Title: Overview - The Civil War (U.S. National Park Service)
Headings: The Civil War - An Introduction
The Civil War - An Introduction
Last updated: August 5, 2013

Content: The monstrous injustice of slavery," he said in a speech at Peoria, "deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world--enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites." With the abolition of slavery by the Civil War, embodied in the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865, that particular monstrous injustice and hypocrisy existed no more. The abolition of slavery, however, did not end racism, discrimination, and caste segregation of which slavery had been the most extreme manifestation. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, adopted in 1868 and 1870, implanted equal civil and political rights in the Constitution. But for generations the nation failed to live up the promises of these Amendments. The issue of racial justice that came to the fore in the Civil War era is still with us today. In the process of preserving the Union of 1776 while purging it of slavery, the Civil War also transformed it. Before 1861 the words United States were usually rendered as a plural noun: " The United States are a large country." Since 1865 the United States is a large country.