much more, filled with the stories of Michigan soldiers. Access: http://civilwar.archives.msu.edu/ .
• The Civil War Collection at Penn State. Penn State has a rich digitized special collection. These include diaries, newspapers, and other ephemera. No transcriptions are available for the diaries, but the scanned pages are clean and easy to peruse. Access: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/digital/civilwar.html .
• Civil War Diaries and Letters. Browse a list of scanned diaries and letters from the University of Iowa Libraries, some of which currently have transcriptions, but not all. You can also browse by year to get the materials for a particular time. Access: http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cwd/ .
• Civil War Diaries and Letters Collections. A collection of diaries and letters from Auburn University, covering both sides of the war; each item is scanned and transcribed. Access: http://diglib.auburn.edu/collections/civilwardiaries/ .

• The Civil War: Women and the Home-front. Duke University has put together this study guide relating to women’s role during the war. Use the tab labeled “Primary Sources Online,” which includes digitized diaries and letters, as well as outside links to other institutions’ collections. The online papers include a collection from Rose O’Neal Greenhow, a famed Confederate spy. Other letters include those written by African American slaves, describing their living conditions in the South. Access: http://guides.library.duke.edu/content.php?pid=41224&sid=303304 .
• First Person Narratives of the American South. Everyday people’s voices speak through their diaries, autobiographies, ex-slave accounts, and memoirs on this site, which is organized alphabetically or by subject. Access: http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/index.html .
• Manuscripts of the American Civil War. This special collection from the University of Notre Dame’s Rare Books and Special Collections contains seven soldier’s diaries, which have been carefully scanned and transcribed. The soldiers represented are from both sides of the war. The diaries highlight their day-to-day experiences—from the mundane to the terrifying. Access: http://www.rarebooks.nd.edu/digital/civil_war/diaries_journals/ .
• Saint Mary’s College of California Special Collections. Saint Mary’s College has a small, select special collection containing letters from a private in the Fifth Vermont regiment, and a diary from a captain of the Sixteenth Michigan regiment. The collections are digitized and transcribed, and the site is well illustrated. Access: http://www.stmarys-ca.edu/library/about-the-library/special-collections .
• South Carolina and the Civil War. The site brings together primary sources by eyewitnesses from the holdings of the University of South Carolina. Included on the site are diaries, sheet music, maps, letters, and photographs. The collections are scanned and viewable, but with little transcription or description. Access: http://library.sc.edu/digital/collections/civilwar.html .
• Valley of the Shadow. Thousands of documents are accessible that compare life in two towns during the war: one in Virginia and one in Pennsylvania. These documents include letters, diaries, maps, newspaper accounts, and other sources. Access: http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/ .
• Virginia Military Institute Archives. The Virginia Military Institute has a proud history of training its students to serve in the military service of the United States. The archives provide access to the full-text of more than 75 letters, diaries, manuscripts, and other ephemera of soldiers from both armies. Access: http://www.vmi.edu/Archives/Civil_War/Civil_War_Resources_Home/ .
• Wisconsin Goes to War: Our Civil War Experience. The University of Wisconsin is in the process of digitizing letters, diaries, poetry, and other writings from Wisconsin’s soldiers; approximately 630 pages to date, with an expected completion number to be more than 2,600 pages. Access: http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/WI/WIWar .

Dispatches and battles

• Antietam on the Web. This site looks at the crucial Battle of Sharpsburg (Antietam), highlighting generals and other officers, battle maps, and important background information. This site also includes the transcriptions of reports from the officers from both sides of the war, as well as excerpts from diaries and letters of some of the soldiers who survived. Access: http://antietam.aotw.org/index.php .
• Making of America: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies. The Making of America site is an excellent source of primary documents, and this one features the orders, reports, and correspondence from the Union and Confederate navies. The scanned pages of the 30-volume set from the Government Printing Office are annotated and arranged chronologically. The collection is searchable. This is an essential resource for any study of naval operations in the war. Access: http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/m/moawar/ofre.html .
• Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library. This site from Mississippi State University contains the first 31 volumes of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant published by Southern Illinois University Press, and includes his military papers from the Civil War. Also included are photographs and prints from the life of Grant, including photographs from the war. The volumes are searchable as well as browsable. Access: http://digital.library.msstate.edu/cdm/usgrantcollection .
• The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. This 70-volume work from the Making of America site at Cornell University contains the formal reports for both the Union and Confederate armies, including correspondence and orders. The scanned volumes are arranged chronologically and identified with a brief annotation. The volumes are searchable. This is an essential resource for anyone doing serious research on battles, regiments, and the progress of the war. Access: http://digital.library.cornell.edu/m/moawar/waro.html .

Slavery and abolitionism

• Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938. Includes more than 2,300 first-person accounts, and more than 500 photographs. The narratives were collected in the 1930s by the Federal Writer’s Project and the Works Progress Administration, and put into a seventeen volume set. Access: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html .
• Frederick Douglass Papers. A former slave and devout abolitionist, Douglass’s papers were digitized by the Library of Congress. They are searchable, and also can be browsed by date, and then narrowed by type, such as speeches or correspondence. Access: http://www.loc.gov/collection/frederick-douglass-papers/about-this-collection/ .
• North American Slave Narratives. The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has a special collection dedicated to slave narratives. Not every manuscript is a primary document, but many are. Included on the site are narratives of fugitive and former slaves in published form from before 1920. For scholars interested in further study, a bibliography of slave and former-slave narratives by William L. Andrews is also included. Access: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/index.html .
• Slavery and Abolition in the U.S.: Select Publications of the 1800s. Reflecting both sides of the slavery question, these publications from the 1800s include speeches, tracts, pamphlets, books, legal proceedings, religious sermons, and personal accounts. This collection from a cooperative project by Millersville University and Dickinson College includes more than 24,000 individual pages. Access: http://deila.dickinson.edu/slaveryandabolition/index.html .
• Slaves and the Courts 1740–1860. From the Library of Congress’s American Memory Project this site consists of trials and cases, arguments, proceedings, and other historical works of importance that relate to the prosecution and defense of slavery as an institution. The collection contains more than 100 pamphlets and books published between 1772 and 1889. Access: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/sthtml/ .

Confederacy

• The Museum of the Confederacy. Various primary sources are accessible, including a collection of photographs, documents, and artifacts relating to Lee and Jackson, the “Roll of Honor and Battle Accounts” from Confederate soldiers, and a searchable database of their collections. Access: http://www.moc.org/collections-archives?mode=general .
• The Papers of Jefferson Davis. A selection of documents from the published papers of the same name that includes speeches, reports, and correspondence. The documents are organized by volume with brief annotations. Access: http://jeffersondavis.rice.edu/documentslist.aspx .

Article Views (Last 12 Months)

Contact ACRL for article usage statistics from 2010-April 2017.

Article Views (By Year/Month)

© 2024 Association of College and Research Libraries , a division of the American Library Association

Print ISSN: 0099-0086 | Online ISSN: 2150-6698

ALA Privacy Policy

ISSN: 2150-6698

The New York Times

Opinionator | the end of the war in the west.

The End of the War in the West

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

After Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, the Civil War continued. After the final pitched battle at Palmito Ranch, Texas, on May 12-13, 1865, the Civil War continued. After Cherokee leader Stand Watie became the last Confederate general to surrender on June 23, 1865, the Civil War continued. Even after Aug. 20, 1866, when Andrew Johnson formally declared an end to the war and began to pull back the troops occupying the former Confederate states, the war wasn’t really over, at least not in the American West.

That’s strange, because in many ways the war never really came to the territories west of the Mississippi River. Though the question of the extension of slavery westward was a precipitating cause of the war, hardly any battles pitted Union and Confederate soldiers against one another in the region. The Battle of Glorieta Pass is an important exception, as it prevented the opening of a Confederate front in the Southwest, and it dashed the hopes of Richmond to have an outlet to the Pacific. And while fights between the United States Army and American Indian nations — or, as in the case of the Cherokee, among members of the nations aligned with each side — intensified during the Civil War years, these conflicts often seemed only tangentially related to the fighting in the East.

But looking at the war from the West is an important perspective. From the West, the Civil War appeared as merely the greatest in a series of conflicts that shaped the United States in the 19th century, conflicts over how to square liberty and slavery, empire and democracy — crises of authority that tested what the proper limits of the United States would be. The Civil War caused brawls among American miners in Victoria, British Columbia, and it launched multiple schemes for Americans — black and white, Union and Confederate — to colonize Mexico, or Central America, or islands in the Caribbean. The Civil War contributed to the rise and then the fall of Emperor Maximilian in Mexico, as well as the Confederation of Canada from disparate provinces.

