Civil War Dbq

By February of 1861 six states had seceded from the Union (Glass, 2008). The Civil War was impacted by Southern and Northern leaders. Two of the leaders in the South were Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and in the North the Union was led by Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. A few years after Lincoln’s election, the North and South swapped their party labels as the conservatives from the South grew dissatisfied with the Democratic Party's increasingly progressive platforms. Conversely, the historically Republican strongholds in the Northeast began voting Democrat.
The Union led by Lincoln and Grant, opposed slavery and the won against the Confederacy during the Civil War. In 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." The Southerners reflected on the consequences of the immediate liberation of slaves. If all slaves were emancipated and free labor were abolished suddenly in the South, cotton could not be tended to and harvested and would ultimately result in the fall of the Southern economy. The slave owners were heavily reliant on free labor for profit. Without the production of cotton in the South, Northern

The end of the Civil War brought legal end to slavery, but it did not immediately affect the economy, policy or social differences. Some policies of the Reconstruction era may have even exaggerated the differences between the states. For example, the federal pension system, in 1862, that sought to provide support to veterans, was offered only to Union Army veterans. As such, Union veterans -including African-American veterans- earned financial security in the latter half of the 1800s, while their Confederate counterparts were less well off. Post-war Southern society, was faced with federal occupation for nearly a