1 marzo 1865 anni - Lincoln's second inaugural address

Descrizione:

-FOr the first time, Lincoln said war was to end slavery (a "Divine plan"), not save the Union.
-acknowledged sins of slavery.
-siad Union and Confederacy shared the guilt for slavery
-Lincoln only depicted war as a catastrophe for whites, making it sound like enslaved African Americans were passive victims/bystanders rather than participants who played decisive roles in Union victory and getting their freedom.




Post war: Confederates wanted a reunion of North and south with prewar principals. African Americans and Radical Republicans wanted a complete economic, social, and political transformation of the South.

-As for the future of the United States, an optimistic New York census-taker suggested that the conflict had had an “equalizing effect.” In some ways he was right. Slavery was dead: in a transformation of shattering significance, no American could ever again legally claim to own another human being. The same official also reflected that, in the North, “military men from the so called ‘lower classes’ now lead society, having been elevated by real merit and valor.” However perceptive these remarks, they overlooked the simultaneous wartime emergence of a new financial and corporate aristocracy that soon presided over what Mark Twain labeled the Gilded Age. As early as 1863, a journalist warned that when the war was over, “there will be the same wealth in the country, but it will be in fewer hands; we shall have … more merchant princes and princely bankers.”

Astonishing its European rivals, the United States emerged from the Civil War relatively unscathed. High tariffs put in place by Republicans, for example, paid off the nation’s war debt with remarkable speed. And however devastated the South’s economy might be, the United States had started on the path to global economic power. In the postwar period, Republicans would wrestle with the limits of that power at home and on the world stage.

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