Comparison Of Ta-Nehisi Coates Between The World And Me

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Ta-Nehisi Coates - Between the World and Me

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Every Democrat voted to convict while every Republican, with the exception of Senator Mitt Romney of Utah , voted to acquit. Health officials confirmed this was the first case of the virus in the United States on January 20, Trump and his supporters made multiple attempts to overturn the results of the election , the most notable of which was the storming of the Capitol on January 6, The War in Afghanistan continued. In September , President Bush announced he would shift 4, U. After a profile on U. In mid President Obama announced the start of the withdrawal of the additional 33, troops deployed from the troop surge.

As of February , a total of 2, U. ISAF ceased combat operations and was disbanded in December , with a small number of troops remaining behind in an advisory role as part of ISAF's successor organization, the Resolute Support Mission. On April 13, President Biden announced his plan to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by September 11, , this date being the twentieth anniversary of the September 11th Attacks. The date for US troops to withdraw from Afghanistan was moved forward to August On the same day, the president of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani fled to Tajikistan and the Taliban declared victory and the war had ended.

As the situation in Iraq became increasingly difficult and deadly, policymakers began looking for new options. This produced a variety of proposals; some of the more notable ones were to seek decreased U. The recommendations were generally ignored, and instead, President Bush ordered a surge of troops to Iraq in and Violence in the country declined in and , and the U. On April 15, , two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon in Boston, Massachusetts , killing three people and injuring over On December 2, , in the San Bernardino attack , 14 people were killed and 22 were injured in a mass shooting at a workplace Christmas party at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California.

Both a workplace shooting and a terrorist attack , the incident was perpetrated by Rizwan Farook , a healthcare worker who was employed at the facility, and his wife Tashfeen Malik. The pair were U. The attack also included an attempted bombing. Four hours after the attack, the perpetrators were killed by police in a shootout that left two officers injured. In late October , 16 packages containing pipe bombs were mailed via the U. Postal Service to several prominent critics of U. President Barack Obama, former U. Vice President Joe Biden, and former U. On March 21, , Cesar Sayoc , 57, pleaded guilty to 65 felony charges related to the bombing, including using weapons of mass destruction and domestic terrorism.

Continuing the increase in high-profile mass school shootings seen in the late s and s, additional school shootings shocked the country in the s, the deadliest of which were the Oikos University shooting , the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting both in , the Isla Vista killings , the Umpqua Community College shooting , and the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and Santa Fe High School shooting both in In November , U. On September 16, , another mass murder on a U. On January 8, , U. Representative Gabby Giffords was the target of an assassination attempt, when a gunman went on a shooting spree , critically injuring Giffords, killing federal judge John Roll and five other people, and wounding 14 others.

On July 20, , a man shot 70 people up to that time, the highest number of victims of any mass shooting in American history at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado , killing 12 and injuring 58 others. On June 12, , a mass shooting in a Florida gay nightclub killed 50 people, including the man responsible for it. It surpassed 's Virginia Tech shooting as the deadliest mass shooting in American history, and was also classified as a terrorist attack and a hate crime against the LGBT community. On October 1, , the Orlando incident was surpassed by the Las Vegas shooting as the deadliest mass shooting in American history when a gunman fired from his 32nd-floor hotel room of the Mandalay Bay onto a crowd of concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest music festival, killing 58 and injuring others before committing suicide.

This shooting led to increased dialogue and debate over gun control, particularly the use of bump stocks which allowed the shooter to fire his semi-automatic rifle at a rate similar to a fully automatic weapon. Concerns about public event safety and hotel security also became a focus of public dialogue in the wake of this event. In addition, the investigation was the focus of intense scrutiny, particularly as the official reports and timelines changed several times throughout the investigation. This also led to a number of conspiracy theories. It was the worst mass shooting that occurred in both the state of Texas and at an American place of worship in modern history, surpassing the Charleston church shooting of and the Waddell Buddhist temple shooting of , and the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting of and also led to major debates on weapon control and brought attention to gaps in reporting to the federal background-check system intended to ban convicted domestic abusers.

In the spring of , several major tornado outbreaks affected the Central and Southern United States. Forty-three people were killed in a tornado outbreak from April 14— The storm was particularly notable for its extensive flooding in the Northeast, and a couple days later, Tropical Storm Lee made landfall in Louisiana, its remnants tracking to the Northeast for even more devastating floods.

The storm knocked out power to millions of people and caused flooding in parts of New York City along with devastation to the Jersey Shore and portions of Long Island and Staten Island. Harvey's highest winds hit mph. The size of the storm spanned across the entire Florida peninsula, and all 67 counties of Florida declared a state of emergency. Irma's highest winds were mph.

Maria's highest winds were mph. Florence's highest winds were mph. On October 10, Hurricane Michael struck the Florida Panhandle as a Category 5 storm with mph winds after undergoing rapid intensification just prior to landfall; it killed 45 people in the U. In November of that year, several wildfires devastated portions of California, most notably the Camp Fire in Butte County in Northern California, which burned over , acres and destroyed nearly 19, structures. A series of earthquakes struck Southern California on July 4 and 5, A magnitude 6. On July 5, a 7.

The latter was the largest earthquake to hit Southern California in 20 years. Relatively minor damage resulted from the initial foreshock, though some building fires were reported in Ridgecrest near the epicenter. An estimated 20 million people experienced the foreshock, and approximately 30 million people experienced the mainshock. On April 20, , an offshore oil drilling rig, the Deepwater Horizon , exploded and burned off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico.

The rig burned for 36 hours before sinking. On April 24, it was discovered that a damaged wellhead was leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico at a rapid rate. For approximately 90 days, tens of thousands of barrels of oil leaked into the ocean every day, resulting in the largest oil spill in United States history. The wellhead was successfully contained in mid-July, stopping the flow, and efforts are ongoing to cap the wellhead and create a replacement well.

Despite significant efforts to protect coastlines, the spill has had devastating impacts on the environment and the economies of the Gulf Coast states. The Obama administration has ordered well operator BP responsible for all cleanup costs, which are expected to run in the tens of billions of dollars. The spill has resulted in negative public approval ratings of the U. In , while U. By mid, property values and the values of other assets plummeted, and the stock market crashed in October , spurred by a lack of investor confidence as the liquidity of assets began to evaporate.

With the decline in wealth and the lack of investor and consumer confidence, growth and economic activity came to a screeching halt and the job growth of previous years was soon wiped out, with mass layoffs and unemployment rising rapidly in late , and continuing into Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke told a federal commission in November , "As a scholar of the Great Depression, I honestly believe that September and October of was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression.

The Federal Reserve and the Treasury cooperated by pouring trillions into a financial system that had frozen up worldwide. They rescued many of the large financial corporations from bankruptcy — with the exception of Lehman Brothers , which went bankrupt — and took government control of insurance giant AIG, mortgage banks Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and both General Motors and Chrysler. In October , Bush sought, and Congress passed, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of commonly referred to as the "bank bailout" with the goal of protecting the U. By , only a fraction of that money was ever spent, as banks were able to quickly repay loans from the federal government or ended up never needing the money. The recession was worldwide, with Europe and Japan hard hit, while China, India and Canada fared much better.

The nation went into the election cycle having a Republican president [79] and Democratic Congress [80] both with extremely low approval ratings. New York Senator Hillary Clinton had the inside track for the nomination but faced an unexpected challenge from Barack Obama, the nearly unknown junior Senator from Illinois. During the general election, Obama's youthfulness, charisma, and widespread media support proved effective against McCain, seen as a stodgy Washington insider.

