Civil Rights

Civil War and Reconstruction

In 1860, Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president. In his inaugural address, Lincoln attempted to avert war by declaring: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.” Lincoln was not an abolitionist, but he believed that slavery was a threat to the Union. Angered by Lincoln's election, the Civil War began when South Carolinians fired on Fort Sumter, on April 12, 1861. The following year, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the seceded states. Four years later, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the rest of the United States.

In April 1865, President Lincoln was assassinated, plunging the country into chaos. Vice President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat with southern sympathies, was neither strong nor wise enough to lead the nation through reunification. The election of General Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 reenergized Reconstruction, but it heightened tensions in the South where Grant was hated for his participation in the war.

After the Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Congress made the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments requirements for Southern redemption. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) established rights of citizenship, while the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) granted suffrage to black males. The compromise election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 brought Reconstruction to an abrupt end, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were virtually useless for the next five decades. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537), with only a single dissenting vote, the Supreme Court upheld the separate but equal doctrine that had become prevalent in the South.

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