The Civil War was certainly the most catastrophic
event in American history. More than 600,000 Northerners
and Southerners died in the war, a greater number than all those
who had died in all other American wars combined. As many as 50,000 died
in a single battle. The high death toll particularly hurt the South,
which had a smaller population going into the war.
Nearly every American lost someone in the war: a friend,
relative, brother, son, or father. In fact, the war was so divisive
that it split some families completely in two. One U.S. senator,
for example, had a son who served as a general in the Union army
and another as a general for the Confederacy. Even the “Great Emancipator”
Abraham Lincoln himself had four brothers-in-law who fought for
the South.
As disastrous as the war was, however, it also brought
the states—in the North as well as the South—closer together. After
the war, the United States truly was united in
every sense of the word. Most obvious, the war ended the debate
over slavery that had divided North and South since the drafting
of the Constitution in 1787.
States had bickered over Missouri, the Wilmot Proviso and the Mexican
Cession, Texas, California, the Fugitive Slave Laws, Dred
Scott v. Sanford, Bleeding Kansas, and John Brown and had still
been unable to resolve the dispute. In this sense, the Civil War had
become inevitable once it was clear that compromises such as the
three-fifths clause, the Missouri Compromise, and the Compromise
of 1850 had
little effect. With each decade, the two regions had drifted further
and further apart. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863,
however, ended the debate for good. Lincoln knew that only when
slavery had been abolished would the debate end and the Union be
reunited.
The Union victory also ended the debates over states’
rights versus federalism. Southerners and Democrats had believed
since Thomas Jefferson’s and James Madison’s Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions
that states had the right to overrule the federal government when
Congress acted unconstitutionally. In other words, they believed
that states—not the Supreme Court—had the power of judicial review
to determine whether Congress’s laws were constitutional or unconstitutional.
John C. Calhoun had raised this point in his South Carolina
Exposition and Protest during the Nullification Crisis
of the 1830s
when he had urged his state to nullify the Tariff of Abominations.
Whigs and Republicans, on the other hand, generally believed the
opposite—that only the Supreme Court had the power of judicial review
and that it was the duty of the states to obey the Court. The South’s
defeat asserted federal power over the states and settled the debate
once and for all.
The Civil War was also a significant event in world history because
the North’s victory proved that democracy worked. When war broke
out in 1861,
many monarchs in Europe had believed smugly that the United States
was on the brink of collapse. Democracy, they argued, was too volatile,
too messy, and too fragile to be of any practical use. Lincoln himself
recognized the historical significance of the war even before it
was over. In his Gettysburg Address, he argued that the Civil War
was a test for democracy and that the outcome of the war would determine
the fate of representative government for the entire world. In his
words, “. . . we here highly resolve . . . that government of the
people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the
earth.”
