DK - The American Civil War

THE COST OF THE WAR

The Civil War transformed fundamental

aspects of the postwar South, leaving the

region impoverished and politically weak

compared to the rest of the country.

THE NEW SOUTH

The Civil War brought an end to slavery and

Reconstruction would give further rights and

freedoms to former slaves 338–39 ❯❯.

Free-labor relations replaced slavery, and blacks

received a share of the returns for their work.

“Sharecropping” allowed laborers to work the

lands of others for a share of the crop. The South

would remain mainly agricultural but railroad

development, manufacturing, and urbanization

would increase dramatically 340-41 ❯❯.

The wealth of this “New South” went largely

to Northern investors or white Southern merchants

and businessmen. For whites and blacks at the

bottom of society, the postwar years were

marked by poverty. Beset by crop failures,

white owners of small farms found themselves

increasingly reliant on cotton to pay debts.

But overproduction lowered prices and indebted

the farmers. The main consequence was the loss

of political influence—not to return until the

20th century.

in the South with dramatic
impact. Armies swept over the
countryside, consuming food
and wood at the expense of
local inhabitants, with perhaps
40 percent of Southern livestock
taken for military purposes. An
unknown number of civilians
died and hundreds of thousands
of whites and blacks became
refugees. Confederates returned
to a devastated South.
War destroyed two-thirds
of the wealth of the South,
most in the value of slaves. The
Southern economy became a
shambles. Reliance on printed
currency led to astronomical
inflation (over 9,000 percent)
and worthless Confederate
money. Southern banks
held insufficient capital for
rebuilding. And the Confederate
government had increasingly seized
much-needed supplies from its people in
exchange for worthless currency.

The ravaged South
Half of the South’s farm machinery had
been destroyed along with hundreds
of miles of railroad track. Additionally,
large portions of Richmond, Mobile,
Columbia, and Atlanta were damaged
by fire. The “hard hand of war” fell
unevenly on the Confederacy and
those hardest hit were in the path of
Sherman’s March or Sheridan’s raid
in the Shenandoah Valley. Republican
politician and German émigré Carl
Schurz saw the devastation of the march
and wrote that South Carolina “looked

for many miles like a

broad black streak of

ruin and desolation—the

fences all gone; lonesome

smoke stacks, surrounded by

dark heaps of ashes and

cinders, marking the spots

where human habitations

had stood; the fields along the

road wildly overgrown by

weeds.” This was not the norm,

however, and in other parts of the

South, the Union army acted with

more restraint.

The economic impact of the

conflict was felt long after the

fighting ended. Manufacturing and

transportation had largely recovered

by the 1870s, but agriculturally the

South would remain a stagnant region

of relative poverty for decades to come.

The effects in the North

While Union forces suffered up to

a third more casualties than the

Confederates, the war had a less

damaging effect on the North. Only half

of the military-aged men had enlisted

in the army or navy, one-quarter of

them immigrants. In contrast to the

Confederates, a lower proportion died

in actual service—roughly one-sixth.

The North had far greater financial,

agricultural, and industrial resources.

A better managed economy, including

increased taxes, national currency, and

successful bonds drives, contained

wartime inflation to 80 percent.

Suffering was largely offset by high

employment and a

rise in wages. Food

production rose

to meet military

demand and

voluntary efforts

by civilians supplemented war needs

for rations, clothing, and medical

supplies. The remaining war debts

were a fraction of those incurred by the

Confederacy and no large impediment

to the postwar economy. The war slowed

immigration and industrial growth but

only temporarily, as the Union economy

emerged stronger from the conflict.

The greatest lingering costs were the

pensions to hundreds of thousands of

veterans, totaling 40 percent of the

Federal budget in the 1890s.

The new nation

A key legacy was a new American

nationalism in which the Union was

deemed perpetual. Symbolically, the

name “The United States” became a

singular noun and a stronger national

government came forth. In wartime, the

nation had instituted compulsory national

conscription, direct

federal income tax,

greenback (paper)

currency, and a

suspension of civil

liberties. In support

of these powers, Republicans had

worked to fashion a new sense of

patriotism emphasizing unconditional

loyalty to the government.

Though many expanded authorities

faded during peacetime, the precedent

of national administration remained.

To ease reconciliation, the Union

government conducted no treason

trials. In May 1865, Jefferson Davis

was imprisoned for two years in Fort

Monroe, Virginia, but released without

trial. General Robert E. Lee was never

arrested. The only high-profile case

was that of Captain Henry Wirz. The

commander of Andersonville Prison,

Wirz was hanged on November 10,

1865, for crimes of mismanagement.

Union soldiers at his execution chanted,

“Wirz, remember Andersonville.”

AFTER

Most Confederates were ultimately

restored to rights by the end of

Reconstruction. However, postwar

Republican dominance did have other

consequences. One was Southern

political and economic marginalization.

Another was the United States’ entry

into an expansive era of industrial

growth with little government

oversight, famously described by Mark

Twain as the “Gilded Age.”

Locomotive in ruins

At the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad depot a

wrecked engine is surveyed. Damage both by the

Confederates in retreat and the advancing Union army

added to the heavy postwar cost borne by the South.

A home destroyed

Henry Mosler’s painting, The Lost Cause, portrays a

war-weary soldier returning home to find a devastated

homestead and his family gone. Mosler sketched the

conflict regularly for the magazine, Harper’s Weekly.

Mosby’s crutches
Confederate Commander John S.
Mosby found the war brutal, as his repeated
need for crutches attested: “They were first
used in August 1863 ... I again used them
in September 1864 and December 1864.”

The estimated

number of soldiers

who entered the Confederate military. The

First Conscription Act was passed in 1862.

850,000