The Impact Of The African-American Civil War

After the last shots of Civil War were heard, and following the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln, the South had been humiliated and devastated. The repercussions of war included loss of life, land, and livelihood. Patriarchy and racism remained entrenched, but the emancipation of slaves significantly transformed the social landscape of the South. Liberated slaves started from scratch without access to cultural or social capital, and many eventually migrated north. African-American culture was able to emerge, and in many cases, to flourish. Meanwhile, the white power structures in the South resigned themselves to ignorance, causing the South to remain the most backwards, uneducated, and poor region of the United
This decimated the male labor force, which would add to the South’s economic burden. The systematic subjugation of women and their exclusion from social, economic, and political affairs likewise made it difficult to rebuild the economy of the South (Faust). With African-Americans barred access to social status, the South allowed itself to stagnate socially instead of adapt to changing times. Even after the population would stabilize no amount of patriarchal power could remedy the devastation wrought by the Civil War. Patriarchy remained entrenched, as did systems of racial
By refusing to change politically, the South facilitated the failure of Reconstruction. Weak federal mandate contributed to the political decimation of the South. As a result, religious extremism and racism led to anarchic forms of oppression including socially sanctioned lynching of African-Americans and the validation of the KKK. As the KKK became a surrogate political institution in the South, so too did voter suppression, restricted access to land ownership, and other issues. Sectional reunion “could not have been achieved without the resubjugation of many of those people whom the war had freed from centuries of bondage,” (Blight 3). Resubjugation took the form of economic, social, and political oppression. Sharecropping systems were the modern equivalent of feudalism, in which former slaves worked off small parcels of land but paid leases to white landowners. Social oppression remains salient in the south, and political oppression ensued especially after the assassination of Lincoln and the rise to power of Vice President Johnson, himself a Southerner sympathetic to Confederate concerns and bent on ensuring the irrelevance of