ABSTRACT
The Civil War placed a monumental roadblock in the path of empire. It would take decades for the nation to fully recover and rebuild consensus for foreign policy expansion. Diplomacy was thus halting and uneven in the post-bellum years. Yet despite lingering sectional divisions through the remainder of the nineteenth century, the United States purchased Alaska, asserted its influence in Latin America, advanced the Anglo-American rapprochement despite episodic but often serious tensions with Great Britain, and conducted a massive campaign of Western Indian remov al culminating in an internal colonialism. By the end of the nineteenth century the United States was an emerging global power.
