The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

by Neil Howe

No doubt this resolution would have seemed bittersweet to Lincoln had he lived to see its fruits. Yes, the Union was preserved, the slaves emancipated, and the Industrial Revolution fully unleashed. But the Union’s postwar authority quickly collapsed, its politicians fell into disrepute, and emerging social issues like labor violence and urban squalor remained unaddressed. The war left the South impoverished and in political exile. And neither two more Constitutional Amendments (ratified in 1868 and 1870) nor a far-reaching Civil Rights Act (in 1875) could prevent Reconstruction in the South from ending in Jim Crow by the late 1880s.