Civil War - Social, Political and Economical Turning Point

Civil war and Reconstruction |

Civil War and Reconstruction- Final Exam |

Fall 2012 |

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YOUR NAME |

12/3/2012 |

Part I The Civil War Years,Option 2: pages 1-6 Part II Reconstruction, Option 1: pages 6-12. |

Option 2.

The Civil War is considered by many to be a “turning point” in American history. Is this a fair or just assessment? Consider military, technological, political, cultural, and/or social perspectives in your answer

The Civil War is considered a turning point because in American History because of the lasting political, technological, military and social legacies that resulted from the period. Southern society moved from a forced labor to a somewhat of a free labor system and saw an end to the planter aristocracy. The concept of ‘modern warfare’ was born during the civil war, and presidential power began to expand which gave roots to generations thereafter.

One of the more notable landmark changes in politics that resulted from the civil war is the President’s ‘expanded’ use of executive privilege; Lincoln exercised the office’s broadest use of presidential war power during his time in office.  At first the Supreme Court upheld Lincoln’s first employment of executive power involving the ‘The Prize Cases’ explaining that:

Whether the President, in fulfilling his duties as Commander-in-Chief in suppressing an insurrection, has met with such armed hostile resistance and a civil war of such alarming proportions as will compel him to accord to them the character of belligerents is a question to be decided by him, and this Court must be governed by the decisions and acts of the political department of the Government to which this power was entrusted.

However on April 27, 1861, when President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus for the area ranging Philadelphia to the District of Columbia. Chief Justice Roger Taney, serving on a lower federal court in the case of Ex Parte Merryman, ruled that Congress, not the President,...