Did the United States benefit in the long run from having a civil war?

by qwasar1

What I mean is, for some wars like WW2 or WW1 it could be argued that the boom in wartime technology development or economic development (from weapon sales etc) ended up creating advantages for the US in the long run. In the civil war however, the US sustained all the damage from the war, suffered all the casualties, and had to deal with what seems to have been a very contentious period of reconstruction for the south. Slavery was abolished of course, but were there any other not-as-obvious benefits to the civil war?

AndyBirch

The end of the Civil War was a very significant, if not the most, event in US history. The conclusion of the war can essentially be boiled down to a few main points:

 

    1. The abolition of slavery - This is the most obvious one. Slavery was now, by law, illegal in the US. Despite this groundbreaking event, African-Americans would still work under bad conditions in the South, as the ghosts of the civil war continued to linger for a long time.

 

    1. The creation of a modern nation-state I suppose this is sort of what you were looking for. After the war, there was a paradigm shift in the way, that the United States went from being a union, with the States being addressed in plural, to a nation, with the United States being singular. This also marked a shift in the American mentality in general, that for once, it was a single nation.

 

    1. The first modern war The American Civil War was known as the first modern war, due to the fact that it was massive armies fighting each other with the weapons of the Industrial Revolution. These weapons included massive cannons and fast-loading rifles with it's grooved barrel which provided longer ranged, had replaced the musket. Beginning as a conflict of army versus army, the war became a conflict of society against society, in which the distinction between military and civilian targets often disappeared.

 

Now, all these points all factored in, what the United States gained from the Civil War in the long run, called the Second Industrial Revolution. Post Civil War, the US underwent a rapid and economic revolution. The country enjoyed abundant natural resources, a growing supply of labor, an expanding market for manufactured goods and the availability of capital for investment. In addition, the federal government actively promoted industrial and agricultural development. It enacted high tariffs that protected American industry from foreign competition, granted land to railroad companies to encourage construction and used the army to remove Indians from western lands desired by farmers and mining companies. There was a transition from being a farmland nation, to being an industrial nation. People moved to the cities.

 

Sources:

Foner, Eric. "Chapter 14. "A New Birth of Freedom: The Civil War, 1861-1865" and Chapter 15. "What Is Freedom?": Reconstruction, 1865-1877." Give Me Liberty!: An American History. Seagull 4th ed. Vol. Fourth. W. W. Norton, 2014. 509-592.

Notes from my bachelor on American Studies.