As Reconstruction moved forward in the South, it encountered questions of race and citizenship, occupation and voting rights that were familiar from the states and territories of the West. Republicans in California twisted themselves into knots to explain why African African-Americans should receive citizenship and voting rights, but Chinese immigrants should not; the Wyoming Territory granted woman’s suffrage in 1869 as part of a strategy to resist perceived equality among races.

Put simply, one cannot understand the Civil War without addressing the significance of the West in American history before, during, and after the traditional chronology of the war. And likewise you cannot understand the West without taking into account changes wrought by the nation’s cataclysmic Civil War. Though often held apart, the histories of the Civil War, Reconstruction and the American West compose a larger, unified history of conflict over land, labor, rights, citizenship and the limits of governmental authority in the United States.

The nation’s defining debates and battles over freedom, race, land, and the rights of individuals, took place amid, and because of, the territorial expansion of the United States, at the hands of men and women who welcomed an American empire. This was nothing new in 1848: Thomas Jefferson, the slaveholding son of a westering slaveholder, embraced territorial expansion as the engine of an “empire for liberty” — though Jefferson’s fellow slaveholders more often envisioned an empire for slavery. In the West as much as in the slave South, elites demonstrated how little regard they had for the life, liberty or pursuit of happiness of the American Indian nations they encountered, or of the Spanish-speaking peoples who had for generations lived in the newly American West.

This interwoven story of the wider Civil War and the American West is present throughout the objects on display in an exhibit at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles curated by Virginia Scharff and Carolyn Brucken, from bills of sale for slaves moved into Texas to the career of John Charles Frémont, the South Carolina-born adventurer who (prematurely) encouraged the Bear Flag revolt in California and then, after his courts-martials and business reversals, ran as the first presidential candidate of the Republican Party in 1856.

Disunion Highlights

Explore multimedia from the series and navigate through past posts, as well as photos and articles from the Times archive.

• See the Highlights »

In the vast expanses of the West, Confederate soldiers froze in the mountains of New Mexico and baked in the Texas desert, while Union officers used the telegraph as much as the rifle as a vicious tool to corral Native American nations attempting to escape. In the West, unfreedom persisted, for domestics in New Mexico households caught between slavery and kinship, and for Chinese and other Asian laborers, who were eventually ejected from the nation under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1883. In the last decades of the 19th century, both Union and Confederate veterans moved by the thousands to California, but for some the war never completely faded away.

So we should not think that the Civil War ended at Appomattox Courthouse. Men and women of the Civil War generation carried the war with them wherever they went — and its questions of authority and liberty, unfree labor and territorial expansion continued to be asked, especially in the American West. In emphasizing this continuity, we can create a more capacious and complicated American story, through a provocative vision of American history that reaches beyond North and South.

Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook .

Adam Arenson is an associate professor of history at Manhattan College and a co-editor of the new volume “ Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States .” Virginia Scharff is an associate provost for faculty development and a distinguished professor of history and the director of the Center for the Southwest at the University of New Mexico. She is also the chair of western women’s history at the Autry National Center and co-curator (with Carolyn Brucken) of the Autry exhibition and editor of the companion volume “ Empire and Liberty: The Civil War and the West .” The exhibition is open now and runs through January. This essay draws on the introductions to both volumes.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter , and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter .

What's Next

You may opt out or contact us anytime.

Zócalo Podcasts

Did the End of the Civil War Mean the End of Slavery?

April 1865 marked the beginning of a new battle for american abolitionists.

by Matthew Pinsker | April 14, 2015

Early on the morning of April 15, 1865, Garrison, best known as the controversial editor of The Liberator , had traveled across the city with a handful of other fellow abolitionists to visit the gravesite of the original philosopher of secession. Sometime shortly after Lincoln had choked out his last breath at 7:22 a.m., Garrison reportedly said to his friends standing inside the cemetery, “Down into a deeper grave than this, slavery has gone, and for it there is no resurrection.”

The trouble was that not everybody agreed with Garrison’s optimistic prediction. The end of the war and the pending destruction of slavery was generating a deep sense of foreboding among many Americans, only magnified that Saturday afternoon as word of Lincoln’s assassination spread across the nation’s telegraph lines.

On April 14, 1865, the U.S. flag was raised again over Fort Sumter

Frederick Douglass, the most famous black abolitionist in the country, certainly lacked Garrison’s confidence about the future. Douglass had not gone with the others to Charleston to commemorate victory, but had instead been out lecturing northern audiences on the remaining work to be done to secure real freedom for the former slaves. He was at home in Rochester, New York, when word of the president’s murder reached him, and that evening he delivered some impromptu remarks at a hasty memorial held at city hall. Much later, he claimed that this moment was the first time he had ever felt such “close accord” with his white neighbors. It was the shocking nature of that “terrible calamity,” he recalled , which made them all—white and black—feel more like “kin” than “countrymen.”

This was an especially important sensation for Douglass, because he was already deeply concerned that emancipation would mean little without immediate and full equality. He had been arguing for months that friends like Garrison, his one-time mentor and patron, might ultimately fail the former slaves if they did not push harder for black rights while black men and women were still making important contributions to the Union war effort.

Garrison and his clique of mostly white supporters were not opposed to black voting rights or other civil rights, but they had different priorities by April 1865. They were busy that spring organizing emergency charitable support, what they called freedmen’s relief, spurred on by the pending creation of the new federal Freedmen’s Bureau. The idea was to provide a safety net and universal education for the former slaves, propelling them toward integration into American society and the labor force. Yet in the weeks after Lincoln’s assassination, Douglass became openly scornful of such efforts, which he considered patronizing and a dangerous distraction. “The negro needs justice more than pity,” he growled on May 2, 1865 , “liberty more than old clothes; [and] rights more than training to enjoy them.”

A week later, he went even further and backed a kind of coup within the American Anti-Slavery Society, the great abolitionist organization that Garrison had launched some three decades before. Proud but tired, Garrison had proposed disbanding the movement in its moment of triumph, anticipating ratification of the proposed 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which had passed Congress at the end of January. On May 9, 1865, the resolution to disband was voted down, 118-48, and orator Wendell Phillips replaced the now-outcast Garrison as head of the organization. Douglass supported Phillips and blasted anyone who claimed that slavery was already in its grave. “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot,” he said at the annual meeting in New York, with Garrison glaring down at him, and then adding with a defiant flourish, “or [while] any discrimination exists between white and black at the South.”

Abolitionists had always been prone to feuding, especially over movement tactics, but there was still something maddening about this last epic fight. During a period that should have been marked by a spirit of solemn awe over what they had helped to accomplish, the anti-slavery activists found themselves at worse odds than ever during the final months of the Civil War.

Douglass was in a fighting mood, but he was also a practical man. He soon developed a plan for achieving his most sweeping aspirations. The public’s reaction to Lincoln’s assassination had captivated him, as it did so many others. The electric bond, which he had first felt with his white neighbors on that Saturday evening of April 15, convinced him that the best way forward was to fight this new political war in Lincoln’s name, to keep reminding white audiences that embracing black equality was the best way to honor the martyred president’s memory.

Douglass began this campaign in earnest on June 1, 1865, which had been set aside by new President Andrew Johnson as a national day of mourning for Lincoln. Johnson did not share Douglass’ civil rights fervor, however, and had just issued a controversial proclamation of amnesty, which offered pardons to most of the participants in the Confederate rebellion. This was the kind of backsliding that infuriated Douglass and that he would spend the rest of his life fighting against. So, Douglass eulogized Lincoln that morning in New York emphatically as the “black man’s president,” calling him “the first to show any respect to their rights as men.” He pushed hard to define the war as a struggle not just for emancipation, but also for equality—and did so explicitly in Lincoln’s name.

Over the next several years, Douglass pursued this strategy with a single-minded devotion that yielded some impressive results. He made an alliance with Radical Republicans who had come to despise President Johnson and together they fought successfully for the 14th (1868) and 15th (1870) Amendments, which guaranteed equality and due process for all Americans, and suffrage for black men.

But this early civil rights movement also encountered major setbacks. They failed to end discrimination in the South (or North, for that matter), and in their zeal to insist it was “the negro’s hour” and to abolish all the vestiges of slavery, Douglass and Phillips antagonized feminists and old friends like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who wanted a broader expansion of voting rights. By the middle of the 1870s, it was clear that civil rights for blacks had come at a high political cost and that the future of freedom was still as uncertain as ever.

On April 14, 1876, the 11th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, Douglass spoke at the dedication of an emancipation memorial in Washington, D.C. The statue, funded with the contributions from tens of thousands of freed people who organized the effort in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, showed a standing Lincoln unshackling the chains of a kneeling slave. Yet the memory of that magical period when white and black had felt an electric kinship over their martyred president now seemed far removed. Douglass no longer tried to invoke Lincoln as the “black man’s president.” Instead, he now called him “preeminently the white man’s President,” and concluded, with President Ulysses S. Grant and members of the Supreme Court seated behind him, that Lincoln had been “entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.”

