1 - Springboards and Strategies

Summary

The Civil War created the beginnings of a new world for U.S. foreign policy, but it was another generation before that future could be realized. The Civil War officially ended the slavery of African Americans, but the Emancipation Proclamation was not a commitment as well to raise the former slaves to equality. The Civil War and the acts of Reconstruction turned the United States into a nation-state. Many of the industries spawned by the Civil War helped shape U.S. foreign relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The racism and xenophobia shaped the ideology of following generations, including those who made U.S. foreign policy. Post-Civil War America remained a vast, unwieldy country of isolated, parochial communities, but the federal government had demonstrated its power to invade these areas and integrate them into an industrializing, railway-linked world that had global boundaries.