American Civil War
The American Civil War is properly viewed as a protracted struggle lasting from 1848 to 1876 contemporainious with "Liberal" European Nationalist Movements. Contrary to Europe, in which Greece, Romania, Prussia, Hungary and Italy seceeded formally or de facto from the Ottoman or Habsberg empires, Union forces succeeded in crushing the Confedeate rebellion but, in the process, transformed slavery from an economic issue regarding labor and property to the perenial race issue it remains today. Europe, on the other hand, had already created a peasant class from its Imperial Roman slaves via "peculium" legislation, a circumstance that persisted until the Cold War and agricultural mechanization which ironically aggravated the American Civil Rights Movement.
The American Civil War may regarded in three phases.
The first comprises the acquisition of 15 states between ratification of the U.S Constitution in 1789 and the Kansas Nebraska Act and formation of the Republican Party in 1854 accompanied by guerilla warfare and terrorism in the territories regarding slavery and legislative attempts to maintain a balance between slave and free labor states in Congress.
The second phase erupted from an escalation of the first and split ticket election of a Republican in 1860, resulting in Southern secession and a conventional war of pacification with which the Holy Alliance of Europe was familiar. Although the Confederacy immediately declared slavery a war goal, it was Union defeats that finally compelled Republican President Abraham Lincoln to accede to Aboltionsits Karl Marx, Wendell Phillips or Frederick Douglas in January 1863 to arouse the discourgaed pacification into quasi-religious crusade to abolish slavery.
The third phase, Reconstruction, comprised a botched attempt to social engineer an ossified Southern plantation economy with which Yankee former Whigs-burgeosie industrialists had no experience. Initial attempts at Rice Island to implement a burgoesie work contract between Freedmen and Planters failed, Freedmen refusing field labor and insisting upon land redistribution. Contemporary Europe still enforeced the corvee by which tenants paid for subsistance plots in labor and Republicans insisted upon returning the plantations to the Planters reuslting in impasse.
Recontruction proceded in three phases beginning in Military Reconstruction 1863 via army field orders intended only to relieve congregating negroes impeding military logistics.
The presidential phase proceeded when Vice President Andrew Johhson attempted to take over Reconstruction after Lincoln's assassination, April 1865, on a policy of rapid reconciliation requiring only the that the rebel states renounce secession and abolish slavery to be re-admitted the Union, leaving the Freedmen Question to the states.
The third phase began in February 1868 with Radical Republicans frivolousy impeaching Andrew Johnson, who'd run with Lincoln on a National Union Party ticket, and the election of Republican U.S. Grant. Radical Republicans intended racial equality in the South via restricting the White Yeoman and Planter franchise, using Federal troops to suppress guerilla Southern resistance: Ku Klux Klan: Knights of the White Camillia.
Grant persisted until 1876 when he refused to run for re-election. Reconstruction was finally eneded by a back room deal resutling from another wave of violence instigated by Wade Hampton's "Red Shirts" (imitating Italian Graibaldi) in which Democrat Samual Tilden conceded to Republican R.B. Hayes in return for an end to Reconstruction.