The speech was not a total surrender of faith—Douglass still praised Lincoln’s emancipation policy—but it was an admission that his earlier strategy had fallen short. Rallying around Lincoln’s memory had helped to alter the words of the Constitution, but it was not enough to revolutionize American race relations.

Douglass had come to the hard realization that slavery and its vestiges were not fully abolished, even after the black man had the ballot. Not everybody saw it that way, but clearly the fight over what it meant to be an American—a free American citizen—was far more complicated than anyone had anticipated.

Send A Letter To the Editors

Please tell us your thoughts. Include your name and daytime phone number, and a link to the article you’re responding to. We may edit your letter for length and clarity and publish it on our site.

(Optional) Attach an image to your letter. Jpeg, PNG or GIF accepted, 1MB maximum.

By continuing to use our website, you agree to our privacy and cookie policy . Zócalo wants to hear from you. Please take our survey !-->

Get More Zócalo

No paywall. No ads. No partisan hacks. Ideas journalism with a head and a heart.

• History Classics
• Your Profile
• Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
• This Day In History
• History Podcasts
• History Vault

Reconstruction

By: History.com Editors

Updated: January 24, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

Reconstruction (1865-1877), the turbulent era following the Civil War, was the effort to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly-freed people into the United States. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures passed restrictive “ Black Codes ” to control the labor and behavior of former enslaved people and other African Americans. 

Outrage in the North over these codes eroded support for the approach known as Presidential Reconstruction and led to the triumph of the more radical wing of the Republican Party. During Radical Reconstruction, which began with the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, newly enfranchised Black people gained a voice in government for the first time in American history, winning election to southern state legislatures and even to the U.S. Congress. In less than a decade, however, reactionary forces—including the Ku Klux Klan —would reverse the changes wrought by Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in the South.

Emancipation and Reconstruction

At the outset of the Civil War , to the dismay of the more radical abolitionists in the North, President Abraham Lincoln did not make abolition of slavery a goal of the Union war effort. To do so, he feared, would drive the border slave states still loyal to the Union into the Confederacy and anger more conservative northerners. By the summer of 1862, however, enslaved people, themselves had pushed the issue, heading by the thousands to the Union lines as Lincoln’s troops marched through the South. 

Their actions debunked one of the strongest myths underlying Southern devotion to the “peculiar institution”—that many enslaved people were truly content in bondage—and convinced Lincoln that emancipation had become a political and military necessity. In response to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation , which freed more than 3 million enslaved people in the Confederate states by January 1, 1863, Black people enlisted in the Union Army in large numbers, reaching some 180,000 by war’s end.

Did you know? During Reconstruction, the Republican Party in the South represented a coalition of Black people (who made up the overwhelming majority of Republican voters in the region) along with "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags," as white Republicans from the North and South, respectively, were known.

Emancipation changed the stakes of the Civil War, ensuring that a Union victory would mean large-scale social revolution in the South. It was still very unclear, however, what form this revolution would take. Over the next several years, Lincoln considered ideas about how to welcome the devastated South back into the Union, but as the war drew to a close in early 1865, he still had no clear plan. 

In a speech delivered on April 11, while referring to plans for Reconstruction in Louisiana, Lincoln proposed that some Black people–including free Black people and those who had enlisted in the military –deserved the right to vote. He was assassinated three days later, however, and it would fall to his successor to put plans for Reconstruction in place.

Andrew Johnson and Presidential Reconstruction

At the end of May 1865, President Andrew Johnson announced his plans for Reconstruction, which reflected both his staunch Unionism and his firm belief in states’ rights. In Johnson’s view, the southern states had never given up their right to govern themselves, and the federal government had no right to determine voting requirements or other questions at the state level. 

Under Johnson’s Presidential Reconstruction, all land that had been confiscated by the Union Army and distributed to the formerly enslaved people by the army or the Freedmen’s Bureau (established by Congress in 1865) reverted to its prewar owners. Apart from being required to uphold the abolition of slavery (in compliance with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution ), swear loyalty to the Union and pay off war debt, southern state governments were given free rein to rebuild themselves.

As a result of Johnson’s leniency, many southern states in 1865 and 1866 successfully enacted a series of laws known as the “ black codes ,” which were designed to restrict freed Black peoples’ activity and ensure their availability as a labor force. These repressive codes enraged many in the North, including numerous members of Congress, which refused to seat congressmen and senators elected from the southern states. 

In early 1866, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau and Civil Rights Bills and sent them to Johnson for his signature. The first bill extended the life of the bureau, originally established as a temporary organization charged with assisting refugees and formerly enslaved people, while the second defined all persons born in the United States as national citizens who were to enjoy equality before the law. After Johnson vetoed the bills—causing a permanent rupture in his relationship with Congress that would culminate in his impeachment in 1868—the Civil Rights Act became the first major bill to become law over presidential veto.

Radical Reconstruction

After northern voters rejected Johnson’s policies in the congressional elections in late 1866, Radical Republicans in Congress took firm hold of Reconstruction in the South. The following March, again over Johnson’s veto, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which temporarily divided the South into five military districts and outlined how governments based on universal (male) suffrage were to be organized. The law also required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment , which broadened the definition of citizenship, granting “equal protection” of the Constitution to formerly enslaved people, before they could rejoin the Union. In February 1869, Congress approved the 15th Amendment (adopted in 1870), which guaranteed that a citizen’s right to vote would not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

By 1870, all of the former Confederate states had been admitted to the Union, and the state constitutions during the years of Radical Reconstruction were the most progressive in the region’s history. The participation of African Americans in southern public life after 1867 would be by far the most radical development of Reconstruction, which was essentially a large-scale experiment in interracial democracy unlike that of any other society following the abolition of slavery. 

Southern Black people won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress during this period. Among the other achievements of Reconstruction were the South’s first state-funded public school systems, more equitable taxation legislation, laws against racial discrimination in public transport and accommodations and ambitious economic development programs (including aid to railroads and other enterprises).

Reconstruction Comes to an End

After 1867, an increasing number of southern whites turned to violence in response to the revolutionary changes of Radical Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations targeted local Republican leaders, white and Black, and other African Americans who challenged white authority. Though federal legislation passed during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in 1871 took aim at the Klan and others who attempted to interfere with Black suffrage and other political rights, white supremacy gradually reasserted its hold on the South after the early 1870s as support for Reconstruction waned. 

Racism was still a potent force in both South and North, and Republicans became more conservative and less egalitarian as the decade continued. In 1874—after an economic depression plunged much of the South into poverty—the Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War.

When Democrats waged a campaign of violence to take control of Mississippi in 1875, Grant refused to send federal troops, marking the end of federal support for Reconstruction-era state governments in the South. By 1876, only Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina were still in Republican hands. In the contested presidential election that year, Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes reached a compromise with Democrats in Congress: In exchange for certification of his election, he acknowledged Democratic control of the entire South. 

The Compromise of 1876 marked the end of Reconstruction as a distinct period, but the struggle to deal with the revolution ushered in by slavery’s eradication would continue in the South and elsewhere long after that date. 

A century later, the legacy of Reconstruction would be revived during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, as African Americans fought for the political, economic and social equality that had long been denied them.

HISTORY Vault: The Secret History of the Civil War

The American Civil War is one of the most studied and dissected events in our history—but what you don't know may surprise you.

Sign up for Inside History

Get HISTORY’s most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

Slavery and the Civil War Essay

Theme essays. diversity, extra credit option. reconstruction, works cited.

During the period of 1820-1860, the life of white and black people in the South depended on developing the Institute of slavery which shaped not only social but also economic life of the region. The Institute of slavery was primarily for the Southern states, and this feature helped to distinguish the South from the other regions of the USA.

Slavery played the key role in shaping the economic and social life of the South because it influenced the trade and economic relations in the region as well as the social and class structure representing slave owners, white farmers without slaves, and slaves as the main labor force in the region.

The development of the South during the period of 1820-1860 was based on growing cotton intensively. To guarantee the enormous exports of cotton, it was necessary to rely on slaves as the main cheap or almost free workforce. The farmers of the South grew different crops, but the economic success was associated with the farms of those planters who lived in the regions with fertile soil and focused on growing cotton basing on slavery.

Thus, the prosperity of this or that white farmer and planter depended on using slaves in his farm or plantation. Slaves working for planters took the lowest social positions as well as free slaves living in cities whose economic situation was also problematic. The white population of the South was divided into slave owners and yeoman farmers who had no slaves.