In addition, his relatively advanced age 72 and injuries from captivity in the Vietnam War drew doubts over his health and stamina. Overall disillusionment with the Republican Party and George Bush's administration did not help McCain's cause, and his choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate also drew some controversy. Obama also drew some doubts over his inexperience and controversial associations with Weather Underground founder William Ayers and Reverend Jeremiah Wright , the pastor of an African-American church Obama had attended for years who was discovered to have made anti-white sermons. The decisive event was the collapse of the national financial system over the summer, launching a severe worldwide depression [81] On November 4, , Obama defeated McCain to in the electoral vote and Part of the strong showing came from a surge of support from younger voters, African Americans, Hispanics and independents.

Democrats made further gains in Congress, adding to the majorities they had won in Obama's early policy decisions addressed a continuing global financial crisis [83] and have included changes in tax policies, foreign policy initiatives and the phasing out of detention of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. A domestic initiative passed by the th Congress and signed into law by President Obama was the Affordable Care Act , an important statute guaranteeing comprehensive medical coverage to all Americans, regardless of age, sex, pre-existing health conditions or ability to pay.

In foreign policy, President Obama withdrew U. At the same time, he also increased troop levels in the Afghanistan War. The U. In May , President Obama announced in a televised speech to the nation that al-Qaeda leader and culprit behind many deadly acts of terrorism including the September 11 attacks Osama bin Laden was killed by U. Although the recession reached its bottom in June and began to move up again, voters remained frustrated with the slow pace of the economic recovery. In the spring of , large protests erupted in Washington, DC from conservative groups who began calling themselves the " Tea Party " and who were particularly opposed to the controversial stimulus act. The Tea Party would end up in a few years as a springboard for a large-scale Republican revival.

Under the new Congress, which had a Republican House and a Democratic Senate, President Obama and Congress clashed for months over whether or not to raise the debt ceiling and whether or not to extend the payroll tax cuts for middle-income citizens that Obama signed into law. After months of heated debate, the debt ceiling was ultimately raised and the tax cuts extended.

Much like John McCain four years earlier, Romney was largely seen as a tepid moderate and a Beltway insider who did not inspire the conservative base of the Republican Party, nor independents. He also drew controversy for his stand on Obamacare, which had been based on the system he implemented in Massachusetts. Obama defeated his opponent to win a second term, with a tally in the Electoral College by to and in the popular vote by The electoral map remained the same as , with the exception of North Carolina and Indiana flipping back as red states, and the party balance in Congress remained largely unchanged. In the November midterm elections , the Republican Party took control of the Senate and expanded its majority in the House of Representatives , an event that portended an ill omen for the Democrats.

On December 17, , President Barack Obama announced a restoration of full diplomatic relations with Cuba for the first time since A deal between the United States and Cuba was brokered during 18 months of secret talks hosted by Canada , with a final meeting hosted by Pope Francis at the Vatican. Although the U. The New York Times reported in January [92]. In short: The state of union, while far stronger than when Mr. Obama took office, remains troubled. The financial crisis has ended, with job growth picking up and the American economy among the world's strongest right now. Yet the great 21st-century wage slowdown continues, with pay raises for most workers still meager. In other positive news, the deficit has fallen sharply, thanks to a combination of slower health-cost growth and budget cuts the latter championed by Republicans.

Many more people have health insurance, thanks to Mr. Obama's health law. More people are graduating from college—although Mr. Obama is likely to fall short of his vow to have the United States lead the world in college graduates by On the negative side, climate change appears to be accelerating, creating serious health and economic risks. The fall in gasoline prices, though welcome for many struggling families, won't help the climate. And with Mr. Obama delivering his address the day after Martin Luther King's Birthday, it's also worth remembering that the country's racial divides remain deep, with African-Americans still far behind other Americans by many measures.

On June 26, , the Supreme Court ruled, 5—4, in the case of Obergefell vs. Hodges that same-sex marriage was a constitutionally protected right under the 14th Amendment. Shortly before the ruling, polling showed the majority of Americans approving of same-sex marriage. The ruling was celebrated by many, and President Obama advertised his support for the ruling by coloring the White House in gay pride colors using lights. This ruling was not achieved without controversy, as it did little to change the minds of those that disapproved of homosexuality in general. In regards to the Supreme Court, President Obama faced three vacancies during his administration.

Justice Antonin Scalia died on February 13, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland as his replacement, but the United States Senate, led by Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to give Garland a hearing, instead arguing that the winner of the ongoing presidential election be given the opportunity to nominate Scalia's replacement instead. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was pressured by liberal groups to retire while the Democrats remained in control of the White House, but declined to do so.

On September 25, , John Boehner announced that he would step down as Speaker and resign from Congress at the end of October Boehner's resignation took place after Pope Francis' address to Congress the day before , an event considered by Boehner as a high point in his legislative career. Boehner was replaced by Republican Paul Ryan , the U. Representative for Wisconsin's 1st congressional district and former candidate for vice president along with Mitt Romney.

Sources in Boehner's office indicated he was stepping aside in the face of increasing discord while trying to manage passage of a continuing resolution to fund the government. Conservative opposition to funding Planned Parenthood as part of the resolution, and stronger threats to Boehner's leadership on account of the controversy, prompted the abrupt announcement. In the presidential election, the GOP had 17 candidates. A surprise challenger to Clinton appeared in year-old Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders , a self-identified democratic socialist and the one of only two independents in the Senate. Despite attracting a large, enthusiastic following among mostly young voters, Sanders was unable to secure the nomination.

When the primary season finished in the spring, Clinton secured the Democratic nomination. Senator Bernie Sanders finally conceded the race, endorsing then presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, in June , real estate mogul Donald Trump announced that he was seeking the presidency. Although Trump's announcement received little attention at first he had mounted a short-lived third-party presidential run in , he quickly bounded out of the gate with a populist message about his perceived decline of American economic and geopolitical prestige under the previous two administrations.

By the start of the primary season in early , Trump was polling ahead of the other GOP candidates despite his lack of political experience and attracting a considerable following among the party base. Some right wing conservatives and Christian groups continued to support Cruz, especially as there was controversy over Trump's personal life and relatively liberal attitude on social issues. However, Trump's economic message had widespread populist appeal and on May 3, Ted Cruz officially ended his presidential campaign. John Kasich followed suit the following day. As the primaries gave way to the general election, Hillary Clinton faced numerous controversies over her tenure as Secretary of State, namely an email server scandal. Polls and surveys showed that both Clinton and Trump had an overall negative image among voters.

Pence, a staunch conservative Christian, was seen as a way of winning over heartland conservatives, many of whom were Ted Cruz supporters wary of Trump's attitude on social issues. Clinton chose as her running mate Virginia Senator Tim Kaine , seen as a way of connecting with blue collar white voters, Trump's base of support. During the general election, controversies over remarks Donald Trump had made over the years seen as demeaning to women came up, including a beauty pageant he had been a judge on in the s where he had criticized the appearance of a contestant, as well as a leaked audio tape in which he made vulgar statements about the treatment of women.

In addition, John Podesta , Clinton's campaign manager, had his private email account hacked, releasing over 20, campaign emails in October and November by WikiLeaks. He made considerable inroads into the old Rust Belt , carrying states such as Michigan , Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that had been safe Democratic territory since However, Donald Trump did not win the popular vote. This was the fifth time in American history that the outcome of the Electoral College did not match the outcome of the popular vote, the others happening in , , , and The GOP also retained control a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, controlling all branches of government.

