American Civil War and Reconstruction

br - American Civil War and Reconstruction

The time surrounding the Civil War and reconstruction effort could be described with plenty of adjectives . Of those , revolutionary might be one that some choose to use . In the time leading up to the Civil War the United States was a country in flux . Questions of state rights slavery , and how the nation would eventually form were on the docket . As such , there were different groups of people that all had very different perspectives and motivations working in their favor . Those in charge of the country

, including President Abraham Lincoln , could not sit idly and watch the nation head down a road where such indecision was the of the day . In a way , there are many things that happened during that time that could be correctly described as revolutionary . This distinction includes both things that ended up being good for the Union and those things that were thrown out . From the effort to protect a state 's rights to the constant battle faced in reconstruction to incorporate freed blacks , the time was characterized by those things that a historian might consider to be revolutionary

Starting with the Civil War in 1861 , the revolutionary events were many . During that war , both idealistic and tangible revolutions were going on all over the country . On one hand , the time was revolutionary in a military sense . The development of both weapons and military strategy was evident for both sides . Those fighting for the North had to come up with ways to counteract the Confederacy 's knowledge of the fighting areas , while those fighting for the Confederacy had to get creative to overcome the sheer size advantage held by the union . The measured responses to these problems were revolutionary in a military sense . On top of that , there were certain small revolutions in medical technology . The Civil War was one of the bloodiest wars to ever be fought . With that in mind , doctors , nurses , and others had to constantly figure out ways to fix the various problems presented by gunshot wounds and other consequences of war

In a more idealistic sense , the Civil War was a revolutionary time because it served as the impetus for a change in thinking in America Until the fighting commenced , there was an entire segment of American citizens that felt it was alright to enslave other human beings . On a basic level , this is a type of thinking that had to be overcome if America was to move forward . Whereas the Revolutionary War helped Americans establish a nation free of British tyranny , the Civil War helped create a revolutionary new society free of such prevailing thought . Russian revolutionary thinker and politician Vladimir Lenin shared the thinking that American was home to a couple of different revolutions . In one of his memoirs on the American Revolutions , Lenin wrote of the long standing American revolutionary tradition when he said , That tradition is the war of liberation against the British in the eighteenth century and the...