Thus, having no opportunities to use the advantages of slavery, yeoman farmers relied on their families’ powers, and they were poorer in comparison with planters (Picture 1). However, not all the planters were equally successful in their economic situation. Many planters owned only a few slaves, and they also had to work at their plantations or perform definite duties.

Slaves were also different in their status because of the functions performed. From this point, the social stratification was necessary not only for dividing the Southern population into black slaves and white owners but also to demonstrate the differences within these two main classes (Davidson et al.).

As a result, different social classes had various cultures. It is important to note that slaves were more common features in spite of their status in families, and they were united regarding the culture which was reflected in their religion, vision, and songs. The difference in the social status of the white population was more obvious, and the single common feature was the prejudice and discrimination against slaves.

Picture 1. Yeoman Farmer’s House

The Civil War became the real challenge for the USA because it changed all the structures and institutions of the country reforming the aspects of the political, economic, and social life. Furthermore, the Civil War brought significant losses and sufferings for both the representatives of the Northern and Southern armies.

It is important to note that the situation of the Union in the war was more advantageous in comparison with the position of the Confederacy during the prolonged period of the war actions.

As a result, the South suffered from more significant economic and social changes as well as from extreme losses in the war in comparison with the North’s costs. Thus, the main impact of the Civil War was the abolition of slavery which changed the economic and social structures of the South and contributed to shifting the focus on the role of federal government.

The Civil War resulted in abolishing slavery and preserving the political unity of the country. Nevertheless, these positive outcomes were achieved at the expense of significant losses in the number of population and in promoting more sufferings for ordinary people. A lot of the Confederacy’s soldiers died at the battlefields, suffering from extreme wounds and the lack of food because of the problems with weapon and food provision.

During the war, the Union focused on abolishing slaves who were proclaimed free. Thus, former slaves from the Southern states were inclined to find jobs in the North or join the Union army.

As a result, the army of the Confederacy also began to suffer from the lack of forces (Davidson et al.). Moreover, the situation was problematic off the battlefield because all the issues of food provision and work at plantations and farms challenged women living in the Southern states.

The forces of the Union army were more balanced, and their losses were less significant than in the Southern states. Furthermore, the end of the war did not change the structure of the social life in the North significantly. The impact of the war was more important for the Southerners who had to build their economic and social life without references to slavery.

The next important change was the alternations in the social role of women. Many women had to work at farms in the South and to perform as nurses in the North (Picture 2). The vision of the women’s role in the society was changed in a way.

However, in spite of the fact that the population of the South had to rebuild the social structure and adapt to the new social and economic realities, the whole economic situation was changed for better with references to intensifying the international trade. Furthermore, the abolishment of slavery was oriented to the social and democratic progress in the country.

Picture 2. “Our Women and the War”. Harper’s Weekly, 1862

Diversity is one of the main characteristic features of the American nation from the early periods of its formation. The American nation cannot be discussed as a stable one because the formation of the nation depends on the active migration processes intensifying the general diversity. As a result, the American nation is characterized by the richness of cultures, values, and lifestyles.

This richness is also typical for the early period of the American history when the country’s population was diverse in relation to ethnicity, cultures, religion, and social status. From this point, diversity directly shaped the American nation because the country’s population never was identical.

The Americans respected diversity if the question was associated with the problem of first migrations and the Americans’ difference from the English population. To win independence, it was necessary to admit the difference from the English people, but diversity was also the trigger for conflicts between the Americans, Englishmen, and Frenchmen as well as Indian tribes.

The ethic diversity was not respected by the first Americans. The further importations of slaves to America worsened the situation, and ethnic diversity increased, involving cultural and social diversity.

Diversity was respected only with references to the negative consequences of slave importation. Thus, the Southerners focused on using black slaves for development of their plantations (Davidson et al.). From this point, white planers concentrated on the difference of blacks and used it for discrimination.

Furthermore, slavery also provoked the cultural and lifestyle diversity between the South and the North of the country which resulted in the Civil War because of impossibility to share different values typical for the Southerners and Northerners. Moreover, the diversity in lifestyles of the Southerners was deeper because it depended on the fact of having or not slaves.

Great religious diversity was also typical for the nation. White population followed different branches of Christianity relating to their roots, and black people developed their own religious movements contributing to diversifying the religious life of the Americans (Davidson et al.).

Thus, the aspects of diversity are reflected in each sphere of the first Americans’ life with references to differences in ethnicities, followed religions, cultures, values, lifestyles, and social patterns. This diversity also provoked a lot of conflicts in the history of the nation.

The role of women in the American society changed depending on the most important political and social changes. The periods of reforms and transformations also promoted the changes in the social positions of women. The most notable changes are typical for the period of the Jacksonian era and for the Civil War period.

The changes in the role of women are closely connected with the development of women’s movements during the 1850s and with the focus on women’s powers off the battlefield during the Civil War period.

During the Jacksonian era, women began to play significant roles in the religious and social life of the country. Having rather limited rights, women could realize their potentials only in relation to families and church work. That is why, many women paid much attention to their church duties and responsibilities.

Later, the church work was expanded, and women began to organize special religious groups in order to contribute to reforming definite aspects of the Church’s progress. Women also were the main members of the prayer meetings, and much attention was drawn to the charity activities and assistance to hospitals (Davidson et al.).

Women also played the significant role in the development of revivalism as the characteristic feature of the period. Moreover, the active church work and the focus on forming organizations was the first step to the progress of the women’s rights movements.

It is important to note that the participation of women in the social life was rather limited during a long period of time that is why membership and belonging to different church organizations as well as development of women’s rights movements contributed to increasing the role of women within the society. Proclaiming the necessity of abolishment, socially active women also concentrated on the idea of suffrage which was achieved later.

The period of the 1850s is closely connected with the growth of the women’s rights movements because it was the period of stating to the democratic rights and freedoms within the society (Davidson et al.). The next important event is the Civil War. The war influenced the position of the Southern white and black women significantly, revealing their powers and ability to overcome a lot of challenges.

The end of the Civil War provided women with the opportunity to achieve all the proclaimed ideals of the women’s rights movements along with changing the position of male and female slaves in the American society.

The development of the American nation is based on pursuing certain ideals and following definite values. The main values which are greatly important for the Americans are associated with the notions which had the significant meaning during the periods of migration and creating the independent state. The two main values are opportunity and equality.

These values are also fixed in the Constitution of the country in order to emphasize their extreme meaning for the whole nation.

Opportunity and equality are the values which are shaped with references to the economic and social ideals because all the Americans are equal, and each American should have the opportunity to achieve the individual goal. Nevertheless, in spite of the proclaimed ideals, the above-mentioned values were discussed during a long period of time only with references to the white population of the country.

The other values typical for the Americans are also based not on the religious, moral or cultural ideals but on the social aspects. During the Jacksonian era, the Americans focused on such values as the democratic society. Following the ideals of rights and freedoms, the American population intended to realize them completely within the developed democratic society (Davidson et al.).

Moreover, these ideals were correlated with such values as equality and opportunity. It is necessary to pay attention to the fact that for many Americans the notions of democratic society, opportunity, and equality were directly connected with the economic growth. That is why, during long periods of time Americans concentrated on achieving freedoms along with pursuing the economic prosperity.

Thus, it is possible to determine such key values which regulate the social attitudes and inclinations of the Americans as equality and opportunity, freedoms and rights. In spite of the fact the USA was the country with the determined role of religion in the society, moral and religious aspects were not proclaimed as the basic values of the nation because of the prolonged focus of the Americans on their independence and prosperity.

From this point, opportunity, equality, freedoms, and rights are discussed as more significant values for the developed nation than the religious principles. The creation of the state independent from the influence of the British Empire resulted in determining the associated values and ideals which were pursued by the Americans during prolonged periods of the nation’s development.

The period of Reconstruction was oriented to adapting African Americans to the realities of the free social life and to rebuilding the economic structure of the South. The end of the Civil War guaranteed the abolishment of slavery, but the question of black people’s equality to the whites was rather controversial.

That is why, the period of Reconstruction was rather complex and had two opposite outcomes for the African Americans’ further life in the society and for the general economic progress of the states. Reconstruction was successful in providing such opportunities for African Americans as education and a choice to live in any region or to select the employer.

However, Reconstruction can also be discussed as a failure because the issues of racism were not overcome during the period, and the era of slavery was changed with the era of strict social segregation leading to significant discrimination of black people.

The positive changes in the life of African Americans after the Civil War were connected with receiving more opportunities for the social progress. Thus, many public schools were opened for the black population in order to increase the level of literacy (Picture 3). Furthermore, the impossibility to support the Southerners’ plantations without the free work of slaves led to changing the economic focus.

