The Civil war preserved the nation created in 1776, spelled the end of a social and economic system based on chattel slavery, and set in motion the forces that made America an economic and political colossus. It also transformed the United States from a decentralized republic where the federal government had few direct contacts with its citizens to one that taxed them directly, enacted a draft and national bank, expanded the powers of its courts, established a system of national currency, and confiscated 3 billion dollars in personal property by emancipating the 4 million slaves.
The conflict lasted four years and produced the highest death toll in American history. It killed more than 60,000 whites and more than 300,000 blacks, forged heroes out of ordinary men and women, and changed the course of American history.
Both sides mobilized soldiers on a scale unprecedented in American history. The Confederacy had about 1,000,000 military-age white men; the Union mustered more than 2.1 million, a little less than half its 1860 population. The Union navy kept a continuous naval blockade off the coast of the South, and the US military seized key Confederate cities like Richmond and Petersburg.
Nat Turner’s bloody slave rebellion in Virginia, the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry fed fears in the South that their chattel slavery-based social and economic systems were being threatened. In addition, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass advocated for black enlistment and were rebuffed at every turn by President Lincoln, until rising political pressures and the realities of war finally changed that policy in 1862.
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