Allegations of Russian interference on behalf of Trump's candidacy in the election caused controversy during and after the election. On January 20, , Trump took the oath of office as the 45th U. On his first day in office, he undertook a series of executive orders aimed at dismantling the Affordable Care Act and Trans-Pacific Partnership, and also moved to pass a temporary ban on refugees from several Middle Eastern states. This last action met with widespread criticism, and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed it as unconstitutional.

On June 26, the Supreme Court overturned the 9th Circuit's decision, ruling that part of President Trump's executive order is constitutional. On April 10, Gorsuch was sworn in. The nomination process soon became contentious after several women, most notably Palo Alto University psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford , accused Kavanaugh of past instances of sexual assault. After a series of hearings, the U. Senate voted to confirm Kavanaugh despite the controversy.

The Act amended the Internal Revenue Code of based on tax reform advocated by congressional Republicans and the Trump administration. Major elements include reducing tax rates for businesses and individuals; a personal tax simplification by increasing the standard deduction and family tax credits, but eliminating personal exemptions and making it less beneficial to itemize deductions; limiting deductions for state and local income taxes SALT and property taxes; further limiting the mortgage interest deduction; reducing the alternative minimum tax for individuals and eliminating it for corporations; reducing the number of estates impacted by the estate tax; and repealing the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act ACA.

The individual and pass-through tax cuts fade over time and become net tax increases starting in while the corporate tax cuts are permanent. This enabled the Senate to pass the bill with only 51 votes, without the need to defeat a filibuster , under the budget reconciliation process. It began when the Confederacy, knowing they had to meet or match the Union's naval superiority, responded to the Union blockade by building or converting more than vessels, including twenty-six ironclads and floating batteries. Many were equipped with ram bows, creating "ram fever" among Union squadrons wherever they threatened.

But in the face of overwhelming Union superiority and the Union's ironclad warships, they were unsuccessful. In addition to ocean-going warships coming up the Mississippi, the Union Navy used timberclads, tinclads, and armored gunboats. Shipyards at Cairo, Illinois, and St. Louis built new boats or modified steamboats for action. The Confederacy experimented with the submarine CSS Hunley , which did not work satisfactorily, [] and with building an ironclad ship, CSS Virginia , which was based on rebuilding a sunken Union ship, Merrimack. On its first foray on March 8, , Virginia inflicted significant damage to the Union's wooden fleet, but the next day the first Union ironclad, USS Monitor , arrived to challenge it in the Chesapeake Bay.

The resulting three-hour Battle of Hampton Roads was a draw, but it proved that ironclads were effective warships. Lacking the technology and infrastructure to build effective warships, the Confederacy attempted to obtain warships from Great Britain. However, this failed as Great Britain had no interest in selling warships to a nation that was at war with a far stronger enemy, and it meant it could sour relations with the U. By early , General Winfield Scott had devised the Anaconda Plan to win the war with as little bloodshed as possible. Lincoln adopted parts of the plan, but he overruled Scott's caution about day volunteers. Public opinion, however, demanded an immediate attack by the army to capture Richmond.

In April , Lincoln announced the Union blockade of all Southern ports; commercial ships could not get insurance and regular traffic ended. The South blundered in embargoing cotton exports in before the blockade was effective; by the time they realized the mistake, it was too late. The blockade shut down the ten Confederate seaports with railheads that moved almost all the cotton, especially New Orleans, Mobile, and Charleston. By June , warships were stationed off the principal Southern ports, and a year later nearly ships were in service. The Confederates began the war short on military supplies and in desperate need of large quantities of arms which the agrarian South could not provide. Arms manufactures in the industrial North were restricted by an arms embargo, keeping shipments of arms from going to the South, and ending all existing and future contracts.

The Confederacy subsequently looked to foreign sources for their enormous military needs and sought out financiers and companies like S. To get the arms safely to the Confederacy British investors built small, fast, steam-driven blockade runners that traded arms and supplies brought in from Britain through Bermuda, Cuba, and the Bahamas in return for high-priced cotton. Many of the ships were lightweight and designed for speed and could only carry a relatively small amount of cotton back to England. The Southern economy nearly collapsed during the war.

There were multiple reasons for this: the severe deterioration of food supplies, especially in cities, the failure of Southern railroads, the loss of control of the main rivers, foraging by Northern armies, and the seizure of animals and crops by Confederate armies. Most historians agree that the blockade was a major factor in ruining the Confederate economy; however, Wise argues that the blockade runners provided just enough of a lifeline to allow Lee to continue fighting for additional months, thanks to fresh supplies of , rifles, lead, blankets, and boots that the homefront economy could no longer supply.

Surdam argues that the blockade was a powerful weapon that eventually ruined the Southern economy, at the cost of few lives in combat. Practically, the entire Confederate cotton crop was useless although it was sold to Union traders , costing the Confederacy its main source of income. Critical imports were scarce and the coastal trade was largely ended as well. Merchant ships owned in Europe could not get insurance and were too slow to evade the blockade, so they stopped calling at Confederate ports. To fight an offensive war, the Confederacy purchased ships in Britain, converted them to warships, and raided American merchant ships in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Insurance rates skyrocketed and the American flag virtually disappeared from international waters. However, the same ships were reflagged with European flags and continued unmolested. Britain acquiesced to their demand, paying the U. Although the Confederacy hoped that Britain and France would join them against the Union, this was never likely, and so they instead tried to bring Britain and France in as mediators. Seward , worked to block this and threatened war if any country officially recognized the existence of the Confederate States of America. In , Southerners voluntarily embargoed cotton shipments, hoping to start an economic depression in Europe that would force Britain to enter the war to get cotton, but this did not work. Worse, Europe turned to Egypt and India for cotton, which they found superior, hindering the South's recovery after the war.

Cotton diplomacy proved a failure as Europe had a surplus of cotton, while the —62 crop failures in Europe made the North's grain exports of critical importance. It also helped to turn European opinion further away from the Confederacy. Lincoln's administration initially failed to appeal to European public opinion. At first, diplomats explained that the United States was not committed to the ending of slavery, and instead repeated legalistic arguments about the unconstitutionality of secession.

Confederate representatives, on the other hand, started off much more successful, by ignoring slavery and instead focusing on their struggle for liberty, their commitment to free trade, and the essential role of cotton in the European economy. European government leaders welcomed the fragmentation of the ascendant American Republic. As early as , many Union diplomats such as Carl Schurz realized emphasizing the war against slavery was the Union's most effective moral asset in the struggle for public opinion in Europe.

Seward was concerned that an overly radical case for reunification would distress the European aristocrats with cotton interests; even so, Seward supported a widespread campaign of public diplomacy. The most famous, the CSS Alabama , did considerable damage and led to serious postwar disputes. However, public opinion against slavery in Britain created a political liability for British politicians, where the anti-slavery movement was powerful. War loomed in late between the U. Navy's boarding of the British ship Trent and seizure of two Confederate diplomats.

However, London and Washington were able to smooth over the problem after Lincoln released the two. In , the British government considered mediating between the Union and Confederacy, though even such an offer would have risked war with the United States. The Union victory in the Battle of Antietam caused the British to delay this decision. The Emancipation Proclamation over time would reinforce the political liability of supporting the Confederacy. Realizing that Washington could not intervene in Mexico as long as the Confederacy controlled Texas, France invaded Mexico in Washington repeatedly protested France's violation of the Monroe Doctrine.

Despite sympathy for the Confederacy, France's seizure of Mexico ultimately deterred them from war with the Union. Confederate offers late in the war to end slavery in return for diplomatic recognition were not seriously considered by London or Paris. After , the Polish revolt against Russia further distracted the European powers and ensured that they would remain neutral. Russia supported the Union, largely due to the view that the U.

