Although there was no constitutional prohibition in Millard Fillmore’s time against running for more than two terms as President of the United States, the strain of leading his country through the Southern Rebellion War and its immediate aftermath had taken a harsh toll on Fillmore both physically and mentally. In the summer of 1860 he confirmed in a speech to Congress what many people had suspected for months: he would leave the White House when his current term of office expired. Many of his fellow Americans were ready for a change of leadership anyway-- the postwar era had opened up a new world of both opportunities and dangers for America, and there was a growing consensus Fillmore was ill-equipped to handle this new world. In the 1860 presidential elections a New Hampshire man, Franklin Pierce, won by a narrow margin to become Fillmore’s successor.

Pierce’s tenure in office, while not quite the roaring success his admirers would had have one believe, did produce a fair amount of positive achievements. For example, many American historians trace the roots of the famed “special relationship” between the U.S. and Great Britain back to Pierce’s appointment in December of 1860 of Abraham Lincoln as new U.S. Secretary of State. Lincoln’s fundamental decency and homespun wit won over the British people and many of Britain’s top political figures, as well as Queen Victoria, who maintained a close friendship with the Secretary of State and Mrs. Lincoln for decades. When Lincoln died from a stroke in 1895, Victoria arranged for flags at all British diplomatic offices in the United States to be lowered to half-mast in his memory. When Victoria herself passed on six years later, members of Lincoln’s family were included among the delegation representing the United States at the monarch’s funeral.

Lincoln would himself win the presidency in 1868 and build on the legacies established by Fillmore and Pierce in the field of civil rights. During his time in the Oval Office the Freedmen’s Agency would expand in both size and budget; when a terroristic organization known as the Ku Klux Klan started harassing blacks in an attempt to thwart them from exercising their constitutional rights, Lincoln dispatched federal troops to arrest the organization’s leaders and crush its rank and file. Lincoln would also have considerable influence on the course of American political history by virtue of his tireless lobbying work on behalf of pioneering African-American political candidates in the early 1870s. He even ventured to predict that within a century there might well be an African-American commander-in-chief(he was only off by a few decades). Although his policies concerning relations between whites and Native Americans came under increasing criticism during his second term in the White House, his legacy on racial matters would be largely a positive one. Many of the civil rights leaders of the 20th century would credit Lincoln as a primary inspiration in their quest to secure greater federal protection for African-Americans’ rights to exercise the privileges granted U.S. citizens under the Constitution.

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Robert E. Lee’s remarkable association with his aide Jeb Stuart didn’t cease when the Southern Rebellion War ended; indeed, during the final decade of Lee’s life Stuart became his closest friend as well as his de facto biographer. Stuart spent many of his days over the course of that decade listening to his former commanding officer recall his prewar life in Virginia and his battlefield experiences as one of the Confederate Army’s preeminent field commanders during the Rebellion as well as his service with the U.S. Army during the Mexican War; to make sure these recollections wouldn’t be lost to posterity, he wrote them down in a leather-bound diary which he kept under lock and key in his home. Nor was Stuart alone in wanting Lee’s memoirs set down on paper for posterity; Lee himself had resolved in 1858 to donate his personal papers to the University of Virginia in his will.

One of Lee’s other driving preoccupations in his final years was laying a solid foundation for black Americans in the South to be able to exercise their full constitutional rights. For him, the Southern Rebellion War had been first and foremost about advancing the cause of states’ rights over federal power; he’d never held much truck with the institution of slavery. In fact, a letter to Lee’s wife found shortly after his death confirmed long-standing rumors that he had intended to emancipate all his slaves when the war was over. In the postwar South he was well-known as being one of those rare Southerners who supported the work of the Freedmen’s Agency; Lee also played a critical role in founding one of the first postwar American universities to admit black students, the Virginia Agricultural & Technical College.

Inveterate segregationists in the Deep South considered the very existence of the new school an intolerable affront, but most people on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line were in firm support of Virginia A and T’s mission. As the college gradually earned a reputation for its demanding academic program and the first-rate intellectual caliber of its graduates, it became one of America’s most respected institutions of learning; even in the late 1870s, when a Southern backlash against federal civil rights enforcement began to roil American society, the school still had a massive and vocal faction of defenders speaking out on its behalf.

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The first major test of renewed North-South unity in the post- Southern Rebellion era came in 1888, when a rebellion intended to achieve Cuba’s independence from Spanish rule brought Spain and the United States into direct armed conflict. Early in the summer of that year the man-of-war U.S.S. Maine, docked in Havana Harbor with orders to evacuate American nationals from Cuba, was destroyed when its main ammunition magazine exploded under circumstances that even now are not entirely clear. The top Spanish colonial official in Cuba insisted the explosion was an accident; most U.S. government leaders, however, were convinced that the Maine had been the victim of an unprovoked attack. Even while the first caskets bearing the bodies of her slain crew were being shipped out from Havana to U.S. naval bases in Florida, a fierce sentiment was building in the halls of Congress and among the general public in favor of going to war against Spain. By the time the last of the victims of the Maine explosion was laid to rest, both the House of Representatives and the Senate had overwhelmingly approved resolutions declaring war on the Spanish Empire.

