312 The American Civil Warbattalions.' There is truth to the North's
preponderance of strength. Federals
employed over two million soldiers, while
the Confederacy mustered close to 900,000.
Despite having one million men in uniform
at once, the Northern states grew enough
food to feed civilians and soldiers and still
market huge amounts overseas. By the end
of the war, the Union had over 700 navy
vessels, many of them ironclads; the
Confederacy had almost none. From
November 1862 to late October 1863, the
Union army purchased from Northern
factories as many field artillery guns as the
Confederacy's principal producer, Tredegar
Iron Works, manufactured in the entire war.
That same year, the Federal Ordnance
Department bought over 1.4 million artillery
rounds and 260 million small-arms cartridges
from Northern munitions makers. For the
entire war, the Confederacy produced only
150 million small-arms cartridges, and the
Richmond Arsenal, the Confederacy's largest
manufacturer, made 921,000 artillery rounds.
Nor were these lopsided statistics simply
anomalies. The same overwhelming
advantages existed in weapons, clothing, and
other military accouterments. But as the
Vietnam experience demonstrated,
overwhelming superiority in equipment,
population, and even technology do not
assure victory.
Ultimately, three critical factors enabled
the Union to win the war. First, it possessed
overwhelming resources in population,
industrialization, agriculture, and
transportation, and a slight edge in
technology. Second, the Union benefited
from political and military leaders who
harnessed those resources, transforming them
into military might and focusing that power
on the critical aspects of the Confederacy'.
Finally, the Federals had a home front that
remained committed enough to the war to
see it through to its conclusion, despite all
the losses, hardships, and sacrifices.
What were the consequences of the war?
Several were obvious. More than 260,000
Confederate soldiers and over 360,000
Federals died in the war. The preponderance
lost their lives to disease. An additional
500,000 suffered wounds, and hundreds of
thousands more endured ailments and
disabilities from their days in the service.
According to the best estimate, the total cost
of the Civil War exceeded $20 billion, a
figure 31 times larger than the federal
government's budget in 1860. In fact, so
devastating was the war to the Confederacy
that it took some six decades for the
Southern states to reach their 1860 level in
agricultural productivity.
Once and for all time, the war removed
the scourge of slavery from the American
landscape. Well over four million
African-Americans had been held, sold, and
controlled as chattel. The war destroyed that
institution. Hundreds of thousands entered
Federal lines on their own. Others followed
the Union armies to freedom. Still many
more waited until the fighting ceased before
securing their liberty. Passage and ratification
of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US
Constitution, abolishing slavery forever,
made certain that wartime measures freeing
slaves could not be overturned in peacetime.
While the achievement of freedom was a
wondrous thing for blacks, white society
prevented them from exploiting its benefits
fully. The Fourteenth Amendment secured
citizenship and equal protection and due
process of law. The Fifteenth Amendment
granted black males the right to vote. But in
time, Southern whites resurrected their
power and stripped African-Americans of
many of their rights. Northerners, tired of
war and struggles over power in the South,
yielded Southern control to Southern whites.
Although African-Americans in the South
and the North were better off after the
destruction of slavery, it took more than a
century for them to achieve their Civil War
goal of basic civil rights.
By winning the war, too, the Northern
vision of the United States took precedence
over the more local, states' rights,
agriculturally oriented version of the South.
No longer were they states united, but a
United States. The federal government
established its preponderance over the state