The Eastern theater refers to the military operations east of the Appalachian Mountains , including the states of Virginia , West Virginia , Maryland , and Pennsylvania , the District of Columbia , and the coastal fortifications and seaports of North Carolina. George B. McClellan took command of the Union Army of the Potomac on July 26 he was briefly general-in-chief of all the Union armies, but was subsequently relieved of that post in favor of Maj.

Henry W. Halleck , and the war began in earnest in The Union strategy called for simultaneous advances along four axes: []. The Army originated as the Confederate Army of the Potomac , which was organized on June 20, , from all operational forces in northern Virginia. The Army of the Peninsula was merged into it on April 12, When Virginia declared its secession in April , Robert E. Lee chose to follow his home state, despite his desire for the country to remain intact and an offer of a senior Union command. Lee's biographer, Douglas S. Freeman , asserts that the army received its final name from Lee when he issued orders assuming command on June 1, Johnston , his predecessor in army command, before that date and referred to Johnston's command as the Army of Northern Virginia.

Part of the confusion results from the fact that Johnston commanded the Department of Northern Virginia as of October 22, and the name Army of Northern Virginia can be seen as an informal consequence of its parent department's name. Jefferson Davis and Johnston did not adopt the name, but it is clear that the organization of units as of March 14 was the same organization that Lee received on June 1, and thus it is generally referred to today as the Army of Northern Virginia, even if that is correct only in retrospect.

Jackson assigned Jeb Stuart to command all the cavalry companies of the Army of the Shenandoah. He eventually commanded the Army of Northern Virginia's cavalry. In one of the first highly visible battles, in July , a march by Union troops under the command of Maj. Irvin McDowell on the Confederate forces led by Gen. The Union had the upper hand at first, nearly pushing confederate forces holding a defensive position into a rout, but Confederate reinforcements under Joseph E. Johnston arrived from the Shenandoah Valley by railroad, and the course of the battle quickly changed. A brigade of Virginians under the relatively unknown brigadier general from the Virginia Military Institute , Thomas J.

Jackson , stood its ground, which resulted in Jackson receiving his famous nickname, "Stonewall". Upon the strong urging of President Lincoln to begin offensive operations, McClellan attacked Virginia in the spring of by way of the peninsula between the York River and James River , southeast of Richmond. McClellan's army reached the gates of Richmond in the Peninsula Campaign , [] [] [].

Employing audacity and rapid, unpredictable movements on interior lines, Jackson's 17, men marched miles 1, km in 48 days and won several minor battles as they successfully engaged three Union armies 52, men , including those of Nathaniel P. Banks and John C. Fremont , preventing them from reinforcing the Union offensive against Richmond. The swiftness of Jackson's men earned them the nickname of " foot cavalry ".

Lee assumed his position of command. Lincoln then restored Pope's troops to McClellan. Antietam is considered a Union victory because it halted Lee's invasion of the North and provided an opportunity for Lincoln to announce his Emancipation Proclamation. When the cautious McClellan failed to follow up on Antietam, he was replaced by Maj. Ambrose Burnside. Burnside was soon defeated at the Battle of Fredericksburg [] on December 13, , when more than 12, Union soldiers were killed or wounded during repeated futile frontal assaults against Marye's Heights. After the battle, Burnside was replaced by Maj.

Joseph Hooker. Hooker, too, proved unable to defeat Lee's army; despite outnumbering the Confederates by more than two to one, his Chancellorsville Campaign proved ineffective and he was humiliated in the Battle of Chancellorsville in May Stonewall Jackson was shot in the arm by accidental friendly fire during the battle and subsequently died of complications. The fiercest fighting of the battle—and the second bloodiest day of the Civil War—occurred on May 3 as Lee launched multiple attacks against the Union position at Chancellorsville. That same day, John Sedgwick advanced across the Rappahannock River , defeated the small Confederate force at Marye's Heights in the Second Battle of Fredericksburg , and then moved to the west.

The Confederates fought a successful delaying action at the Battle of Salem Church. Hooker was replaced by Maj. George Meade during Lee's second invasion of the North , in June. Meade defeated Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg July 1 to 3, Pickett's Charge on July 3 is often considered the high-water mark of the Confederacy because it signaled the collapse of serious Confederate threats of victory. Lee's army suffered 28, casualties versus Meade's 23, After Meade's inconclusive fall campaign, Lincoln turned to the Western Theater for new leadership. At the same time, the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg surrendered, giving the Union control of the Mississippi River, permanently isolating the western Confederacy, and producing the new leader Lincoln needed, Ulysses S.

The primary Confederate force in the Western theater was the Army of Tennessee. While the Confederate forces had numerous successes in the Eastern Theater, they were defeated many times in the West. The Union's key strategist and tactician in the West was Ulysses S. Grant, who won victories at Forts Henry February 6, and Donelson February 11 to 16, , earning him the nickname of "Unconditional Surrender" Grant, by which the Union seized control of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. Nathan Bedford Forrest rallied nearly 4, Confederate troops and led them to escape across the Cumberland. Nashville and central Tennessee thus fell to the Union, leading to attrition of local food supplies and livestock and a breakdown in social organization.

Leonidas Polk 's invasion of Columbus ended Kentucky's policy of neutrality and turned it against the Confederacy. Although rebuffed at Belmont, Grant cut off Columbus. The Confederates, lacking their gunboats, were forced to retreat and the Union took control of western Kentucky and opened Tennessee in March At the Battle of Shiloh Pittsburg Landing , in Tennessee in April , the Confederates made a surprise attack that pushed Union forces against the river as night fell. Overnight, the Navy landed additional reinforcements, and Grant counter-attacked. Grant and the Union won a decisive victory—the first battle with the high casualty rates that would repeat over and over.

One of the early Union objectives in the war was the capture of the Mississippi River , to cut the Confederacy in half. Naval forces under Farragut ran past Confederate defenses south of New Orleans. Confederate forces abandoned the city, giving the Union a critical anchor in the deep South. Memphis fell to Union forces on June 6, , and became a key base for further advances south along the Mississippi River. Only the fortress city of Vicksburg , Mississippi, prevented Union control of the entire river. Bragg's second invasion of Kentucky in the Confederate Heartland Offensive included initial successes such as Kirby Smith 's triumph at the Battle of Richmond and the capture of the Kentucky capital of Frankfort on September 3, Don Carlos Buell at the Battle of Perryville.

Bragg was forced to end his attempt at invading Kentucky and retreat due to lack of logistical support and lack of infantry recruits for the Confederacy in that state. Bragg was narrowly defeated by Maj. Naval forces assisted Grant in the long, complex Vicksburg Campaign that resulted in the Confederates surrendering at the Battle of Vicksburg in July , which cemented Union control of the Mississippi River and is considered one of the turning points of the war. The one clear Confederate victory in the West was the Battle of Chickamauga. James Longstreet's corps from Lee's army in the east , defeated Rosecrans, despite the heroic defensive stand of Maj.

George Henry Thomas. Rosecrans retreated to Chattanooga , which Bragg then besieged in the Chattanooga Campaign. Grant marched to the relief of Rosecrans and defeated Bragg at the Third Battle of Chattanooga , [] eventually causing Longstreet to abandon his Knoxville Campaign and driving Confederate forces out of Tennessee and opening a route to Atlanta and the heart of the Confederacy. The Trans-Mississippi theater refers to military operations west of the Mississippi River, not including the areas bordering the Pacific Ocean. Extensive guerrilla warfare characterized the trans-Mississippi region, as the Confederacy lacked the troops and the logistics to support regular armies that could challenge Union control.

