19 - The Civil War in Visual Art

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.