Book contents
- The Cambridge History of the American Civil War
- The Cambridge History of the American Civil War
- The Cambridge History of the American Civil War
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Plates
- Figures
- Contributors to Volume III
- Note on the Text
- Part I Values
- Part II Social Experience
- Part III Outcomes
- 14 Making Peace
- 15 Reconstruction during the Civil War
- 16 Veterans and the Postwar World
- 17 The Civil War and the American State
- 18 The Civil War and American Law
- 19 The Civil War in Visual Art
- 20 The Civil War in American Thought
- 21 The Civil War in Literary Memory
- 22 The Civil War in Film
- 23 The Civil War in Public Memory
- Index
- Plate Section (PDF Only)
- References
19 - The Civil War in Visual Art
from Part III - Outcomes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2019
- The Cambridge History of the American Civil War
- The Cambridge History of the American Civil War
- The Cambridge History of the American Civil War
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Plates
- Figures
- Contributors to Volume III
- Note on the Text
- Part I Values
- Part II Social Experience
- Part III Outcomes
- 14 Making Peace
- 15 Reconstruction during the Civil War
- 16 Veterans and the Postwar World
- 17 The Civil War and the American State
- 18 The Civil War and American Law
- 19 The Civil War in Visual Art
- 20 The Civil War in American Thought
- 21 The Civil War in Literary Memory
- 22 The Civil War in Film
- 23 The Civil War in Public Memory
- Index
- Plate Section (PDF Only)
- References
Summary
The American Civil War started on April 12, 1861, and ended in the spring four years later with the rolling surrender of the Confederate armies. The Civil War was the Second American Revolution creating both the political and socioeconomic conditions for the growth and expansion of a modernizing state in the late nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. It reshaped the political landscape, nationalizing power at the expense of the states and localities. The economic and organizational aspects of waging war laid the basis for the postbellum expansion of the economy into an industrial juggernaut. Victory by the North ended slavery and the civil rights amendments to the Constitution at least promised the “new birth of freedom” that Lincoln argued was the purpose of the war in the Gettysburg Address. Union and Liberty were the consequences of four years of combat, justifying the some 800,000 dead, and the uncountable dislocations to domestic life that war entailed. The war reached into every aspect of American life and changed or altered everything that had come before. For instance, as women had assumed the moral leadership of the antislavery movement, so abolition spurred their continual participation in public life in the first feminist movement.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of the American Civil War , pp. 397 - 421Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019