The service of more than 200,000 African American men under arms helped tip the balance decisively in favor of the Union’s victory in the Civil War. In sheer numbers alone, they helped to resolve the potential need for soldiers that federal strategists foresaw as early as 1862. But numbers tell only part of the story. Most of these men entered the ranks after the Emancipation Proclamation signaled the Union’s emerging war against slavery. Their staunch support for the new policy and its chief spokesperson – President Abraham Lincoln – helped to bolster popular acceptance of abolition; even more important, their steadfast service both in camp and on the battlefield helped to recreate the nation, to envision and enact more inclusive notions of citizenship and suffrage after the war. Some present-day observers might see these outcomes as a logical outgrowth of ideals present since the founding of the country and of the decades-long struggle against slavery, but few who witnessed events during the 1850s would have considered such a result inevitable. Black people in the North and South viewed the war as an opportunity to advance the causes of freedom and equality but held no illusions that ending slavery – no small feat in itself – would resolve the challenges freedpeople faced to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves.

In the days that followed his first fight, having seen bodies ripped apart by bullets and shells, Virginian Cornelius Bell prayed every night for God to keep him from returning to the battlefield. “No never again do I wish to pass through what I did last Monday evening and night.” Wherever he turned, he saw men “suffering the agonies of death.” That night, when the musketry turned to desultory skirmishing, Bell felt great sympathy for the “dead & dying enemy,” “Each & every one of whom” he wrote to his wife, “was some ones darling son, brother or husband. And there they lay cold in death, their bodies stripped of the few old clothes they had on & every indignity that could be heaped upon them was.” Some of the wounded were still clinging to life, their naked bodies shaking in the final spasms of life as Bell watched in horror. When the Shenandoah Valley farmer turned Confederate soldier thought about the desecration of the dead, he was sickened by the hypocrisy of his comrades whom “I suppose in the estimation of some [think] this was all right.” Bell could just imagine his fellow soldiers saying the following words as if memorized in their youth. “The Yanks are a God forsaken people & we are his delight.

Civil War soldiers marched home in 1865 as changed men. No longer holiday soldiers, they were now seasoned veterans. In “The Return of the Heroes,” poet Walt Whitman celebrated the “worn, swart, handsome, strong” men who had been made from the “stock of homestead and workshop,” hardened by the “long campaign and sweaty march,” and inured to the “hard-fought, bloody field.” Disease or marching had enervated all; shot and shell had maimed some and shaken others. Whitman nevertheless projected a vision of regenerative masculinity. The immortal ranks tramping through the poem’s stanzas displayed a manliness grounded in the work of the antebellum era, transformed by the experiences in war, and redeemed by the agricultural pursuits of the postwar years. Whitman’s poem serves as a reminder that nineteenth-century Americans thought deeply about what made a man and recognized masculinity’s mutability.

The Civil War generated mass migrations across the Confederacy and the Border South. Called by many names – refugees, contrabands, fugitives, buffaloes – civilians took to the road, hoping variously to find sanctuary, escape persecution, or secure freedom. The panoply of terms used to describe dislocated civilians reflected the diversity of their experiences: refugee planters and runaway slaves both fled the plantation but for radically different reasons and under different conditions. For the most part, historians have replicated this linguistic segmentation of Civil War refugees in their scholarship. Mary Elizabeth Massey’s 1964 Refugee Life in the Confederacy, for instance, focused almost exclusively on pro-Confederate white civilians who left home to find refuge within the shrinking bounds of the Confederacy. More recently, a number of historians have examined the approximately 500,000 African Americans who fled slavery during the Civil War. Since 1976, the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland has published a series of volumes drawn from National Archives collections documenting the black refugee experience.

Levin Smith Joynes, a Richmond physician, professor, and superintendent of the Medical College of Virginia, kept a scrapbook he entitled “The War: – 1861–65.” In it, he pasted newspaper columns labeled “Financial and Commercial,” Confederate government lists of fixed prices for agricultural produce, restaurant bills of fare, and advertisements for the sale of blockade goods and slaves. He included examples of the means of exchange people used throughout the war: Confederate treasury notes, Southern state currencies, and municipal and corporate notes called shinplasters that served as crucial means of exchange in hard times when other currencies had lost value. He also made handwritten notes and drew pictures: at the end of 1863, he recorded that a dry goods store on Main Street was selling a “large doll” and a tiny mahogany chair for it to sit in for $1,000; in January 1865, he sketched the dimensions of a 3½ ounce, $1 loaf of bread.

Americans have long debated whether the Civil War was a defeat for states’ rights and whether it changed the balance of power between state and national governments. For generations, the answer seemed clear. Whether in praise or complaint, Americans largely acknowledged that the Civil War marked a growth spurt in the history of the American state. The Civil War indeed expanded the size of the federal military dramatically, turned Washington DC into a massive contractor funding many expanding industries, opened the door for federal land redistribution to fund universities and railroads, and seemingly transformed the constitutional balance between the general and state governments in a series of constitutional amendments, particularly the Fourteenth. Through a combination of temporary expansion, constitutional transformation, and privatization, the US government grew significantly during the war. The defeat of the Confederate states thus seemed to be a defeat for states’ rights more generally. Yet historians are far less confident than they used to be that the Civil War actually transformed the federal government, much less the more abstract notion of the “American state.” Rather than a forerunner of twentieth-century Progressivism or New Deal governance, the US Civil War may in fact have been a distinct and temporary moment in American governance, a period of momentary but not sustained expansion.