These partisans could not be entirely driven out of the state of Missouri until an entire regular Union infantry division was engaged. By , these violent activities harmed the nationwide anti-war movement organizing against the re-election of Lincoln. Missouri not only stayed in the Union but Lincoln took 70 percent of the vote for re-election. Numerous small-scale military actions south and west of Missouri sought to control Indian Territory and New Mexico Territory for the Union. The Union repulsed Confederate incursions into New Mexico in , and the exiled Arizona government withdrew into Texas. In the Indian Territory, civil war broke out within tribes. About 12, Indian warriors fought for the Confederacy and smaller numbers for the Union.

Although he lacked resources to beat Union armies, he built up a formidable arsenal at Tyler, along with his own Kirby Smithdom economy, a virtual "independent fiefdom" in Texas, including railroad construction and international smuggling. The Union, in turn, did not directly engage him. The Lower Seaboard theater refers to military and naval operations that occurred near the coastal areas of the Southeast Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas as well as the southern part of the Mississippi River Port Hudson and south.

Union Naval activities were dictated by the Anaconda Plan. One of the earliest battles of the war was fought at Port Royal Sound , south of Charleston. Much of the war along the South Carolina coast concentrated on capturing Charleston. In attempting to capture Charleston, the Union military tried two approaches; by land over James or Morris Islands or through the harbor. However, the Confederates were able to drive back each Union attack. One of the most famous of the land attacks was the Second Battle of Fort Wagner , in which the 54th Massachusetts Infantry took part. The Federals suffered a serious defeat in this battle, losing 1, men while the Confederates lost only Fort Pulaski on the Georgia coast was an early target for the Union navy.

Following the capture of Port Royal, an expedition was organized with engineer troops under the command of Captain Quincy A. Gillmore , forcing a Confederate surrender. The Union army occupied the fort for the rest of the war after repairing it. Porter attacked Forts Jackson and St. Philip , which guarded the river approach to New Orleans from the south. While part of the fleet bombarded the forts, other vessels forced a break in the obstructions in the river and enabled the rest of the fleet to steam upriver to the city. A Union army force commanded by Major General Benjamin Butler landed near the forts and forced their surrender. Butler's controversial command of New Orleans earned him the nickname "Beast". Banks laid siege to Port Hudson for nearly eight weeks, the longest siege in US military history.

These two surrenders gave the Union control over the entire Mississippi. Several small skirmishes were fought in Florida, but no major battles. The biggest was the Battle of Olustee in early The Pacific Coast theater refers to military operations on the Pacific Ocean and in the states and Territories west of the Continental Divide. At the beginning of , Lincoln made Grant commander of all Union armies. Grant made his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac and put Maj. William Tecumseh Sherman in command of most of the western armies. Grant understood the concept of total war and believed, along with Lincoln and Sherman, that only the utter defeat of Confederate forces and their economic base would end the war. This policy I believe exercised a material influence in hastening the end.

Averell were to operate against railroad supply lines in West Virginia , and Maj. Nathaniel P. Banks was to capture Mobile , Alabama. Grant's army set out on the Overland Campaign intending to draw Lee into a defense of Richmond, where they would attempt to pin down and destroy the Confederate army. The Union army first attempted to maneuver past Lee and fought several battles, notably at the Wilderness , Spotsylvania , and Cold Harbor. These battles resulted in heavy losses on both sides and forced Lee's Confederates to fall back repeatedly. An attempt to outflank Lee from the south failed under Butler, who was trapped inside the Bermuda Hundred river bend. Each battle resulted in setbacks for the Union that mirrored what they had suffered under prior generals, though, unlike those prior generals, Grant fought on rather than retreat.

While Lee was preparing for an attack on Richmond, Grant unexpectedly turned south to cross the James River and began the protracted Siege of Petersburg , where the two armies engaged in trench warfare for over nine months. Grant finally found a commander, General Philip Sheridan, aggressive enough to prevail in the Valley Campaigns of Sheridan was initially repelled at the Battle of New Market by former U. John C. After redoubling his efforts, Sheridan defeated Maj. Jubal A. Early in a series of battles, including a final decisive defeat at the Battle of Cedar Creek. Sheridan then proceeded to destroy the agricultural base of the Shenandoah Valley , a strategy similar to the tactics Sherman later employed in Georgia.

Johnston and John Bell Hood along the way. The fall of Atlanta on September 2, , guaranteed the reelection of Lincoln as president. Union Maj. Thomas dealt Hood a massive defeat at the Battle of Nashville , effectively destroying Hood's army. Leaving Atlanta, and his base of supplies, Sherman's army marched with an unknown destination, laying waste to about 20 percent of the farms in Georgia in his " March to the Sea ". Sherman's army was followed by thousands of freed slaves; there were no major battles along the March. Sherman turned north through South Carolina and North Carolina to approach the Confederate Virginia lines from the south, increasing the pressure on Lee's army.

Lee's army, thinned by desertion and casualties, was now much smaller than Grant's. One last Confederate attempt to break the Union hold on Petersburg failed at the decisive Battle of Five Forks sometimes called "the Waterloo of the Confederacy" on April 1. This meant that the Union now controlled the entire perimeter surrounding Richmond-Petersburg, completely cutting it off from the Confederacy. Realizing that the capital was now lost, Lee decided to evacuate his army. The remaining Confederate units fled west after a defeat at Sayler's Creek.

Initially, Lee did not intend to surrender but planned to regroup at the village of Appomattox Court House , where supplies were to be waiting and then continue the war. Grant chased Lee and got in front of him so that when Lee's army reached Appomattox Court House, they were surrounded. After an initial battle , Lee decided that the fight was now hopeless, and surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, , at the McLean House. His men were paroled , and a chain of Confederate surrenders began.

Lincoln died early the next morning. Lincoln's vice president, Andrew Johnson , was unharmed as his would-be assassin, George Atzerodt , lost his nerve, so he was immediately sworn in as president. Meanwhile, Confederate forces across the South surrendered as news of Lee's surrender reached them. It proved to be the largest surrender of Confederate forces.

On May 4, all remaining Confederate forces in Alabama and Mississippi surrendered. President Johnson officially declared an end to the insurrection on May 9, ; Confederate president, Jefferson Davis , was captured the following day. The causes of the war , the reasons for its outcome, and even the name of the war itself are subjects of lingering contention today. The North and West grew rich while the once-rich South became poor for a century. The national political power of the slaveowners and rich Southerners ended. Historians are less sure about the results of the postwar Reconstruction, especially regarding the second-class citizenship of the Freedmen and their poverty.

Historians have debated whether the Confederacy could have won the war. Most scholars, including James McPherson , argue that Confederate victory was at least possible. He also argues that if the Confederacy had fought using unconventional tactics, they would have more easily been able to hold out long enough to exhaust the Union. Confederates did not need to invade and hold enemy territory to win but only needed to fight a defensive war to convince the North that the cost of winning was too high. The North needed to conquer and hold vast stretches of enemy territory and defeat Confederate armies to win.

The Confederacy sought to win independence by out-lasting Lincoln; however, after Atlanta fell and Lincoln defeated McClellan in the election of , all hope for a political victory for the South ended. At that point, Lincoln had secured the support of the Republicans, War Democrats, the border states, emancipated slaves, and the neutrality of Britain and France. By defeating the Democrats and McClellan, he also defeated the Copperheads and their peace platform. Some scholars argue that the Union held an insurmountable long-term advantage over the Confederacy in industrial strength and population.