Thus, industrialization of the region could contribute to creating more workplaces for African Americans (Davidson et al.). Moreover, the racial and social equality should also be supported with references to providing more political rights for African Americans.

Reconstruction was the period of observing many black politicians at the American political arena. The question of blacks’ suffrage became one of the most discussed issues. From this point, during the period of Reconstruction African Americans did first steps on the path of equality.

Nevertheless, Reconstruction was also a great failure. The South remained unchanged in relation to the social relations between the whites and blacks. After the Civil War, segregation was intensified. The economic and social pressure as well as discrimination against the blacks was based on the developed concept of racism (Davidson et al.).

The Southerners preserved the prejudiced attitude toward the blacks, and prejudice and discrimination became the main challenge for African Americans in all the spheres of the life.

In spite of definite successes of Reconstruction, African Americans suffered from the results of segregation and discrimination, and they were prevented from changing their economic and social status.

Picture 3. Public Schools

Davidson, James, Brian DeLay, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Mark Lytle, and Michael Stoff. US: A Narrative History . USA: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Print.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, December 31). Slavery and the Civil War. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-civil-war/

"Slavery and the Civil War." IvyPanda , 31 Dec. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-civil-war/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Slavery and the Civil War'. 31 December.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Slavery and the Civil War." December 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-civil-war/.

1. IvyPanda . "Slavery and the Civil War." December 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-civil-war/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Slavery and the Civil War." December 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-civil-war/.

• How Did Reconstruction Change the United States After the Civil War?
• The Southern Argument for Slavery
• Reconstruction in the US: Failures and Successes
• Why the Reconstruction After the Civil War Was a Failure
• Reconstruction: Presidents Lincoln and Johnson
• The American Reconstruction: Failures and Significance
• American History: Reconstruction
• Slavery in the Southern Colonies
• American Reconstruction Period
• American History: Reconstruction, 1865 -1877
• The Los Angeles Zoot-Suit Riots and Its Effects
• History of American Foreign Policy
• Literary Works' Views on Slavery in the United States
• The Main Persons in Native American History
• "From Migrant to Acadian: A North American Border People, 1604–1755" by Naomi Griffiths

• Share full article

Advertisement

Subscriber-only Newsletter

Jamelle Bouie

What are the stakes of ‘civil war,’ really.

By Jamelle Bouie

Opinion Columnist

Ahead of the release of “Civil War,” the new alt-history action-drama from the director Alex Garland, A24, the studio that produced the film, released a map of the United States showing the lines of the conflict. There was the “New People’s Army” of the Pacific Northwest, the Mountain West and some of the Great Plains. There were the “Western Forces” of Texas and California. And there was the “Florida Alliance,” encompassing most of the Southeast. What remained was labeled “the Loyalist States.”

This little bit of information spurred a torrent of speculation on social media about the political contours of the film. What, exactly, were the stakes of the conflict? How, precisely, did the country come to war in the world of the movie? In what universe do the people of California find common cause with the people of Texas? The scenario wasn’t just far-fetched; it seemed nonsensical. And it did not help that in interviews , Garland took a “pox on both their houses” approach when asked about the relationship between his film and contemporary political life. “It’s polarization,” he said. “You could see that everywhere. And you could see it getting magnified.”

I saw “Civil War” a few weeks ago at a screening in Charlottesville. I had no particular expectations, but I was interested to see if the film would try to flesh out its world. It is not a spoiler to say that, well, it didn’t.

Garland and his collaborators make no attempt to explain the war. They make no attempt to explain the politics of the war. They make no attempt to explain anything about the world of the film. There are hints — allusions to the precipitating crisis and the contours of the conflict. In one scene, a television broadcast refers to the president’s third term. In another, a soldier or paramilitary whose allegiances are unclear, executes a hostage who isn’t the right “kind of American.” In another sequence, we see a male soldier — an insurgent fighting the government — sporting colored hair and painted fingernails.

Overall, however, the movie isn’t about the war itself. It is about war itself. It is not an idle choice that the protagonists of the film — and the people we spend the most time with overall — are journalists. They are on a road trip to see the front lines of the war in Charlottesville (I will say that it was a very strange experience watching the movie in a movie theater roughly 30 minutes from where the scene is supposed to be set), and we experience the conflict from their perspective as men and women who cover violent conflict. Their job is to view things as objectively as possible. This carries over to the way the story is filmed and edited. We see what they see, shorn of any glamour or excitement. The war is bloody, frightening and extremely loud.

Nothing depicted in the film — torture, summary executions and mass murder — is novel. It is part of our actual past. It has happened in many places around the world. It is happening right now in many places around the world. What makes the film striking, and I think effective, is that it shows us a vision of this violence in something like the contemporary United States.

The point, however, is not to bemoan division in the usual facile way that marks a good deal of modern political commentary. The point is to remind Americans of the reality of armed conflict of the sort that our government has precipitated in other countries. The point, as well, is to shake Americans of the delusion that we could go to war with each other in a way that would not end in catastrophic disaster.

There is a palpable thirst for conflict and political violence among some Americans right now. There was the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, of course. There are also open calls on the extreme right for civil war. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican representative from Georgia, wants a “ national divorce .” A writer for the influential Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank, once mused that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” Disturbingly large numbers of Americans believe that violence might be necessary to achieve their political goals.

More than anything else, “Civil War” is plugged into this almost libidinal desire. It shows people, on both sides of the conflict, relishing the opportunity to kill — taking pleasure in the chance to wipe their enemies from the earth. In depicting this, “Civil War” is asking its American viewers to take a long, hard look at what it means to want to bring harm to their fellow citizens.

By setting the details of the conflict aside to focus on the experience of violence, “Civil War” is a film that asks a single, simple question of its audience: Is this what you really want?

What I Wrote

My Tuesday column was about Donald Trump’s attempt to distance himself from his anti-abortion base:

The truth of the matter is that given a second term in office, Trump and his allies will do everything in their power to ban abortion nationwide, with or without a Republican majority in Congress.

My Friday column was narrowly about the Electoral College and broadly about the use of the past to guide the present:

But whether as men or myths, the framers cannot do this. They cannot justify the choices we make while we navigate our world. The beauty and, perhaps, the curse of self-government is that it is, in fact, self-government. Our choices are our own, and we must defend them on their own terms. And while it is often good and useful to look to the past for guidance, the past cannot answer our questions or tackle our problems.

Now Reading

Abraham Josephine Riesman on the Book of Job for Slate.

Moira Donegan on the “trad wife” phenomenon for Book Forum.

Adam Gaffney on the war on Gaza’s health care infrastructure for Dissent.

Stephania Taladrid on the fight to restore abortion rights in Texas for The New Yorker.

Maggie Doherty on state-enforced sexual morality for The Atlantic.

Photo of the Week

I drove down to Petersburg, Va., a few weeks ago to walk around and take a few photos. This is one of my favorites.

Now Eating: Blistered Broccoli Pasta With Walnuts, Pecorino and Mint

A very simple pasta that comes together in no time at all. Be sure to use some of the pasta cooking liquid to make the dish less dry. If you’re feeling fancy, you could add a nice tin of fish to the mix — sardines or mackerel would work well. Recipe comes from the Cooking Section of The New York Times .

Ingredients

Kosher salt and black pepper

12 ounces fusilli or other short pasta

½ cup olive oil, plus more for drizzling

½ cup walnuts or pecans, chopped

½ teaspoon red-pepper flakes

1 bunch broccoli or cauliflower florets roughly chopped and stalks peeled and sliced ¼-inch thick

1 lemon, zested then quartered

½ cup grated Pecorino Romano or Parmesan, plus more for serving

1 cup packed fresh mint leaves or parsley leaves

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook according to package instructions until al dente.

Meanwhile, heat the oil in a large skillet over medium-high. Add the walnuts and red-pepper flakes, if using, and cook, stirring, until golden and fragrant, about 1 minute. Using a slotted spoon, transfer walnuts and red-pepper flakes to a small bowl. Season walnuts with a little salt and pepper.

Add the broccoli to the skillet and toss to coat in the oil. Shake the skillet so broccoli settles in an even layer. Cook, undisturbed, 2 minutes. Toss and shake to arrange in an even layer again and cook, undisturbed, another 2 to 3 minutes; season with salt and pepper and remove from heat.

Drain pasta and add to the skillet along with the lemon zest, cheese, toasted walnuts and half the mint; toss to combine. Divide among plates or bowls and top with remaining mint, more cheese and a drizzle of olive oil. Serve with lemon wedges, squeezing juice on top, if desired.

Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @ jbouie

Civil War : Let’s Unpack the Ending

Let’s talk about Lee, Jessie, and President Nick Offerman.

