To be sure, this Fourth Turning utterly transformed America—as Fourth Turnings always do—in ways that most Americans today would regard as positive. The Civil War Crisis crushed sectionalism. It unleashed industrial production on a national scale. It abolished slavery. And it created, from the late 1860s to the late 1880s, a remarkable if turbulent era of biracial democracy in much of the South. All these outcomes were beyond the imagination of most Americans before the war.