Confederate actions, they argue, only delayed defeat. If there had been more Southern victories, and a lot more, the North simply would have brought that other hand out from behind its back. I don't think the South ever had a chance to win that War. A minority view among historians is that the Confederacy lost because, as E. Merton Coulter put it, "people did not will hard enough and long enough to win. Even as the Confederacy was visibly collapsing in —65, he says most Confederate soldiers were fighting hard. Also important were Lincoln's eloquence in rationalizing the national purpose and his skill in keeping the border states committed to the Union cause.

The Emancipation Proclamation was an effective use of the President's war powers. Southern leaders needed to get European powers to help break up the blockade the Union had created around the Southern ports and cities. The abundance of European cotton and Britain's hostility to the institution of slavery, along with Lincoln's Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico naval blockades, severely decreased any chance that either Britain or France would enter the war. Historian Don Doyle has argued that the Union victory had a major impact on the course of world history. A Confederate victory, on the other hand, would have meant a new birth of slavery, not freedom.

Historian Fergus Bordewich, following Doyle, argues that:. The North's victory decisively proved the durability of democratic government. Confederate independence, on the other hand, would have established an American model for reactionary politics and race-based repression that would likely have cast an international shadow into the twentieth century and perhaps beyond. Scholars have debated what the effects of the war were on political and economic power in the South. The war resulted in at least 1,, casualties 3 percent of the population , including about , soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease—and 50, civilians.

David Hacker believes the number of soldier deaths was approximately ,, 20 percent higher than traditionally estimated, and possibly as high as , Based on census figures, 8 percent of all white men aged 13 to 43 died in the war, including 6 percent in the North and 18 percent in the South. Union army dead, amounting to 15 percent of the over two million who served, was broken down as follows: [6]. In addition there were 4, deaths in the Navy 2, in battle and in the Marines in battle.

Black troops made up 10 percent of the Union death toll, they amounted to 15 percent of disease deaths but less than 3 percent of those killed in battle. In the last year and a half and from all reported casualties, approximately 20 percent of all African Americans enrolled in the military lost their lives during the Civil War. Notably, their mortality rate was significantly higher than white soldiers. While Confederate records compiled by historian William F. Fox list 74, killed and died of wounds and 59, died of disease. Including Confederate estimates of battle losses where no records exist would bring the Confederate death toll to 94, killed and died of wounds. However, this excludes the 30, deaths of Confederate troops in prisons, which would raise the minimum number of deaths to , The United States National Park Service uses the following figures in its official tally of war losses: [2].

While the figures of , army deaths for the Union and , for the Confederacy remained commonly cited, they are incomplete. In addition to many Confederate records being missing, partly as a result of Confederate widows not reporting deaths due to being ineligible for benefits, both armies only counted troops who died during their service and not the tens of thousands who died of wounds or diseases after being discharged. This often happened only a few days or weeks later. Francis Amasa Walker , superintendent of the census, used census and surgeon general data to estimate a minimum of , Union military deaths and , Confederate military deaths, for a total death toll of , soldiers. While Walker's estimates were originally dismissed because of the census's undercounting, it was later found that the census was only off by 6.

Analyzing the number of dead by using census data to calculate the deviation of the death rate of men of fighting age from the norm suggests that at least , and at most ,, but most likely , soldiers, died in the war. Deaths among former slaves has proven much harder to estimate, due to the lack of reliable census data at the time, though they were known to be considerable, as former slaves were set free or escaped in massive numbers in an area where the Union army did not have sufficient shelter, doctors, or food for them.

University of Connecticut Professor James Downs states that tens to hundreds of thousands of slaves died during the war from disease, starvation, or exposure and that if these deaths are counted in the war's total, the death toll would exceed 1 million. Losses were far higher than during the recent defeat of Mexico , which saw roughly thirteen thousand American deaths, including fewer than two thousand killed in battle, between and One reason for the high number of battle deaths during the war was the continued use of tactics similar to those of the Napoleonic Wars at the turn of the century, such as charging.

This led to the adoption of trench warfare , a style of fighting that defined much of World War I. Abolishing slavery was not a Union war goal from the outset, but it quickly became one. To Northerners, in contrast, the motivation was primarily to preserve the Union , not to abolish slavery. Lincoln and his cabinet made ending slavery a war goal, which culminated in the Emancipation Proclamation. The Republicans' counterargument that slavery was the mainstay of the enemy steadily gained support, with the Democrats losing decisively in the elections in the northern state of Ohio when they tried to resurrect anti-black sentiment. Slavery for the Confederacy's 3. The last Confederate slaves were freed on June 19th, , celebrated as the modern holiday of Juneteenth.

Slaves in the border states and those located in some former Confederate territory occupied before the Emancipation Proclamation were freed by state action or on December 6, by the Thirteenth Amendment. About , volunteered, further enhancing the numerical advantage the Union armies enjoyed over the Confederates, who did not dare emulate the equivalent manpower source for fear of fundamentally undermining the legitimacy of slavery. During the Civil War, sentiment concerning slaves, enslavement and emancipation in the United States was divided. Lincoln's fears of making slavery a war issue were based on a harsh reality: abolition did not enjoy wide support in the west, the territories, and the border states.

Lincoln warned the border states that a more radical type of emancipation would happen if his gradual plan based on compensated emancipation and voluntary colonization was rejected. When Lincoln told his cabinet about his proposed emancipation proclamation, Seward advised Lincoln to wait for a victory before issuing it, as to do otherwise would seem like "our last shriek on the retreat". In September , the Battle of Antietam provided this opportunity, and the subsequent War Governors' Conference added support for the proclamation. In his letter to Albert G. Hodges , Lincoln explained his belief that "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

Lincoln's moderate approach succeeded in inducing border states, War Democrats and emancipated slaves to fight for the Union. All abolished slavery on their own, except Kentucky and Delaware. It caused much unrest in the Western states, where racist sentiments led to a great fear of abolition. There was some concern that the proclamation would lead to the secession of Western states, and prompted the stationing of Union troops in Illinois in case of rebellion.

Since the Emancipation Proclamation was based on the President's war powers, it only included territory held by Confederates at the time. However, the Proclamation became a symbol of the Union's growing commitment to add emancipation to the Union's definition of liberty. The war had utterly devastated the South, and posed serious questions of how the South would be re-integrated to the Union. The war destroyed much of the wealth that had existed in the South. All accumulated investment Confederate bonds were forfeit; most banks and railroads were bankrupt. The income per person in the South dropped to less than 40 percent of that of the North, a condition that lasted until well into the 20th century.

Southern influence in the U. From the Union perspective, the goals of Reconstruction were to consolidate the Union victory on the battlefield by reuniting the Union; to guarantee a " republican form of government " for the ex-Confederate states, and to permanently end slavery—and prevent semi-slavery status. President Johnson took a lenient approach and saw the achievement of the main war goals as realized in when each ex-rebel state repudiated secession and ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. Radical Republicans demanded proof that Confederate nationalism was dead and that the slaves were truly free. They came to the fore after the elections and undid much of Johnson's work. In the "Liberal Republicans" argued that the war goals had been achieved and that Reconstruction should end.

They ran a presidential ticket in but were decisively defeated. In , Democrats, primarily Southern, took control of Congress and opposed any more reconstruction. The Compromise of closed with a national consensus that the Civil War had finally ended. The Civil War would have a huge impact on American politics in the years to come. Many veterans on both sides were subsequently elected to political office, including five U. The Civil War is one of the central events in American collective memory. There are innumerable statues, commemorations, books and archival collections. The memory includes the home front, military affairs, the treatment of soldiers, both living and dead, in the war's aftermath, depictions of the war in literature and art, evaluations of heroes and villains, and considerations of the moral and political lessons of the war.

