The American Civil War transformed societies' beliefs about education, as well as state policy regarding schools. The common schools of the 1850s tended to be locally funded, selective, and voluntary institutions. The Civil War, and the widespread belief, especially in the North, that a national system of common schools might have averted that conflict profoundly altered the antebellum vision of schools. By the end of the nineteenth-century, reformers were transforming public schools into a system that they intended to be state funded, universal and compulsory. Out of Reconstruction emerged a notion of schools as a unifying force for Union, and a belief that a common public education must be both universal and compulsory to assure civil liberties.