The Spanish-American War, which ended in a decisive U.S. victory in the spring of 1889, marked a major turning point in the process of reunifying North and South. On the battlefields of Cuba as well as on the waters off the Philippines(then a Spanish colony), sons of Union veterans fought side by side with sons of Confederate veterans and the descendants of ex-slaves shared the perils of combat with men who were descended from ex-slaveholders. This served to foster a renewed sense of national unity among Americans; it also encouraged a gradual shift in racial attitudes that would further weaken the failing grip of old myths about race on the collective psyche of mainstream U.S. society. That shift would lay the foundation for the explosion of civil rights activism which would mark the final decade of the 19th century and much of the early half of the 20th.

One other important consequence of the Spanish-American War was that it would see the United States take its first tentative steps on the road toward becoming the global superpower we know today. As the U.S. military kept expanding to meet the new challenges being made by Spain and other great European powers to the Monroe Doctrine, so did the scope of its overall mission in the world. In the time between the signing of the Lisbon Treaty which officially ended hostilities with Spain in April of 1889 and the U.S. entry into the First World War in March of 1917, American soldiers and sailors were involved in scores of interventions all across the globe-- including one on America’s own doorstep in late 1915 when political instability in Mexico endangered the security of the United States’ southern border.

American participation in the First World War marked the final step away from a militia-type fighting force towards a professional modern standing army. Even after the massive disarmament undertaken by the United States and its allies in the post-World War I years, the U.S. Army could still boast nearly 200,000 men in uniform; the rise of fascism in Europe during the late 1920s and early ‘30s would spark a massive increase in that number as Washington slowly came to recognize the necessity of preparing itself for a conflict with Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. The U.S armed forces would expand still further with the United States’ entry into World War II in late 1941 and continue steadily growing until, by the time of the war’s end in 1945, America had the largest military apparatus in the Western world.

While American troops fought the Axis abroad, at home a civil rights organization called the National Coalition for the Advancement of African People-- today better-known by its acronym NCAAP --was in the midst of a full-tilt campaign to desegregate the U.S. military as well as strengthen voting and education rights protection for African- Americans. The NCAAP’s efforts frequently met with stern resistance from white Southerners who still hung on to their forebears’ notions about black inferiority, but with all the other social changes the war was bringing about such antebellum thinking was fated to be vanquished in the long run. Indeed, the NCAAP scored a significant victory on the civil rights front in early 1945 when President Franklin Roosevelt, in one of his final official acts as commander-in-chief before his death, signed an executive order mandating that all sectors of the U.S. armed forces must be fully desegregated within two years. By 1948, both the Democratic and Republican parties had adopted civil rights protection as a major plank in their respective presidential campaign platforms.

It was during the 1950s, however, when the NCAAP’s campaign to strengthen legal protection for African-Americans picked up the most steam. This surge of momentum began in May of 1953 when the Supreme Court, in the case of Barrett et. al. vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, ruled that racial segregation of schools was unconstitutional. This opened the floodgates for black students to begin attending what had previously been all-white primary and secondary schools. One year later an Atlanta preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr. led a public and successful boycott to force the mass transit system in Birmingham, Alabama to desegregate its bus lines. But what may have been the most dramatic victory for the modern civil rights movement in the pre-JFK years came in 1957, when a threat by the Eisenhower administration to dispatch federal troops to Little Rock forced the governor of Arkansas to abandon his resistance to Justice Department rulings mandating the desegregation of that state’s university system.

The Kennedy era saw the formation of a voting rights commission by the Justice Department and the signing of the 1962 Civil Rights Act, a law that among other things identified a new category of criminal acts known as “hate crimes”-- i.e., crimes motivated by ethnic prejudice or cultural bias. Just two years after the act was passed, its hate crime statutes would serve as the basis for one of the biggest murder trials in modern American history when four Mississippi men were convicted of the brutal slayings of three college students who’d come down from New York to do volunteer work for an NCAAP voter registration drive. Those convictions dealt a devastating blow to the Southern white supremacist sub-culture and put bigots in the rest of America on notice that their racism wouldn’t be tolerated by the American mainstream any longer.

