A summary of Time Period #5 [1844–1877]

As the nation expanded and its population grew, regional tensions, especially over slavery, led to a civil war, the course and aftermath of which transformed American society.

By the mid-1840s, Manifest Destiny, the belief that the United States was destined to expand across the North American continent, had become an important influence on American politics. Expansionists were motivated by economic opportunity, national security, access to new markets, and a belief in the superiority of American political and cultural institutions. Ideas of racial and cultural superiority also contributed to support for expansion. The annexation of Texas, settlement of the Oregon boundary dispute, and victory in the Mexican-American War dramatically increased the nation's territory.

The acquisition of western lands intensified a question that had repeatedly confronted the nation: Would slavery be permitted to expand into the territories? The Mexican Cession made that question increasingly difficult to avoid. The proposed Wilmot Proviso, although never enacted, revealed growing sectional divisions by attempting to prohibit slavery in territory acquired from Mexico. Northerners increasingly promoted a free-soil position that opposed the expansion of slavery, while many white southerners argued that slaveholders had a constitutional right to take enslaved property into the territories.

These disputes reflected broader differences between North and South. The North's expanding manufacturing economy relied primarily on free labor, while the southern economy remained heavily dependent on enslaved labor and cotton production. Abolitionists represented a minority of northerners but mounted an increasingly visible moral campaign against slavery. Southern defenders of slavery increasingly described the institution as a positive good and argued that slavery and states' rights were protected by the Constitution. These competing economic systems and ideologies contributed to an increasingly sectional political culture.

Political leaders repeatedly attempted to resolve the conflict through compromise. The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state, settled several territorial issues, ended the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and enacted a stronger Fugitive Slave Act. Rather than permanently resolving sectional tensions, enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act brought the realities of slavery directly into northern communities and increased resistance among many northerners.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 reopened the territorial controversy by allowing settlers to determine the status of slavery through popular sovereignty in lands previously closed to slavery under the Missouri Compromise. Violence between proslavery and antislavery settlers in "Bleeding Kansas" demonstrated the failure of popular sovereignty to settle the issue peacefully. In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the Supreme Court ruled that African Americans could not be citizens under the Constitution and that Congress lacked authority to prohibit slavery in the territories. Rather than resolving the controversy, the decision further intensified sectional conflict.

The slavery controversy also transformed the political party system. The Whig Party collapsed as slavery and nativism weakened traditional party loyalties. The Republican Party emerged in the North during the 1850s in opposition to the expansion of slavery into the western territories. The Democratic Party increasingly divided along sectional lines. By the election of 1860, the breakdown of national political organizations reflected the broader breakdown of sectional compromise.

Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 on a platform opposing the expansion of slavery convinced many white southerners that their influence within the Union was threatened. South Carolina seceded in December 1860, followed by other Deep South states. After the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861 and Lincoln's call for troops, four additional slave states joined the Confederacy. The resulting Civil War would determine both the survival of the Union and, ultimately, the future of slavery.

At the beginning of the war, Lincoln and most Union supporters identified preservation of the Union as their primary objective. As the war continued, however, slavery became increasingly central to Union strategy. Enslaved people themselves weakened slavery by escaping to Union lines, while Congress adopted measures undermining the institution. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863, declared enslaved people in areas still in rebellion to be free. It transformed the war by explicitly linking Union victory to emancipation, authorized expanded Black military participation, and made foreign support for the Confederacy more difficult.

Nearly 200,000 African American men eventually served in the Union Army and Navy, contributing directly to Union victory and strengthening demands for citizenship and equality. Women also participated extensively in the war effort as nurses, relief workers, agricultural workers, factory workers, and managers of households and businesses. Both the Union and Confederacy mobilized their economies and populations on an unprecedented scale, while both faced political dissent and resistance on the home front.

The Union ultimately prevailed because of a combination of advantages and developments, including its larger population, greater industrial capacity, extensive railroad network, stronger financial system, naval power, improvements in military leadership and strategy, African American military participation, and successful campaigns that destroyed Confederate infrastructure and reduced the South's ability to continue fighting. Confederate forces surrendered in the spring of 1865, preserving the Union.