Professional historians have paid much more attention to the causes of the war, than to the war itself. Military history has largely developed outside academia, leading to a proliferation of studies by non-scholars who nevertheless are familiar with the primary sources and pay close attention to battles and campaigns, and who write for the general public, rather than the scholarly community. Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote are among the best-known writers. The memory of the war in the white South crystallized in the myth of the "Lost Cause" : that the Confederate cause was a just and heroic one. The myth shaped regional identity and race relations for generations. Nolan notes that the Lost Cause was expressly "a rationalization, a cover-up to vindicate the name and fame" of those in rebellion.

Some claims revolve around the insignificance of slavery; some appeals highlight cultural differences between North and South; the military conflict by Confederate actors is idealized; in any case, secession was said to be lawful. He also deems the Lost Cause "a caricature of the truth. This caricature wholly misrepresents and distorts the facts of the matter" in every instance. Beard and Mary R. The Beards downplayed slavery, abolitionism, and issues of morality. Though this interpretation was abandoned by the Beards in the s, and by historians generally by the s, Beardian themes still echo among Lost Cause writers.

The first efforts at Civil War battlefield preservation and memorialization came during the war itself with the establishment of National Cemeteries at Gettysburg, Mill Springs and Chattanooga. Soldiers began erecting markers on battlefields beginning with the First Battle of Bull Run in July , but the oldest surviving monument is the Hazen Brigade Monument near Murfreesboro, Tennessee , built in the summer of by soldiers in Union Col.

William B. Hazen's brigade to mark the spot where they buried their dead following the Battle of Stones River. In , these five parks and other national monuments were transferred to the jurisdiction of the National Park Service. The American Civil War has been commemorated in many capacities ranging from the reenactment of battles to statues and memorial halls erected, to films being produced, to stamps and coins with Civil War themes being issued, all of which helped to shape public memory. This varied advent occurred in greater proportions on the th and th anniversary. Numerous technological innovations during the Civil War had a great impact on 19th-century science. The Civil War was one of the earliest examples of an " industrial war ", in which technological might is used to achieve military supremacy in a war.

The war also saw the first appearances of rapid-firing weapons and machine guns such as the Agar gun and the Gatling gun. The Civil War is one of the most studied events in American history, and the collection of cultural works around it is enormous. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The carceral state has, in effect, become a credentialing institution as significant as the military, public schools, or universities—but the credentialing that prison or jail offers is negative. In her book, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration , Devah Pager, the Harvard sociologist, notes that most employers say that they would not hire a job applicant with a criminal record.

Ex-offenders are excluded from a wide variety of jobs, running the gamut from septic-tank cleaner to barber to real-estate agent, depending on the state. And in the limited job pool that ex-offenders can swim in, blacks and whites are not equal. For her research, Pager pulled together four testers to pose as men looking for low-wage work. One white man and one black man would pose as job seekers without a criminal record, and another black man and white man would pose as job seekers with a criminal record. The negative credential of prison impaired the employment efforts of both the black man and the white man, but it impaired those of the black man more. Startlingly, the effect was not limited to the black man with a criminal record.

The black man without a criminal record fared worse than the white man with one. Effectively, the job market in America regards black men who have never been criminals as though they were. One of the great challenges reformers will have to face is not merely reforming the prison system, but reckoning with the broad secondary damage wrought by our policies. Just as ex-offenders had to learn to acculturate themselves to prison, they have to learn to re-acculturate themselves to the outside. But the attitude that helps one survive in prison is almost the opposite of the kind needed to make it outside. Linda VanderWaal told me that re-acculturation is essential to thriving in an already compromised job market.

In America, the men and women who find themselves lost in the Gray Wastes are not picked at random. There is good deal of sociological and economic study on mass incarceration, but considerably less in the way of history. What I would love to see is a book that took the long view of incarceration, crime, and racism. Too many accounts begin in the s. One can imagine a separate world where the state would see these maladies through the lens of government education or public-health programs. Instead it has decided to see them through the lens of criminal justice.

As the number of prison beds has risen in this country, the number of public-psychiatric-hospital beds has fallen. The Gray Wastes draw from the most socioeconomically unfortunate among us, and thus take particular interest in those who are black. It is impossible to conceive of the Gray Wastes without first conceiving of a large swath of its inhabitants as both more than criminal and less than human. These inhabitants, black people, are the preeminent outlaws of the American imagination. The crime of absconding was thought to be linked to other criminal inclinations among blacks.

Michelle Alexander has taken some criticism for asserting, in her book The New Jim Crow , the connections between slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. Honestly, I was one of skeptics. But there are all kinds of ways one can respond to a crime surge. In , a Missouri man named Robert Newsom purchased a girl named Celia, who was about 14 years old. For the next five years, he repeatedly raped her. Celia birthed at least one child by Newsom. While she was in jail, she gave birth to the child, who arrived stillborn.

Not long after, Celia was hanged. Antebellum Virginia had 73 crimes that could garner the death penalty for slaves—and only one for whites. The end of enslavement posed an existential crisis for white supremacy, because an open labor market meant blacks competing with whites for jobs and resources, and—most frightening—black men competing for the attention of white women. Postbellum Alabama solved this problem by manufacturing criminals. Blacks who could not find work were labeled vagrants and sent to jail, where they were leased as labor to the very people who had once enslaved them.

Without the work of Khalil Gibran Muhammad, this section would not be possible. Instead the charge was a weapon wielded to claim that blacks were not entitled to the same rights as others. Another essential text. Rape, according to the mythology of the day, remained the crime of choice for blacks. Before Emancipation, enslaved blacks were rarely lynched, because whites were loath to destroy their own property. But after the Civil War, the number of lynchings rose, peaked at the turn of the century, then persisted at a high level until just before the Second World War, not petering out entirely until the height of the civil-rights movement, in the s.

Even as African American leaders petitioned the government to stop the lynching, they conceded that the Vardamans of the world had a point. Some of the most painful moments in this research came in looking at the black response to lynching. In an lecture, W. Lynching is awful, and injustice and caste are hard to bear; but if they are to be successfully attacked they must cease to have even this terrible justification. In this climate of white repression and paralyzed black leadership, the federal government launched, in , its first war on drugs When people discuss the drug war, they are usually referring to the one that began in the s, without realizing that this was, at least, our third drug war in the 20th century.

I found David F. It was depressing to see that drug wars, in this country, are almost never launched purely out of concern for public health. In almost every instance that Musto looks at there is some fear of an outsider—blacks and cocaine, Mexican-Americans and marijuana, Chinese-Americans and opium. I feel compelled to also mention Kathleen J. The reasoning was unoriginal. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI for nearly half a century, harassed three generations of leaders.

In , he attacked Martin Luther King Jr. Today Hoover is viewed unsympathetically as having stood outside mainstream ideas of law and order. Moreover, Hoover was operating within an American tradition of criminalizing black leadership. In its time, the Underground Railroad was regarded by supporters of slavery as an interstate criminal enterprise devoted to the theft of property. Harriet Tubman, purloiner of many thousands of dollars in human bodies, was considered a bandit of the highest order. The same is true today. Yet blacks were 14 percent more likely to be subjected to force. If policing in New York under Giuliani and Bloomberg was crime prevention tainted by racist presumptions, in other areas of the country ostensible crime prevention has mutated into little more than open pillage.