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Four years after those convictions, Republican presidential candidate and former vice-president Richard Nixon would make history by choosing Massachusetts senator Edward Brooke as his running mate at the 1968 Republican National Convention; it marked the first time in American history that an African-American had been selected for such a position in a presidential campaign. Brooke would help carry many of the East Coast states for Nixon that November and set a precedent for both the Republican and Democratic parties to back African-Americans as candidates for national political office. During his time as vice- president, Brooke would serve as point man for many of Nixon’s urban renewal initiatives; when the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign the presidency in 1974, Brooke was sworn in as his successor and would work tirelessly to restore the American public’s faith in the office; his character, work ethic, and ability to connect with everyday people would not only help heal the damage wrought by Watergate but also pave the way for Brooke to decisively beat Democratic challenger and former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential elections.

If the Soviets had hoped that America’s ignominious exit from Vietnam would undermine American prestige in the rest of the world, Brooke’s next four years in office threw cold water on that idea in a hurry. He was tough as nails in arms control negotiations with the Kremlin; got the ball rolling on the negotiations for what would in time evolve into the Camp David peace accords began Egypt and Israel; helped lead the international fight to halt the Khmer Rouge’s vicious genocide campaign in Cambodia; took decisive action to safeguard U.S. interests in the Middle East against the Islamic fundamentalist regime that took over Iran in 1979; and forged stronger ties between the U.S. and Pakistan to counter the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. Indeed, it was Brooke who achieved one of the political masterstrokes of the Cold War during the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow; he tacitly encouraged the U.S. Olympic team to carry small cards with them into the opening ceremonies which, when assembled, spelled the words “Free Afghanistan” in English, French, and Russian. Caught off guard by this unexpected gesture of protest on the world’s biggest athletic stage, and in their own capital no less, the Soviets were unable to do much more than send harshly worded communiqués to the U.S. embassy in Moscow(and encourage the U.S. Olympic team to leave the Soviet Union as quickly as possible once the Summer Games were over).

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By the time Brooke finally left the White House for good in 1985, the idea of a black man holding the nation’s highest political office no longer seemed so far-fetched. Indeed, even as new president Ronald Reagan was delivering his first inaugural address a number of African- American political and cultural leaders had already started to jockey for position in future presidential elections. Black mayors ran ten of the country’s twenty largest cities and black governors ran five of its ten largest states. For one young African-American man this era would have a powerful influence on his future aspirations; Hawaiian- born Barry Obama began to take a more serious interest in political matters around this time, and in so doing would make the first steps on the path that eventually led to his own presidential run in 2008. Obama’s campaign was a further reflection of how deeply the Southern Rebellion War had transformed American society-- its volunteer staff was the most ethnically diverse one ever assembled for a presidential campaign, and in an irony that surely would have raised the eyebrows of both Millard Fillmore and Robert Toombs three of Obama’s biggest electoral victories came in states which had previously been part of the Confederate Republic.

The Southern Rebellion has War proven fertile ground for writers, artists, and filmmakers seeking a dramatic theme for their works. To cite just a few of the best-known examples of fiction using the war as a theme Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, and Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge Of Courage have long enjoyed a strong claim to a place in the ranks of America’s greatest literary classics; on the silver screen David O. Selznick’s 1939 MGM adaptation of Gone and Kevin Willmott’s 2004 “what-if” production CRA: The Movie(which from this author’s perspective frankly works better as a satire on racial bias than as a serious attempt to examine the long- term consequences of a Confederate victory in the Southern Rebellion) have generated both considerable box office profits and a firestorm of political controversy; and sculptures like the Afro-American Veterans’ Memorial in Boston and the “Confederate Mount Rushmore” near Atlanta stand as tangible reminders of the intensity with which both sides in the Southern Rebellion War fought in defense of their ideals.

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To end this series we now pose a question that’s been asked endless times since the final Confederate surrender in 1854: could passing the “Compromise of 1850” bill have averted the outbreak of civil war between North and South? On the whole the answer, if we’re honest about it, has to be “No”. Even at the time the bill was being debated there were numerous warning signs that a break between the Northern and Southern states was close at hand; today, knowing what we do now about the fundamental differences between North and South on slavery and many other critical matters, civil war now seems to have been practically inevitable. Passing the “Compromise of 1850” might have delayed the conflict a few years, maybe even a decade or two, but eventually circumstances and the irreconcilable gulf which separated the pro-slavery mindset then prevalent in the South from the anti-slavery ideology of many Northerners would have forced the two sides into a final reckoning.

It’s actually a notable surprise such a reckoning didn’t take place before 1850. Certainly most of the key ingredients for armed internal conflict were already in place by the beginning of the 19th century; as has been noted in the first chapter of this series no less a figure than Thomas Jefferson predicted as early as 1820 that slavery would one day trigger a clash of arms in which brother would fight brother. And even years after the last shots of the Southern Rebellion had been fired Americans were still significantly divided on racial matters; one can only hope in this day and age, when the questions of ethnic diversity and human rights are taking on renewed importance, that such divisions don’t reassert themselves to such a point the bloody history of the Southern Rebellion War repeats itself.