Congrats, reader. If you made it here, that means you endured the brutal 109 minutes that comprise A24’s Civil War . You came to terms with the reality that America is so fucked up nowadays that a British filmmaker (Alex Garland) was moved to write speculative fiction about our downfall. You saw “GO STEELERS!” on that Pennsylvania underpass and wondered if the NFL could make it through an American Civil War. You asked yourself, When will Jesse Plemons ditch the scary shtick and just play a rom-com lead? I like that guy!

Most of all, you’re still trying to make sense of that ending, which sees a Call of Duty– esque raid on the White House—and the death of one of the film’s heroes. So in this story, I’ll explain exactly how Torrance Shipman evolved from a do-gooding cheerleader at San Diego’s Rancho Carne High School into a weary war photographer during the second American Civil War.

(Sorry. That’s a Bring It On joke, and it was not a very good one. Moving on.)

[ Trump voice ] The country is doing well in so many ways...

Throughout Civil War , I wondered if I missed an important line of dialogue that told us how this whole thing started—because this film doesn’t really tell us much about its central conflict. A few important bits we learn (and infer) about this particular dystopia:

• Nineteen states seceded from—and are violently rebelling against—the United States government. The collection of states is called the Western Forces, which include California and Texas (an unlikely but presumably powerful alliance).

• Don’t let President Nick Offerman’s opening scene fool you—this government isn’t so diplomatic anymore. He seemingly ushered in a dangerously authoritarian reign, where journalists are executed on sight in the nation’s capital; the Western Forces consider him a dictator; and he’s at least three terms into his presidency.

• We’re far enough into the conflict that a large amount of America has been ravaged by the war. The New York Times is barely a newspaper anymore. There was, at one point, an “Antifa Massacre.” Some communities play Switzerland in this whole thing and live in relative peace...with armed protection.

Apparently, the lack of exposition is intentional. A24’s press notes for Civil War —which I found incredibly helpful and will refer to later on—outright state that the film is supposed to be a “Rorschach test of America, left for viewers to wrestle with on their own.” Cailee Spaeny (who plays Jessie) told A24, “You are putting pieces together for yourself. Your internal feelings about why or how war like this would start and the cracks that form to cause a war to happen in America is up to you to fill in.”

Now, I’m not sure if I totally agree with this, because Garland positions the team of journalists as the heroes of the story—and they’re sympathetic to the Western Forces. Plus, you know, what happens at the very end of the film...

“You sacrificed Kirsten Dunst!”

This is what a woman screamed during my Civil War screening. I agree—it’s messed up! The final stretch shows the Western Forces staging an attack on the White House, with intent to kill the president. (Fun fact, from A24: Most of that exterior set was real. “At some point it was decided for all the right reasons, safety among them, we’re going to build that block,” production designer Caty Maxey said. “We built four-hundred-foot-long buildings [and] two sides of the street in three and a half weeks.” Imagine!)

During the White House raid, Jessie is increasingly thrilled by the pursuit of the perfect photograph. She constantly puts herself in the line of fire until—as the Western Forces are just a couple rooms away from reaching the president—she’s right in front of a bullet. Lee (Kirsten Dunst) puts down her camera and throws herself in front of the gunfire. As she falls to the floor, Jessie takes a picture of her mentor’s final moments.

.css-f6drgc:before{margin:-0.99rem auto 0 -1.33rem;left:50%;width:2.1875rem;border:0.3125rem solid #FF3A30;height:2.1875rem;content:'';display:block;position:absolute;border-radius:100%;} .css-1aglugu{font-family:Lausanne,Lausanne-fallback,Lausanne-roboto,Lausanne-local,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:1.625rem;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-1aglugu{font-size:1.75rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1aglugu{font-size:2.375rem;line-height:1.2;}}.css-1aglugu b,.css-1aglugu strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-1aglugu em,.css-1aglugu i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;}.css-1aglugu:before{content:'＂';display:block;padding:0.3125rem 0.875rem 0 0;font-size:3.5rem;line-height:0.8;font-style:italic;font-family:Lausanne,Lausanne-fallback,Lausanne-styleitalic-roboto,Lausanne-styleitalic-local,Arial,sans-serif;} Garland has repeatedly called his film a parable, meant to tell us what America might look like, should its fault lines continue to multiply.

It’s a brutal resolution for what I felt was the strongest thread in Civil War : the psychology of the war journalist. Throughout most of the film, Lee preaches one thing to Jessie: Document the moment by any means necessary. By the end, though, she sees futility in her work; by Lee’s admission, her photographs were a warning that was never received. During the White House skirmish, what’s surely a horrible case of PTSD comes to a head. Lee can hardly bring herself to use her camera. You have to wonder if—seeing the Western Forces overtake the government, which would surely breed more bloodshed—she simply sees no use in capturing another death. She chooses to save a life and give her own.

“She sees it and hates it for her, because there’s part of Lee that’s like, Don’t do this to yourself, ” Dunst told A24. “There’s part of Lee that becomes very protective of her because she knows the addiction to what they’re doing, this need to put themselves in the worst possible situations to tell the truth about what’s going on. There’s a real warning: Don’t become me. Don’t become hardened. Don’t lose your life. ”

Meanwhile, we’re left to choose how we feel about Jessie’s decision to photograph Lee’s death. As Dunst implied, is Lee addicted to the thrill of the work? Or is she just documenting the truth?

RIP President Ron Swanson

So is this guy a Trump stand-in? I’d say no. Actually, quite the opposite. My take is that Garland cast an actor as affable and beloved as Nick Offerman just to show that even someone who is seemingly good has the potential to destroy a nation. Plus, we don’t really hear from the guy. We really only see him at the beginning and end of the film.

In the final moments of Civil War , the Western Forces finally close in on the president and Joel ( Wagner Moura ) has his interview moment. He requests a quote from the leader, who says, “Don’t let them kill me!” Joel replies with the best line of the movie: “That’ll do.” Then the Western Forces troopers kill the president, and Jessie takes—as we learn in the end credits—a photo of the Army members surrounding his dead body.

We’re left to wonder where the United States goes from there. It’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever find out, unless Garland is truly deranged and directs Civil War 2 . The Western Forces would have to rebuild the American government from the ground up—if they’re even interested in doing such a thing.

What Civil War offers, as far as its political statement goes, is a warning. Garland has repeatedly called his film a parable, meant to tell us what America might look like should its fault lines continue to multiply. “The modern state of civil war is a fractured collapse across the board,” the director told A24. “This is not a repetition of the previous Civil War. I don’t think America or the rest of the world is at danger of the clear demarcations of the previous Civil War. That’s not the risk the world faces. We are facing a disintegration risk.”

@media(max-width: 73.75rem){.css-1ktbcds:before{margin-right:0.4375rem;color:#FF3A30;content:'_';display:inline-block;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1ktbcds:before{margin-right:0.5625rem;color:#FF3A30;content:'_';display:inline-block;}} Movies

Wagner Moura Is Chasing the Truth

The 64 Best Documentaries of All Time

The 27 Greatest Western Films Ever Made

‘Civil War’ Is Almost Here to Fill You with Dread

Give Me ‘The Crow’ or Give Me Death

The Best Horror Movies of 2024 (So Far)

The 50 Best Movies to Stream on Netflix Right Now

Robert Downey Jr. Marvels at His Run as Iron Man

The Essential Robert Downey Jr.

Robert Downey Jr. on Overcoming Drug Addiction

Robert Downey Jr. on What It Took to Win an Oscar

Screen Rant

Civil war's final shot at the white house explained by alex garland.

Civil War director Alex Garland explains the movie's final shot at the White House, and how it relates to the themes present in the movie.

Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS ahead for Civil War (2024)!

• Director Alex Garland reveals the purpose of the final shot in Civil War , showcasing themes of personal sacrifice and the lasting impact of war.
• The photograph taken by Jessie captures the essence of the moment and what people will remember about the war.
• Garland emphasizes the importance of showcasing the personal cost of documenting history, even at the expense of those around you.

Civil War director Alex Garland opens up about the purpose of the final shot at the White House, revealing how the ending of the movie reflects the themes present throughout. The final moments of the film see Joel and Jessie in the Oval Office as Western Forces are about to kill the President. After getting a final plea from the President as a quote for his story, Joel stands by as he is killed. The final shot of the movie is the picture Jessie takes of a group of soldiers standing and smiling around the President's body.