Ambrose Bierce’s short story, “Horseman in the Sky,” is an archetypal piece of short fiction out of the late nineteenth century: crisply written, with a quirky plot twist, and a rather dismal take on human nature. But it is also the perfect representation of the cliché that the Civil War tore families apart. The brother against brother metaphor – or, in Bierce’s case, the father against son – has long been a favorite of historians and commentators; it works because, in fact, the war did divide families politically. Abraham Lincoln’s Todd in-laws are only the most famous family riven by war. Most of these divisions did not result in a Unionist son shooting his Confederate father (the denouement of Bierce’s unlikely story), but the power of the metaphor nevertheless provides a useful starting point for a discussion of families during the Civil War.

“Nobody expected to have to contend with the women.” Here, Stephanie McCurry referred to the inability of Confederate powerbrokers to anticipate that their project of building a modern proslavery and antidemocratic state hinged on the support and dedication of millions of Southerners whom they had refused to recognize as political beings. The campaign to secure the loyalty of nonslaveholding men, McCurry explained, “was expected and it exacted its price.” Yet “There would be far more of the people to contend with in the making of the history of the Civil War South than the founders ever bargained on.” Her prize-winning 2010 history of the Confederacy’s rise and fall, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, highlights the profound irony of the Confederate experiment: in the attempt to erect a proslavery nation, its architects “provoked precisely the transformation of their own political culture they had hoped to avoid, bringing into the making of history those people – the South’s massive unfranchised population of white women … – whose political dispossession they intended to render permanent.”

For both the United States and the Confederacy, motivation’s essence was a patriotic commitment to defend the liberty bequeathed to Americans by the nation’s founding generation. Exactly what defending liberty meant, however, depended upon sectional understandings of the critical elements of a good society and a just government. One thing was clear to Northerners: there could be no liberty outside of the protection of the old Constitution and the union it had created. Patriots living in the fledgling Confederacy, however, defended secession as a conservative necessity in the face of Northern ideological innovation that challenged their very way of life.

Reconstruction did not just follow the Civil War. It got several months’ head start on it. From the moment that South Carolina declared itself out of the Union, plans had been plentiful as blackberries for uniting the nation again. Some were more outlandish than others: the creation of vying confederacies, with one in the Ohio Valley or another encompassing the Upper South, a free city of New York, a fresh constitutional convention, a series of amendments to resolve the slavery issue, a single amendment guaranteeing the right of states to make slavery lawful. But all were groping for the terms on which eventual reunion occurred, and some of them outlasted the war itself, notably the proposal to call a convention of all the states to set the terms.

The American Civil War started on April 12, 1861, and ended in the spring four years later with the rolling surrender of the Confederate armies. The Civil War was the Second American Revolution creating both the political and socioeconomic conditions for the growth and expansion of a modernizing state in the late nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. It reshaped the political landscape, nationalizing power at the expense of the states and localities. The economic and organizational aspects of waging war laid the basis for the postbellum expansion of the economy into an industrial juggernaut. Victory by the North ended slavery and the civil rights amendments to the Constitution at least promised the “new birth of freedom” that Lincoln argued was the purpose of the war in the Gettysburg Address. Union and Liberty were the consequences of four years of combat, justifying the some 800,000 dead, and the uncountable dislocations to domestic life that war entailed. The war reached into every aspect of American life and changed or altered everything that had come before. For instance, as women had assumed the moral leadership of the antislavery movement, so abolition spurred their continual participation in public life in the first feminist movement.

In June 1937, Norman Rockwell’s painting The Gaiety Dance Team appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. The image portrayed Dolores and Eddie, formerly successful stage dancers now rendered broke, unemployed, and bereft of their trademark cheer. Rockwell, ever the astute observer of popular trends and tastes, left no doubt as to why these vaudeville performers were down on their luck. Tucked into Eddie’s pocket is a well-read issue of Variety magazine, teeming with news of a booming motion picture industry that had trampled the live dance and comedy circuit. The cinema had enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity among Americans during the early twentieth century, particularly with the emergence of the first feature-length sound films of the late 1920s. By the time the Post printed its Dance Team cover, millions of Americans had embraced motion pictures as a new and exciting form of paid entertainment. And because filmmakers mined the past for narrative content, many Americans came to learn US history from the movie house as much as from the library, university, or lectern.

The first of these themes (the accurate depiction of war) brings together research on a series of writers who attempted to describe the battles of the Civil War in their fiction such as Ambrose Bierce, John Esten Cooke, Herman Melville, and Frances E. W. Harper. The second (the social construction of gender norms) involves the analysis of narratives that depict shifting gender roles during the conflict such as Augusta Jane Evan’s novel Macaria and Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, a book which provides an excellent opportunity for discussing the relation of nonfiction genres such as memoir to literary forms.

The American Civil War was not a war of religion. The divisions within America’s most important denominations by the war’s beginning were the result of differing and patently sectional ideas about slavery, and not doctrine. The majority of the war’s nearly 4 million armed participants from both the North and the South were Protestants of one kind or another. Ethnically identifiable and predominantly Catholic regiments like those that made up the Union’s Irish Brigade were of a kind with the Confederacy’s 24th Georgia and 10th Louisiana Infantries. Of only 150,000 Jews in America in 1861, 6,000 Jewish men wore Union blue and likely 3,000 or so Confederate gray. Not only was America’s greatest existential crisis not a war of religion then, in many ways it was the very antithesis of a war of a religion. During the American Civil War, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish Americans on both sides of the conflict made war against their fellow believers in spite of the overwhelmingly similar religious traditions they shared.