In the period between 1860 and 1890, the United States government and society experienced what some historians call “The Second American Revolution” (Foner, Brief 4th ed, p 417). The Civil War and Reconstruction transformed a “union” into a “nation,” shifted an agricultural society to an industrial society in the North, and reinterpreted the definition of freedom for both white and black men. For a brief time, it seemed possible for blacks to achieve the same status as whites, and although the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments granted them political equality before the law, the ideal of social equality was less so when the nation succumbed. the rush for capital and material goods characteristic of the Golden Age. The net result of Reconstruction, in practice, hardly allowed even the political liberties outlined in the Constitution, issues that failed to capture national attention because most white abolitionists had never considered civil equality as an ultimate goal. Slavery was predominantly a labor issue rather than a civil rights issue, and in the rapidly growing industrial economy of the Gilded Age, conflicts with the working class quickly eclipsed racial ones on the national stage. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Before the Civil War, the North and South had very different views about slavery. As a slave society, the Southern economy depended on slave labor on plantations, and although only a quarter of all white Southern families owned slaves, “most small farmers believed that their economic and personal freedom rested on slavery” (Foner, Brief 4th edition, p 316, 317). On the other hand, Northern society gradually aspired toward the ideal of “free labor” because it feared the rigid social order of slave society, a system that left “poor whites without hope of advancement” (Foner, Brief 4th ed, p 387). Indeed, opposition to the spread of slavery was the key platform of the Republican Party, and the election of its presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln ultimately incited the secession of Southern states. Congressman WW Boyce said this about the Republican Party in a speech days after the election: “It is a party full of animosity toward the South… a party founded on a principle destructive to our social system. A party that destroys our entire social fabric, that reduces the beautiful South to a howling desert. Will we submit to such a party? In my opinion we should not” (The Sun, 10 November 1860). Thus began the Civil War over divided ideals over the spread of slavery. However, until 1862 the Union government strongly opposed general abolition in the South. In February 1861, the House of Representatives unanimously adopted a resolution stating that “neither Congress, nor the people, nor the governments of the non-slaveholding States have a constitutional right to legislate or interfere with slavery in any slaveholding State of the Union". (New York Herald, October 14, 1861). The North continued to emphasize its anti-abolitionist position until 1862, but even before the Emancipation Proclamation, some Northerners predicted the end of the war as well as the end of slavery. “The most natural way to end a controversy,” writes the New York Times, “is to remove its cause, and since war is the result of the refusal of slavery propagandists to submit to the laws, the obvious and certain cure for the diseasepolicy is the abolition of slavery” (New York Times, 29 July 1861). In the summer of 1862, the push for abolition dramatically changed the trajectory of the war and forever instilled the ideal of free labor in the United States. When Lincoln formulated the Emancipation Proclamation, he drafted it on the principle of “military necessity,” understanding the Confederacy's dependence on slave labor and the use of slaves, a Proclamation that threatened the economy of the Southern states (Memphis Daily Appeal, April 25, 1864) . Although Lincoln deliberately excluded Union-controlled areas and established a deadline by which emancipation would take place, which allowed “the States involved in this rebellion to save themselves and their national institutions,” the impetus of this action quickly led to the conclusion that abolition represented the only stable future for the Union (The New York Herald, September 27, 1862). Within a year, society widely accepted that “human slavery and human freedom cannot peacefully coexist under the same constitutional government; that there is in their very nature irreconcilable hatred and eternal war” (Chicago Tribune, September 11, 1863). Most Northerners still limited the implications of abolition to the destruction of a labor institution, but within the Radical Republican faction, some officials broadened the meaning of abolition to include that of social and political rights for African Americans. Many leaders, however, still opposed the radical sense of abolition that followed the Civil War, and none more prominently than President Andrew Johnson. Himself a Southerner before the war, Johnson detested the Southern planter class and supported the abolition of slavery only as a means of reducing the power of this “damned aristocracy” (Chicago Tribune, April 20, 1865). Although he openly rejected black equality, he stated that “the necessity of labor would bring about an understanding between the two races” for a new system of labor in the South that would be “applicable to both whites and blacks” (The New York Herald , 15 October 1865). There is no telling what such a system would actually look like in his vision, but in any case this limited vision of Reconstruction ultimately foreshadowed its failure. Only the simple definition of free labor seemed reasonable to the citizens of a former slave society, much less social equality between the races. However, when radical Northern Republicans wrested power from President Johnson over Reconstruction, they moved to establish legal equality between whites and blacks. at a pace unprecedented in history. Congress passed the 14th and 15th Amendments guaranteeing the right to vote and equal protection under the law for African Americans, extending the notion of abolition far beyond the issue of jobs. However, the ideals of Radical Reconstruction quickly lost many of its supporters in the North. As one newspaper put it, “The white masses of the North do not like to see the national government aiding and assisting in the disfranchisement of their white brethren in the South” (Daily Courier, July 29, 1868). Furthermore, the Freedmen's Bureau, charged with enforcing the new freedmen's rights, was criticized as an organization "vilely perverted to partisan ways", with the majority of whites objecting to the focus on African Americans over white men ( Republican Banner, July 9, 1868). Despite the abolition achieved during the Civil War, the ideology of blacks as inferior almost never changed or was even addressed in the struggle for emancipation. Therefore, the idea of ​​“protecting the interests of a class of people mentally incapable of taking care of themselves” seemed “too.