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 Confederates
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The Second American Revolution was a series of armed conflicts and political machinations between Republicans ('Reds') and Confederates ('Blues') principally over the concentration of power in the hands of wealthy landowners governance that emerged from the Madison Compromise. The war pitted the supporters of Robert E. Lee and the politically conservative and socially traditionalist faction of the US Senate against the supporters of the Revolutionary Republican government, the war ended with the Republican victory at the Battle of Washington in 1868.
The Republicans and Confederates quickly raised volunteer and conscription armies that fought mostly in the South for three years. The Republicans finally won the war when President Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at the Battle of Washington, following the recognition of the Republican Revolutionary government by Britain and France. Three years of intense combat left 520,000 to 650,000 people dead, more than the number of US military deaths of all other wars prior to the Great War Much of the South's plantations had been destroyed and the huge tracts of land owned by wealthy families seized by the Republican government. The United States emerged a unified nation-state, hereditary land-ownership was abolished, and the Federal government was given sweeping new powers to redistribute wealth and land to the poor. The Reconstruction Era (1869–1877) overlapped and followed the war, with the process of strengthening the national government, granting universal suffrage, and redistributing wealth and land. The Second Revolution is the most studied and written about episode in US history.
Background[]
Land Grants[]
The abolition of slavery during the drafting of the constitution was only made possible by the Madison Compromise which guaranteed that slave owners would be compensated for the emancipation of their slaves. In most cases, this was in the form of land grants in the western frontier. However, since the capital of the United States was already set to be in Virginia, and Southern slave owners made up a large portion of the first members of the US government, these land grants were often selected, priced, and issued by the men who stood to benefit from their assignment. As a result, former southern slave-owners and their decedents were issued control over the best land in the Western frontier. Andrew Jackson attempted to check the growth of the power of land owners via the Indian Land Grant Act which recognized the lands occupied by native peoples (and in some cases former slaves who had settled on land before it was issued to their former masters) as being owned by those peoples. However, very little land was actually transferred back to their original occupants, and in most cases they were simply awarded inferior neighboring plots. Additionally, Democratic controlled state legislatures of the Age of Jackson attempted to further check the power of the elites (who were mostly supporters of the Federalist party) by extending voting rights to non-landowners. However, most states still only extended this as far as tax paying citizens, which effectively excluded poor whites, freed slaves, and some native peoples from the ballot box.
Nationalism[]
The United States at the outbreak of the Second Revolution was largely seen as a confederation of sovereign states by the Eastern confederates, and US policy prior to 1869 had largely supported this notion. Indian nations were granted their own states, Freedmen were given land grants to encourage their relocation to Alabama and West Florida, and there were plans to create a Chinese only state in the Cascades for the new wave of immigrants from Asia.
However, by the 1850s and 60s the country was seeing a wave of immigration from Ireland and Central Europe, and while many of these immigrants settled into the Frontier onto small plots of land, most remained in the growing industrial cities of the East Coast. Indian nations, poor whites of Scotch-Irish ancestry, and freedman had largely integrated in the territories west of the Mississippi, particularly Missouri, and former Indian nations held large populations of non-white immigrants. To Westerners, the notion that America was a confederation of quasi-nations was ridiculous.
Protectionism[]
1864 Presidential Election[]
Main article: Election of 1864 By the 1850s the power of wealthy landowners had led to rampant corruption throughout all levels of government, and the new Republican Party emerged on the promise of ending the practice of land grants to cover government emancipation debts, and to redistribute land to the people. During the election of 1864, the Republicans nominated Kansas territorial governor John Brown, one of the founders of the Republican Party and a vocal opponent of the Land Grant system and the poll tax. He faced then Governor of Virginia Robert E. Lee, along with Labor party candidate Robert Baldwin, and Edward Everett, who would be the last candidate of the waning National Party. Brown received a plurality of the popular vote, and was expected to receive a majority in the Electoral College, however the electors from Alabama instead voted for Lee, leading to no candidate receiving a majority of the vote and sending the election to the House of Representatives.
The outcome of the 1864 election was seen as a sham by most of the country, and Brown and his supporters organized a march on Washington DC to demonstrate to the Congress that voting for Lee would only make the situation worse. Lee and Brown both worked to lobby Congress to vote in their favor, with Brown going so far as to get Baldwin to drop out and endorse the Republican candidate. However, the power of the land owners was too entrenched in Congress, and Lee won handily.
