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In What Way the African Americans Shaped the Course and Consequences of the Civil War? Confine Your Answer to the Years from 1861 and 1870.

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In what way the African Americans shaped the course and consequences of the Civil War? Confine your answer to the years from 1861 and 1870. Immediately after the election and inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, the newly-established Republican Party’s presidential nominee, eleven states of the South seceded from the Union. These events marked the beginning of the Civil War and the war was a result of many political tensions that had emerged between the North and the South in the prior decades, all of which were associated with the institution of slavery installed in the Southern United States. President Lincoln began the Civil War with the South in response to states’ secession from the Union, and therefore, the war was not solely …show more content…

The New York Times portrayed the appreciation of whites regarding African-American military service for the Union [F]. This statement by the Republican Party exemplified a fundamental shift in its position on slavery as when the war had begun in 1861, the Republican Party saw the issue of states’ rights and the protection of slave property the reasons for the war. Because President Lincoln and the Republicans changed the course of the Civil War by making it a war over the abolition of slavery, the consequences that would emerge after the conclusion of the war would therefore be different than what they had originally believed. Although the war had ended, many of the issues that had existed before the conflict still lingered. To deal with these long-lasting issues, the Republicans passed the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in all of the United States. Thomas Nast’s political cartoon published in Harpers Weekly in 1865 depicted leaning liberty, the symbol of American democracy asking for equality for African American veterans of the Civil War. In the cartoon, the black soldier has lost his leg fighting for the Union, showing the great sacrifices that African-American soldiers had made [G]. Nast’s cartoon revealed that although African-American slaves were emancipated, they remained to be considered as second-class citizens were not well treated after the war and that the South had not

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