What was the Civil War?
The Civil War, also known as American Civil War, took place between 1861 and 1865, between the north and south of the United States. This conflict brought great destruction, especially to the south of the country, directly affecting its economy and resulting in an approximate balance of 600 thousand dead.
What motivated this conflict?
The American secession was motivated basically by the existing differences between North and South of the United States during the XIX century. The northern states were characterized by manufacturing development, with the existence of small agricultural properties and the predominance of free wage labor.
The south, in turn, was characterized by dependence on agricultural cultivation based on the system of the plantation, in which there was the existence of large land ownership (large estates), based on monoculture (generally cotton) and totally dependent on slave labor. Economically, these antagonistic models complemented each other, but politically, each side had different interests, which contributed to the erosion of relations between these regions.
The great divergence between the two sides was based on the debate on the model of society that would be implemented in the new American territories. That's because, with the process of march west, began the occupation of the American West, with the defense by the southerners of the extension of slave labor for these places, while northerners were against this idea and defended the prohibition of slavery in these new territories.
This issue generated great controversy between the two sides, mainly due to the occupation of the territories of the Kansas It's from Nebraska. Politically, the two sides were in intense dispute and this was reflected in society, as the existing tension in Kansas, mainly, led to the emergence of small militias that fought each other.
Southern dissatisfaction with northerners' attempts to abolish slavery led many of them to advocate ideals of separatism to maintain their way of life. All these issues were channeled into the 1860 presidential election, with southerners taking a stand against the Republican candidacy. Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln was seen by southerners as a committed abolitionist and his victory for president motivated them – who already defended separatist ideals – to start a movement of secession, that is, of separation. Lincoln's victory made the state of South Carolina declare his secession in December 1860, when the newly elected candidate had not even assumed the presidency.
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The secession of South Carolina was accompanied by the accession, between January and June 1861, of other states southerners such as Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee. With the secession of the southerners, the Confederate States of America.
Mind Map: War of Secession
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How was the war?
The first act of aggression with secession came from the Confederate side in April 1861. Confederate armies attacked a fort occupied by Union troops in South Carolina. This event was known as Fort Sumter Battle and did not register deaths. This southern attack mobilized Union resistance under Lincoln's leadership.
Initially, the Union army consisted of 80,000 soldiers, a number that increased considerably throughout the war. The fighting in the Civil War advocated a striking feature of wars in that period: the trenches. The development of machine guns made infantry warfare – in the traditional molds – unfeasible, making it necessary to man the trenches.
Therefore, the Civil War stood out for its violence and high mortality combat such as the battle in Gettysburg, known for its high death toll (about 30,000 soldiers).
southern defeat
The southern defeat in the conflict was consolidated for the following reasons:
Southerners failed to gain foreign support, mainly from France and England;
The economic maritime embargo, applied by Lincoln to the southerners, choked the local economy and generated a shortage crisis, including in the Confederate army, which resulted in desertions;
The actions of northerners to encourage the flight of slaves in southern possessions increased the economic crisis in the south.
The combination of these factors led to the surrender of the Southerners in April 1865. With the war, the south was devastated, with great material destruction and an economy in shambles. The war consolidated the abolition of slavery across the country with the enactment of 13th Constitutional Amendment, and the reconstruction and reintegration of the south into the Union began. The balance of the conflict was 600,000 dead, marking the secession as the biggest war in American history.
By Daniel Neves
Graduated in History