Outbreak[]
The results from Congress are reported in the press as an act of unrepentant corruption, and before Lee's inauguration several Republicans in the western states lead a series of violent uprisings against state governments installed under similarly corrupt means. Fatalities are low, but the instillation of these new Republican governments shocks many lawmakers in Washington who order the arrest of the leaders of the revolts not long after Lee is inaugurated. A warrant is placed for John Brown's arrest after he appears before the state assembly of the new Republican government of Alabama and calls for a "Second American Revolution." Brown was apprehended in Virginia and tried for high treason.
Brown's execution by hanging was immediately followed by the Republican members of Congress, led by Thaddeus Stevens and Alexander Mackenzie, gave up on attempts to change the system from within and left the House of Representative in protest. In March, they held an extralegal convention for the Republicans and representatives for the governments in Revolution which called on states that opposed Lee's government and the Land Power conspiracy to draft a petition for a redress of grievances. The petition demanded the resignation of Lee, an amendment to the constitution to establish a direct popular vote for President and Senators, the holding of new elections to the same the following year, and the end to the land grant system.
The petition was largely ignored by Lee who had already ordered General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant to raise three regiments of infantry to dislodge the governments in rebellion in the west. Grant famously resigned his commission in the U.S. Army and met Jackson's forces at the Battle of Atlanta on May 18, 1865. Grant's Republicans were made up mostly of forces from his home-state of Ohio, but were augmented by a sizable amount of troops from Cherokee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Georgia, many of which were veterans of the Klondike War. Jackson's own troops were made up entirely of men from Virginia, many of whom were either the children of land-owners or those who worked on Virginia plantations, and had not seen any action prior to the Battle of Atlanta. Grant's Republicans repelled Jackson's invasion, which led to the Lee administration asking congress for emergency powers to put down a "domestic rebellion."
Fourth Continental Congress[]
Shortly before the Battle of Atlanta, Indiana Governor Abraham Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens issued a formal call for the Fourth Continental Congress to be based in Brant, Alabama.
Stevens and Mackenzie jointly penned what became the Call to Revolution on June 13th, 1865, and the Continental Congress appointed Grant as the Commander in Chief of the New Continental Army on June 19, 1865. Grant had been among those veterans of the Klondike war who made up the Nationalist wing of the Republican party, and his appointment secured the support of a number of former National party supporters in the North of the country.
The Revolution[]
The Second Revolution was a contest marked by the ferocity and frequency of battle. Over three years, 178 named battles were fought, as were many more minor actions and skirmishes, which were often characterized by their bitter intensity and high casualties. The leadership of both sides fought to secure important geographic positions, such as the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, and the Appalachian Mountains. Neither side had absolute control over more than a handful of states at the outbreak with the Republicans only directly controlling the whole of Alabama and Ohio at the outbreak. The Confederates earned their name because of the government's desire to, as President Lee put it, "Preserve the Confederation that has endured for more than four score years." This was put into practice by petitioning the individual states to contribute forces to the United States Army, while the Republicans under Grant had adopted a unified command structure and General Staff.
By 1866 the Republicans had successfully consolidated the core of their territory around the Ohio River while the Confederates brutally put down the People's Convention established by the Labor Party in New Jersey. Republican and Confederate ships dueled in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico with little in the way of success for either side. By 1867, the British and French had agreed to begin sending weapons and ships to the Republicans, after Farragut's Raid on New Orleans took the city and with it control of the Mississippi from the Confederates, thanks in part to the help of former President Sam Houston and his contingent of Texas militiamen.
On July 3, 1868 Grant's army met McClellan's at Gettysburg in what would be the decisive battle of the war. After McClellan's defeat President Lee ordered the remaining forces loyal to the Government to surrender.
Aftermath[]
On April 9, 1868, President Lee formally surrendered to capture by the Republicans under General Grant at the White House and kept under house arrest until after the elections. The final meetings of the Fourth Continental Congress included numerous proposals from Radical Republicans from revolutionary tribunals to amending the Constitution.
Grant was unanimously elected President in 1868, and the Republicans entered Congress with an overwhelming majority. Despite beliefs to the contrary, Lee was never actually impeached or removed from office prior to being executed after the conclusion of the Revolutionary Trials. The Grant administration and Republican government conducted a political purge of Democrats from the government, including removing Roger B. Taney from the position of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and nominating Indiana Republican jurist Abraham Lincoln to replace him. Lincoln's court under Grant upheld several of the government's more extreme measures such as land redistribution and the creation of the National Rail Bureau.