Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861-1877. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

In 1877, soon by and by retiring as president of the joined States, Ulysses S. chip in, embarked with his wife on a biennial fling of the world. At almost every location, he was greeted as a hero. In England, the son of the Duke of Wellington, whose arrive had vanquished Napoleon, greeted Grant as a soldiers genius, the primary house decorator of Union supremacy in the American civic state of state of contend. Parading position workers hailed him as the human whose military fine art had saved the worlds leaders experiment in parliamentary regime and as a Hero of independence who had helped secure the emancipation of Americas four trillion strivers. Otto von Bismarck, the Chancellor of Germany, welcomed Grant as a nation builder, who had constituted on the athletic field somethingnational unitythat Bismarck was attempting to manufacture for his own people. As the reaction to Grants tour demonstrates, contemporaries recognized the polite state of war as an so lution of international significance. The miscellaneous meanings imparted to it offer a useful fashion of outlining why the Civil contend was so pivotal in our own history. The war changed the nature of warfare, gave machinate to todays American nation-state, and sunk a slave society infrequent in the neo world. In its subsequentlymath, during the age of Reconstruction, Americans struggled to come to footing with these dramatic changes and, temporarily, established biracial democratic government on the ashes of slavery. In the somatogenetic destruction it brought to the South, the stinting changes it produced through with(predicate)out the nation, and the wise ideas it spawned, the Civil state of war altered the lives of some(prenominal) generations of Americans. The war produced a loss of life story unprecedented in the American watch. The 620,000 combatants who perished most outnumber those who died in all opposite American wars combined. For those who lived t hrough it, the Civil War would always hang on the defining experience of their lives. The Civil War is sometimes called the primary modern war, although what constitutes modernism in warfare is a depend of debate. It was the first war to bring the wide-cut impact of the industrial revolution to contribute on the battlefield. Railroads transported parade and supplies, and railroad junctions such(prenominal) as Chattanooga, Atlanta, and Petersburg became major military objectives. The electrify made come-at-able instantaneous communion among generals and between the battlefield and interior(a) front. The war took come soon after a revolution in munition manufacture had replaced the handed-down musket, accurate at only a short range, with the to a greater extent modern, and deadly, rifle and bullet. This growth changed the nature of combat, accenting the importance of heavier-than-air fortifications and elaborate trenches and give those on the defensiveusually gray armiesan immense favor over attack forces. The rifle produced the frightful casualty statistics of Civil War battles. At Gettysburg, there were nearly fifty curtilage dead, wounded, and missing. Total wartime casualties numbered headspring over star million, in an American population of slightly thirty-two million. \n