Results of the War
Nearly all the fighting took place on Southern soil, so that section suffered heavy war damage. Some regions, such as central Georgia and the Shenandoah Valley, were deliberately ravaged. Freeing of the slaves added a property loss estimated at two billion dollars. The Federal government spent more than six billion dollars on the war; the Confederacy, perhaps two billion dollars.
Both sides sustained heavy casualties. There were far more deaths caused by disease than by combat. Estimated total deaths are 360,000 for the Union army and 260,000 for the Confederate army.
Physical reconstruction in the South was a great problem, but more serious difficulties were encountered in the effort to politically reintegrate the Southern states into the Union. Both Lincoln and his successor, Andrew Johnson, wanted the conditions for the readmission of the rebellious states into the Union to be mild and conciliatory. However, some Republican congressmen, known as the Radical Republicans, considered the Presidential conditions to be too lenient, and formulated their own Reconstruction policy.
The objectives of the Radical Republicans were to protect the former slaves (or freedmen) and to punish the leaders of the Confederacy, whom they considered to be traitors. All Confederate leaders were denied their civil rights, but only Jefferson Davis was charged with treason. He spent two years in prison but was never brought to trial.
The Radical Republicans outraged white Southerners by enacting laws that gave political and economic rights to blacks. The Southern response was sometimes violent; the Ku Klux Klan was formed to terrorize blacks and other supporters of Reconstruction. To enforce its Reconstruction policies, Congress imposed military rule on most of the South in 1867. Governments formed under Reconstruction were sometimes inefficient and corrupt, but they enacted much progressive legislation. Eventually the commitment of the Federal government to its Reconstruction policies waned; by 1877 all Southern states were controlled by white supremacists, who began to strip blacks of their political, economic, and civil rights.
The Civil War is often called “the first modern war.” It saw the introduction of rapid-fire weapons. Trenches were first used extensively in battle. The railway and the telegraph were first used in a large-scale war. The campaigns of Lee, Jackson, Grant, Sherman, and Joseph E. Johnston were studied abroad for new concepts of strategy and tactics. At sea, ironclad ships and rifled cannon had made the wooden navies of the world obsolete.
Interest in the campaigns, and in the personalities of Lincoln, Lee, and other leaders, made the Civil War one of the most studied periods in American history. It has been a subject for many best-selling novels and much poetry. Its story continues to fascinate historians, writers, and hobbyists.
