It was the first war to bring the full impact of the industrial revolution to bear on the battlefield. The Civil War is sometimes called the first modern war, although what constitutes “modernity” in warfare is a matter of debate. For those who lived through it, the Civil War would always remain the defining experience of their lives. The 620,000 combatants who perished nearly outnumber those who died in all other American wars combined. The war produced a loss of life unprecedented in the American experience. In the physical destruction it brought to the South, the economic changes it produced throughout the nation, and the new ideas it spawned, the Civil War altered the lives of several generations of Americans. In its aftermath, during the era of Reconstruction, Americans struggled to come to terms with these dramatic changes and, temporarily, established biracial democratic government on the ashes of slavery. The war changed the nature of warfare, gave rise to today’s American nation-state, and destroyed a slave society unprecedented in the modern world. The various meanings imparted to it offer a useful way of outlining why the Civil War was so pivotal in our own history. Otto von Bismarck, the Chancellor of Germany, welcomed Grant as a nation builder, who had accomplished on the battlefield something-national unity-that Bismarck was attempting to create for his own people.Īs the reaction to Grant’s tour demonstrates, contemporaries recognized the Civil War as an event of international significance. Parading English workers hailed him as the man whose military prowess had saved the world’s leading experiment in democratic government and as a Hero of Freedom who had helped secure the emancipation of America’s four million slaves. In England, the son of the Duke of Wellington, whose father had vanquished Napoleon, greeted Grant as a military genius, the primary architect of Union victory in the American Civil War. At almost every location, he was greeted as a hero. Grant, embarked with his wife on a two-year tour of the world. In 1877, soon after retiring as president of the United States, Ulysses S.
0 kommentar(er)