The Civil War fundamentally changed the relationship between the federal government and the states and destroyed the institution of slavery. The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery throughout the United States. The central question of the postwar era became how the former Confederate states would be restored to the Union and what freedom would mean for approximately four million formerly enslaved Americans.

Reconstruction

Reconstruction produced an intense struggle over political power, citizenship, race, and the relationship between the federal government and the states. President Andrew Johnson favored relatively rapid restoration of the former Confederate states, while Republicans in Congress sought greater federal protection for freedpeople and more substantial changes in southern society. Conflict between Johnson and Congress eventually led to Johnson's impeachment by the House of Representatives, although the Senate fell one vote short of removing him from office.

Congressional Reconstruction produced some of the period's most significant constitutional changes. The 14th Amendment established birthright citizenship and guaranteed due process and equal protection of the laws. The 15th Amendment prohibited denying the right to vote on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Together with the 13th Amendment, the Reconstruction Amendments significantly expanded federal responsibility for protecting individual rights.

Reconstruction governments also expanded public education and rebuilt southern infrastructure. African American men participated in politics as voters, delegates to constitutional conventions, local officials, state legislators, and members of Congress. Institutions such as the Freedmen's Bureau assisted formerly enslaved people with education, labor contracts, legal disputes, and other aspects of the transition from slavery to freedom. Black communities established schools, churches, mutual-aid organizations, and other independent institutions.

Political freedom, however, did not generally produce economic independence. Most formerly enslaved families received no land of their own. The development of sharecropping and tenant farming allowed many freedpeople greater control over their family lives and daily labor than they had experienced under slavery, but debt and dependence on landowners and merchants frequently trapped both Black and poor white farmers in cycles of poverty.

White southern resistance severely limited Reconstruction. Southern state governments initially enacted Black Codes designed to restrict the freedom and economic independence of African Americans. Organizations including the Ku Klux Klan used terrorism and violence to suppress Black voting and weaken Republican governments. The federal government responded with legislation and military enforcement, but maintaining those protections required sustained political commitment from the North.

The Reconstruction Amendments also affected the women's rights movement. Some women's rights activists supported the amendments as important expansions of citizenship, while others opposed the 15th Amendment because it prohibited racial discrimination in voting without prohibiting sex discrimination. These disagreements contributed to divisions within the women's suffrage movement.

By the 1870s, northern commitment to Reconstruction had weakened. Economic problems following the Panic of 1873, political scandals, changing national priorities, Democratic electoral gains, and continued white southern resistance reduced support for sustained federal intervention. The disputed presidential election of 1876 was followed by the withdrawal of the remaining federal troops from southern statehouses in 1877, marking the conventional end of Reconstruction.

Reconstruction achieved profound but incomplete changes. The Union was restored, slavery was abolished, and the Constitution established national definitions of citizenship and equal protection while protecting Black male voting rights from racial discrimination. At the same time, white southern resistance and declining northern enforcement allowed many of Reconstruction's political gains to be undermined. In the decades after Reconstruction, southern states increasingly restricted African American political participation and established systems of racial segregation.

Period 5 therefore transformed the meaning of freedom, citizenship, and federal power. The Civil War preserved the Union and abolished slavery, while Reconstruction established constitutional protections that fundamentally altered the relationship between individuals, states, and the federal government. Yet the inability to secure those rights consistently revealed the difference between establishing constitutional principles and enforcing them in practice.

APUSH Historical Thinking Focus

Period 5 is especially important for causation, comparison, and continuity and change over time. Students should be able to explain how territorial expansion intensified conflict over slavery; why repeated political compromises failed to resolve sectional tensions; how slavery contributed to the breakdown of the Second Party System and the coming of the Civil War; and why the Union ultimately defeated the Confederacy.

Students should also be able to evaluate both change and continuity produced by emancipation and Reconstruction. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments abolished slavery and dramatically expanded the constitutional meaning of freedom and citizenship. At the same time, economic dependency, racial violence, political resistance, and weakening federal enforcement limited the ability of African Americans to exercise those rights fully. The central historical question is therefore not simply whether Reconstruction "succeeded" or "failed," but what Reconstruction changed,