At the dawn of the Civil war, the United States was a vast and growing nation. Its North had established a manufacturing economy, while the South was dependent on large-scale farming that used slave labor for cotton and tobacco. After the 1852 publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, many Northerners came to believe that slavery was morally wrong. The Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case (1857) and the abolitionist John Brown’s raid on a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (1860) further turned the tide of opinion against the peculiar institution.
In the 1860 presidential election, Abraham Lincoln emerged as the clear victor for the antislavery Republican Party. White Southerners feared that restricting the expansion of slavery would consign it to extinction and vowed to secede from the Union. They did so in April 1861, forming the Confederate States of America.
The four years of conflict that followed preserved the nation, but it also transformed it. The old decentralized republic with few direct contacts with the average citizen became a modern nation that imposed internal revenue taxes, raised and drafted men for military service, abolished slavery, created a national currency, and increased the powers of the federal courts.
The Civil war touched the lives of all Americans. Even women assumed new roles in the workplace, including working as nurses (previously a male occupation) and clerks for government agencies. In addition, thousands of blacks joined the Union army and worked in factories.
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