Union and Fracture

The Civil War is the country’s central crisis. Eleven slaveholding states seceded after Abraham Lincoln’s election. The Confederacy fought to preserve a slave society; the Union fought first to preserve the United States, and then — after the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment — to end slavery.

Lincoln’s importance is not only military. He kept the border states from leaving, reframed the war as a test of self-government, and pushed emancipation as policy and then as constitutional change. The war killed more Americans than any other U.S. conflict.

Reconstruction tried to rebuild the South and protect the freedpeople. It produced the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments — and then a violent rollback: Black Codes, Jim Crow, and the abandonment of federal enforcement after 1877. The amendments remained, waiting for later courts and movements to take them seriously.