Speaking with Inverse , Garland explained how the ending of Civil War - particularly the final shot Jessie takes as he is killed - reflects the themes of the story and purpose of the film. The director revealed the importance of having the shot during the credits as an illustration of what people would remember about the war in the future. Check out what Garland had to say below:

[The photo comes at a] personal cost, and not just her personal cost, but [to] people around her. But that's part of the transactional deal that sometimes people have to make to do that thing. In 20 years’ time, what would be the image that survived this?. If there was a news article that was illustrative of that moment, what would that image be? That is the image she takes.

Why Civil War’s Ending Shot Is So Important

The final shot of Civil War implies the Loyalist states have lost now that the President is dead, and his demise is a symbolic way of showcasing how the war ended. By having Jessie’s picture of his body surrounded by soldiers as the final shot, it reveals the impartiality photojournalists are expected to have within a wartime setting. It also reflects Garland exploring the theme of journalists risking their lives for perfect documentation , even if it means being a passive observer to world-altering violence.

This ending is also tied to how the cause of Civil War 's conflict is unclear aside from the President taking authoritarian control of the country. The overarching political goals of factions like the Western Forces and the Florida Alliance are kept vague, and the photojournalism in the movie offers audiences a way to interpret what's going on for themselves. The final shot of the President could be viewed as a great victory for the Western Forces , but it doesn't fully resolve what will happen to the United States after his death.

Civil War's Political Approach & Ideas Explained

Because there's no indication of what the United States looks like once the war is over, Jessie's final image acts as an objectively-observed final statement about the future of the country. As time goes on, this could be interpreted as a great victory or a horrific act, depending on how history evolves and views her photos in the future. Because of how Civil War portrays journalism as an observatory practice, the final photo can have different meanings depending on who looks at it.

Civil War is currently playing in theaters.

Source: Inverse

Civil War is a 2024 action thriller from writer and director Alex Garland. Starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, and Stephen McKinley Henderson, Civil War takes place in the near future and shows the United States entering a new Civil War after California and Texas attempt to separate from the country.

Alex Garland Explains Civil War’s Final Shot, And Why He Usually Starts With The Last Five Minutes Of His Stories

MAJOR SPOILERS lie ahead for Alex Garland’s Civil War . 

A great movie ending is not easy to execute but, when it a filmmaker does hit the mark, it can make all the difference in regard to the lasting impact their feature has. When it comes to the end of A24’s Civil War , it may be a conclusions that sparks debate among moviegoers. No matter how you feel about it though, it’s hard to argue with the notion that writer/director Alex Garland went for a major moment with the movie’s final scenes. When CinemaBlend spoke to Garland, he opened up about the final shot and explained instrumental the last five minutes of a film are to his writing process. 

During our own Sean O’Connell’s interviews for Civil War , Alex Garland shared at what point in the writing process the movie’s powerful ending came to him. In his words: 

Usually stories for me, pretty much always actually, begin with the ending. And then I’m trying to figure out how we get there. What’s the sequence of events? You could almost try it as a sort of easy thought experiment. If you take the last five minutes of a film, the sequence of events that lead you there may almost be inevitable once you break apart the constituent parts of that five minutes. What I’m saying is if you have the ending clear in your mind, you can work backwards from it. You can sort of reverse engineer it.

Ahead of this recent entry on the 2024 movie schedule , the director famously wrote the screenplays for other movies like 28 Days Later , Ex Machina and Men the latter two of which he also directed. As the seasoned storyteller shared with O’Connell, when he's crafting a story, he usually starts off with the final few minutes of the movie and works backwards from there. It's an interesting way to operate creatively but, given his past credits, it seems to work for the filmmaker. And I can only imagine how he worked his way forward with this latest endeavor.

In terms of making Civil War , which takes place in a fictionalized version of the United States that's experienced state secession, Alex Garland started in the White House, if we're keeping his creative process in mind. It's in that location that war photojournalists Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and Jessie Cullen (Cailee Spaeney) are accompanying members of the "Western Forces" alongside fellow journalist Joel (Wagner Moura) as the militia heads to take down a fictional president.

In a split second, Lee rushes to save the younger Jessie from being shot as she snaps a photo, and she herself is killed in the process. And, as she falls to her death, Jessie snaps her final moments. The team pushes on and locates the politician. Joel manages to get a final quote from the president and, after giving said sentiment, he's killed. Seriously, what a wild place to start writing a narrative! 

The film has a poetic ending that is really deepened by the characters that are established throughout the movie. From the beginning, Lee is established as a hardened and traumatized photographer covering the titular crisis. While the ending is tragic, it underlines the character’s belief that dying a hero is better than surviving to watch the world burn without capturing its injustices, as she has the gift to do. 

The Annihilation director's methods for crafting a story, especially in this case, worked to his advantage considering the success of the movie. Critics and audiences alike have been raving about the war drama, with CinemaBlend’s Civil War review giving the movie a perfect five out of five.  It also broke a big record for A24 at the box office during last weekend’s debut, as it notched a new milestone for in-house tickets sold. Now, its also expected to outpace this weekend’s new releases, Abigail and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare , per Variety . 

Should Alex Garland not direct any additional films as he's said, then this is certainly some way to go out. I have no doubt people will be talking about this movie's final shot for years to come. At present though, you can see Civil War for yourself in theaters now and read up on upcoming A24 movies . 

Civil War Ending Explained: The Shocking Moments That Concluded Alex Garland's War Story And How They May Spark Debate Among Moviegoers

It's time to discuss what kind of an ending this is.

Warning: MASSIVE SPOILERS for Alex Garland ’s Civil War are in play. It doesn’t matter what type of American you are, but there are some pretty revealing details ahead.

Some pictures are just made to spark conversation, and writer/director Alex Garland’s Civil War absolutely fits that bill. The 2024 movie is the latest from the man who gave us equally debatable conclusions through the ending to Ex Machina and Annihilation , as well as 28 Days Later’s various endings .

However, the discussion that this Kirsten Dunst -led ensemble thriller is bound to ignite isn’t a case of figuring out what happened, but rather over how to interpret two huge events that transpire. If you’d like to read more about the film in a spoiler-free context, you can check out our Civil War review. Otherwise, it’s time to embed ourselves with the Western Forces, and dig deep into what happened and why it matters.

Civil War’s Shocking 1, 2 Punch Finale

The entire third act of Civil War is a greased rail of adrenaline, and it’s part of why I continue to urge people to see the film in IMAX. But no matter what format you choose, the siege of Washington D.C. contains two powerful deaths, with very different discussions behind them. The first of which is the moment where Lee (Kirsten Dunst) sacrifices her life to save Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) from being gunned down by loyal Secret Service agents.

Not too long after that shocking death lands, complete with an extended shot of haunting composition that places the dead Lee next to Jessie on the White House floor, the action picks back up. In the final moments of Civil War , the Western Forces soldiers that have stormed the White House seize the President ( Nick Offerman ), with orders to kill on sight. Which, to be fair, is a moment we partially see in the first Civil War trailer , just with less context into why that moment is so important.

What's so shocking about it is that before this execution is carried out, fellow journalist Joel (Wagner Moura) is determined to get the story his group was headed to DC to capture in the first place. Asking the unnamed commander-in-chief for a quote, the President pleas for his life. Satisfied with getting the story, Joel lets the Western Forces team take out the tyrannical leader, ending Civil War with a trophy photo taken with the troops over his dead body.

Was Lee’s Death Justified?

When it comes to the first debate over Civil War’s ending, the discussion over Lee’s death was the first hot topic that came to mind. Admittedly, this came from talking with one of my colleagues about the ending, as she didn’t think Lee’s death was justified in terms of the story set up.

CINEMABLEND NEWSLETTER

Your Daily Blend of Entertainment News

Rather, she thought that the more fitting finale would be seeing Lee’s war-inspired trauma come to a head, with her being left frozen in the hallway while Joel and Jessie move on to cover the story. I can see that point, but something that happened earlier in Civil War has me convinced that Kirsten Dunst’s character earned those tragic final moments.

After the death of fellow party member Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), Lee tells Jessie that the seasoned journalist could have died in a worse manner. My interpretation of that line was that between his advancing age and an implied physical condition that lessened his mobility, Sammy’s death as a hero saving his friends was more of an honorable warrior’s death. When talking about Sammy’s death, Lee was almost calling her own shot in life.

After reading Film Freak Central critic Walter Chaw’s review of Civil War , I’m also convinced that Lee knew she’d die in the field. This line in particular connected with my reading of this event:

Jessie wants to be Lee one day. Lee tries to talk her out of it. Lee, who knows her fate is to be a corpse that someone like Jessie takes snapshots of on her way to the next place where the guardrails holding entropy back have failed.

As a war photographer, you’re exposed to all sorts of adrenaline-fueled moments of inhumanity, constantly scrambling to survive with the story in your hand. In Lee’s eyes, a normal life with illness and domesticity doesn’t cut it. So to some, the "fitting end" to a war correspondent’s life is being cut down in battle, helping tell the stories that might warn others not to let such horrific events happen in their own backyard.