These findings had been augured by the reporting of The Washington Post The reporter for The Washington Post deserves to be cited by name— Radley Balko , whose writing and reporting on the problems of modern policing has greatly improved my own understanding of the issue. This was not public safety driving policy—it was law enforcement tasked with the job of municipal plunder. It is patently true that black communities, home to a class of people regularly discriminated against and impoverished, have long suffered higher crime rates. The historian David M. Leniency toward Negro defendants in cases involving crimes against other Negroes is thus actually a form of discrimination.

Crime within the black community was primarily seen as a black problem, and became a societal problem mainly when it seemed to threaten the white population. Take the case of New Orleans between the world wars, when, as Jeffrey S. The principal source of the intensifying war on crime was white anxiety about social control. In , the Supreme Court had ruled that a racial-zoning scheme in the city was unconstitutional. The black population of New Orleans was growing.

And there was increasing pressure from some government officials to spread New Deal programs to black people. The staggering rise in incarceration rates in interwar Louisiana coincided with a sense among whites that the old order was under siege. In the coming decades, this phenomenon would be replicated on a massive, national scale. The American response to crime cannot be divorced from a history of equating black struggle—individual and collective—with black villainy. And so it is unsurprising that in the midst of the civil-rights movement, rising crime was repeatedly linked with black advancement. I was not totally convinced by the subtitle, but some of the evidence that Murakawa musters against Democrats, some of whom are still serving, is damning.

Should Joe Biden run for president, he has to be asked about his time spent cheerleading for more prisons. Some of the quotes Murakawa unearths—particularly the ones where Democrats know the bill is bad, and vote anyway—are little more than cowardice and put the lie to the notion that mass incarceration is a well-intentioned mistake. As president, Nixon did just that: During his second term, incarceration rates began their historic rise.

They must be hunted to the end of the earth. I wish I could claim to have dug these up. I cannot. We knew it. A centuries-long legacy of equating blacks with criminals and moral degenerates did the work for him. In , while campaigning for president, Nixon was taped rehearsing a campaign ad. As incarceration rates rose and prison terms became longer, the idea of rehabilitation was mostly abandoned in favor of incapacitation. Mandatory minimums—sentences that set a minimum length of punishment for the convicted—were a bipartisan achievement of the s backed not just by conservatives such as Strom Thurmond but by liberals such as Ted Kennedy. Conservatives believed mandatory sentencing would prevent judges from exercising too much leniency; liberals believed it would prevent racism from infecting the bench.

Before reform, prisoners typically served 40 to 70 percent of their sentences. After reform, they served 87 to percent of their sentences. Moreover, despite what liberals had hoped for, bias was not eliminated, because discretion now lay with prosecutors, who could determine the length of a sentence by deciding what crimes to charge someone with. District attorneys with reelection to consider could demonstrate their zeal to protect the public with the number of criminals jailed and the length of their stay. Prosecutors were not alone in their quest to appear tough on crime. There was no real doubt as to who would be the target of this newfound toughness. Senate seat in New York. He was respected as a scholar and renowned for his intellect. But his preoccupations had not changed.

This might well have been true as a description of drug enforcement policies , but it was not true of actual drug abuse: Surveys have repeatedly shown that blacks and whites use drugs at remarkably comparable rates. Moynihan had by the late Reagan era evidently come to believe the worst distortions of his own report. Gone was any talk of root causes; in its place was something darker. In seeming to abandon scholarship for rhetoric, Moynihan had plenty of company among social scientists and political pundits.

James Q. But the thrust of his rhetoric was martial. Even as The Atlantic published those words, violent crime had begun to plunge. But thought leaders were slow to catch up. In , William J. Bennett, John P. Walters, and John J. DiIulio Jr. For the next decade, incarceration rates shot up even further. The justification for resorting to incarceration was the same in as it was in Many African Americans concurred that crime was a problem.

The argument that high crime is the predictable result of a series of oppressive racist policies does not render the victims of those policies bulletproof. Likewise, noting that fear of crime is well grounded does not make that fear a solid foundation for public policy. In , the ACLU published a report noting a year uptick in marijuana arrests. And yet by the close of the 20th century, prison was a more common experience for young black men than college graduation or military service. This conclusion was reached not warily, but lustily. As a presidential candidate, Bill Clinton flew home to Arkansas to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally disabled, partially lobotomized black man who had murdered two people in Joe Biden, then the junior senator from Delaware, quickly became the point man for showing that Democrats would not go soft on criminals.

The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for , new state prison cells. In Texas, the Democratic governor, Ann Richards, had come to power in advocating rehabilitation, but she ended up following the national trend, curtailing the latitude of judges and the parole board in favor of fixed sentencing, which gave power to prosecutors. In New York, another liberal governor, Mario Cuomo, found himself facing an exploding prison population. After voters rejected funding for more prisons, Cuomo pulled the money from the Urban Development Corporation, an agency that was supposed to build public housing for the poor. It did—in prison. Under the avowedly liberal Cuomo, New York added more prison beds than under all his predecessors combined.

This was penal welfarism at its finest. Prison presented a solution: jobs for whites, and warehousing for blacks. Dark predictions of rising crime did not bear out. Like the bestial blacks of the 19th century, super-predators proved to be the stuff of myth. This realization cannot be regarded strictly as a matter of hindsight. In the end, she voted for it. Pepper also voted for it. In , President Clinton signed a new crime bill, which offered grants to states that built prisons and cut back on parole. Those were, and are, real problems.

But even in trying to explain his policies, Clinton neglected to retract the assumption underlying them—that incarcerating large swaths of one population was a purely well-intended, logical, and nonracist response to crime. Even at the time of its passage, Democrats—much like the Republican Nixon a quarter century earlier—knew that the crime bill was actually about something more than that. On the evening of December 19, , Odell Newton, who was then 16 years old, stepped into a cab in Baltimore with a friend, rode half a block, then shot and killed the driver, Edward Mintz.

The State of Maryland charged Odell with crimes including murder in the first degree and sentenced him to life in prison. He has now spent 41 years behind bars, but by all accounts he is a man reformed. He has repeatedly expressed remorse for his crimes. He has not committed an infraction in 36 years. The Maryland Parole Commission has recommended Odell for release three times since In the s, when Odell committed his crime, this was largely a formality. But in our era of penal cruelty, Maryland has effectively abolished parole for lifers—even juvenile offenders such as Odell.

In , the U. Supreme Court ruled that life sentences without the possibility of parole for juveniles found guilty of crimes other than homicide were unconstitutional. Two years later, it held the same for mandatory life sentences without parole for juvenile homicide offenders. But the Court has yet to rule on whether that more recent decision was retroactive. The vast majority of them—84 percent—are black.

Clara had just driven seven hours round-trip to visit Odell at Eastern Correctional Institution, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and she was full of worry. He was being treated for hepatitis. He had sores around his eyes. I asked Clara how they managed to visit Odell regularly. She explained that family members trade visits. I got so bad one time, I was losing weight … Just thinking, Was it gonna be all right? Was it gonna kill him? Was he gonna die? Clara was born and raised in Westmoreland, Virginia.

She had her first child, Jackie, when she was only They moved to Baltimore so that John could pursue a job at a bakery. They were married for 53 years, until John passed away, in Odell Newton was born in When he was 4 years old, he fell ill and almost died. The family took him to the hospital. Doctors put a hole in his throat to help him breathe. They transferred Odell to another hospital, where he was diagnosed with lead poisoning. It turned out that he had been putting his mouth on the windowsill. In prison, Odell has repeatedly attempted to gain his G. In June of , the family moved into a nicer house, in Edmondson Village. Sometime around ninth grade, Clara began to suspect that Odell was lagging behind the other kids in his class.

Odell Newton is now