In January 1867, after the closure of the Civil War in 1865, Congressman George W. Julian spoke against a bill that would remove military rule in the South and allow the return of civil government. This belief ran against currents in US political philosophy, which consistently worked toward the decentralization of power, creating for example the three branches of government as a precaution to preserve individual liberties. The maintenance of military rule in the South was a departure from this political tradition.

This shows how the Civil War and its following reconstruction “transformed the relationship between liberty and power” (133) in the United States. This rebalancing of the ideas of liberty and power extended to more than the use of the military. Before the war, the institution of slavery was in no way counter to the concept of American liberty, which focused on the right to property and government. But by the end of the war, slavery was the foremost offence to liberty in the nation. More so than any other one person, Lincoln was responsible for this ideological shift.

Lincoln, the first Republican president, understood the hypocrisy of a nation of liberty founded on slavery, and he was vocal about this belief. Therefore, when Lincoln took the presidency, Southerners left the Union to protect their liberty to own slaves. Lincoln characterized secession as anarchy and licentiousness: “license was the abuse of liberty, the aggressive exercise of liberty without restraints imposed by regard for the rights and liberties of others” (135). Such licentiousness, if allowed to control the state, would bring about dissolution. Therefore, as Lincoln saw it, the government was forced to take military action against its own people: “unprecedented power had become necessary to defend liberty against unprecedented evil” (135).

Lincoln’s decision to use the military to attack rebel citizens had a massive effect on later developments in US politics. As the South’s expression of liberty to slave property through secession became treason, the expression of the Union’s military dominance over this region became the protection of liberty. This shaped later changes to the Constitution, which now focused less on people’s freedoms and more on the expansion of government oversight.

The new liberties enshrined in the Constitution met well with African American campaigns for suffrage, which was seen as the cornerstone of legitimate political liberty. While the right to vote was traditionally a decision not of the federal government but individual states, the federal government invoked the archaic “guarantee clause” of the Constitution—that every state is guaranteed a Republican form of government—to assert its ability to grant freed slaves the vote. Based on this initial presumption, several acts and constitutional amendments passed between 1866 and 1870 fortified and eventually guaranteed black Americans the right to vote. The passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments radically redefined the US Constitution, as they transferred the power to enforce citizenship rights from state to national government.

A century after the US Civil War, histories of sharecropping, poverty, and murder for Southern African Americans suggest the expansions of civil liberties in the 13th to 15th Amendments did little for the population. While changing certain rights and granting suffrage, the counter-revolution of the 1870s revived many state rights in the definition of civil liberties, greatly impacting the lives of freed slaves. Over time, states regained the power to exclude blacks from voting, and in 1877 President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew federal troops from the South and returned it to the control of white Southern Democrats. As power shifted within the federal government toward Democrats, and fighting between white leagues and state forces occurred, the 1870s marked a new descent of the United States into decentralized federalism.