How Should We Feel About The President’s Death?

Perhaps the even more divisive event that seems bound to cause much discussion and debate is the killing of Nick Offerman’s unnamed President character. Admittedly, we don’t really see this character much on screen, as brief appearances bookending the narrative and some audio broadcasts are what we are given to define his character. Well, that and a brilliant Q&A prep sequence between Stephen McKinley Henderson and Wagner Moura.

In a rapid-fire question session on the road, Henderson’s Sammy grills Moura’s Joel on the questions he wants to ask in the President’s first potential interview in 14 months. On top of destroying the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution so that he can serve a third term, the President has also used airstrikes on American civilians and disbanded the FBI.

With all of those acts on his resume, the President sure seems like a dictator, and military might is good at overthrowing dictators. So on face value, offing Mr. Offerman should be something cathartically pleasing. But there are two thoughts that prevent me from totally settling on that viewpoint.

The President’s death, cowardly final words and all, could still be seen as martyrdom by the Loyalist States. Also, with this political beast beheaded, at least three more stand to challenge its place as the ruler of the nation.

Is Civil War’s Ending Happy By Any Stretch?

The death of Civil War’s president is supposed to be the capstone to this large scale combat epic, and to a point, it succeeds. You would be forgiven to walk out of this movie keyed up on adrenaline and ready to sing its praises. It's when you start to dwell on what actually happened that the dread starts to challenge the notion that this is even a remotely happy ending.

Call it cathartic, cautionary or anything in-between, the quest that Alex Garland’s intrepid journalists set out to accomplish comes to an end. But while just looking at the ending on the surface level is a pretty dour experience, there’s another line of Sammy’s that came up when researching this write-up:

You watch. Soon as D.C. falls, they’ll turn on each other.

“They” are the competing factions of Civil War’s fractured political landscape, as by time the film starts, there are four parties in play. While the Western Forces are the party we follow the most intently through Alex Garland’s narrative, there’s mention of the Florida Alliance as well. To get a better look at why this notion is so frightening, take a look at the map A24 released before the film’s release:

Ready for the ultimate bummer that’s bound to become Debate #3? What did Lee and The President die for in the grand scheme of things? The endgame of Civil War is definitely to topple Nick Offerman’s regime, and that happens clear as crystal. But what’s the next move? Surely the Western Forces would want to keep power, but with three other players in the game, what sort of deal will there need to be in order to unite America again?

Civil War doesn’t exactly call out for a sequel, but at the same time there’s plenty of fertile ground for a follow-up. Part of me thinks that Alex Garland’s next film Warfare might be a secret follow-up to begin with. Or at least, that’s what I’m hoping, especially since Deadline announced he’s on deck to co-direct with Ray Mendoza, Civil War’s military advisor. A potential trilogy that could see follow-ups detailing the way forward, through the eyes of the military and a new governing body, would make for a hell of an ultimate vision.

However, that’s mere speculation on my part, and that’s part of what makes this ending so brilliant. No one needs to agree on whether or not Lee’s death was justified or if the President’s death is actually satisfying. Were there even a consensus reached on this matter, there’s still the factor that 19 states have ceded from the Union, and another battle feels right around the corner.

Should you have read this rundown without seeing Civil War , I still highly recommend this shock and awe spectacle as a theatrical experience. However, knowing what you know now, I challenge you to not only look closer at the ending, but the two acts that transpire beforehand. There’s still plenty to talk about, and we’ve only just started digging into this new Alex Garland parable of power.

Mike Reyes is the Senior Movie Contributor at CinemaBlend, though that title’s more of a guideline really. Passionate about entertainment since grade school, the movies have always held a special place in his life, which explains his current occupation. Mike graduated from Drew University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science, but swore off of running for public office a long time ago. Mike's expertise ranges from James Bond to everything Alita, making for a brilliantly eclectic resume. He fights for the user.

Every Alex Garland Movie Ranked, Including Civil War

Good Fortune: What We Know About Aziz Ansari's New Comedy Movie

I Rewatched Game Of Thrones' Pilot 13 Years After Its Premiere, And I Need To Rethink My Favorite Characters

Most Popular

• 2 Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Showrunner Told Us How Jerry Seinfeld’s Hilarious ‘Sex Tape’ Riff With Leon Happened, And What Made Him Laugh The Most In The Series Finale
• 3 90 Day Fiancé Finally Showed Us Ed And Liz's Split, But I Feel Like There's A Deeper Story We Still Haven't Seen
• 4 Every Alex Garland Movie Ranked, Including Civil War
• 5 Crafting Robert Downey Jr.’s Oppenheimer And The Sympathizer Characters Was Wildly Different, And Susan Downey Told Us Why

'Civil War': Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny break down 'heartbreaking' yet disturbing ending

Spoiler alert! We're discussing major details about the ending of “Civil War” (in theaters now).

“ Civil War ” isn’t Kirsten Dunst's first time in the White House.

In 1999, the actress co-starred with Michelle Williams in the offbeat comedy “ Dick ,” playing ditzy teens who help expose Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal. The film ends with a giddy roller disco scene set to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.”

“I just remember skating around the Oval Office,” Dunst says with a laugh. But there are no bell bottoms to be found in “Civil War,” which culminates in a nerve-shredding finale of rebel forces storming the White House and killing the tyrannical, third-term president (Nick Offerman). Dunst plays world-weary photojournalist Lee, who travels to Washington to capture the raid with rookie photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) and their teammate Joel (Wagner Moura).

The ear-splitting gunfire and explosions took a toll on the cast, who shot the sequence over the course of two weeks on a soundstage in Atlanta. “The loudness (you hear) in the theater was that intense when we were filming,” Dunst says. “It’s exhausting on your body to be in that noise.”

“It’s very rattling but also very effective for those scenes,” Spaeny adds. “There’s not much acting you have to do, it’s so jolting.”

'No dark dialogue!' Kirsten Dunst says 5-year-old son helped her run lines for 'Civil War'

How does 'Civil War' end?

After bombing the Lincoln Memorial, a militia breaks into the White House and searches for the president, who is holed up in the Oval Office as D.C. burns. Lee, Jessie and Joel tag along with the insurgents, snapping pics as they dodge gunfire from the president’s soldiers.

At one point, while Jessie is furiously shooting photos, Lee notices a gunman aiming at her young colleague. Lee jumps to push Jessie out of the way, taking the bullets and falling down dead. Jessie continues photographing, capturing Lee's lifeless body even as she tumbles onto her.

It’s a sobering callback to earlier in the film, when Lee and Jessie watch as two men get executed at a gas station. “Would you photograph that moment if I got shot?” Jessie tearfully asks. “What do you think?” Lee responds coolly. Lee begrudgingly becomes Jessie’s mentor as the movie goes on, and teaches her to compartmentalize her work and emotions.

“To me, it’s a bit heartbreaking, but it also feels inevitable,” Spaeny says of Jessie chronicling Lee’s death. “But it’s mixed. It could be a bit hopeful; someone else does have to take this on. This is an important job, but it’s also bittersweet, right? Mostly what I felt was slightly disturbed.”

Over the course of “Civil War,” we watch as Jessie becomes desensitized to violence. The film was shot in chronological order, meaning Spaeny was able to track Jessie’s arc in real time.

“As we were filming, I would just know, ‘OK, it’s time for her to step up,’” Spaeny recalls. With that last sequence, “I knew there was going to be some sort of passing of the baton. So much was informed by Kirsten’s performance and the decisions she made on how to play Lee. I was just trying to soak that in.”

What happens to Nick Offerman in 'Civil War?'

In the very last scene, Jessie leaves behind Lee’s dead body and follows Joel into the Oval Office, where the unnamed president is lying on the floor with rebels’ guns pointed at him. Since the start of the war, Joel has been doggedly trying to secure an interview with the president, who has shut himself off entirely from journalists for years.

“Wait! Wait! I need a quote!” Joel says, to which the president replies with a muffled, “Don’t let them kill me!”

“Yup, that’ll do,” Joel deadpans, before the agitators gun down the commander in chief and the credits roll.

“Civil War” is Spaney’s third project with Offerman, after FX series “Devs” and 2018 thriller “Bad Times at the El Royale.” Playing a dictator is a 180 from his best-known role as the gruff but lovable Ron Swanson in NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation.”

“All the ‘Parks’ fans don’t know how to digest this!” Spaeny jokes. Offerman’s casting “is so fun. I love watching comedians take on dramatic roles because I think they bring something to those characters that is more true to life. I think he did it brilliantly, but it’s very bizarre to see him in this role.”