A War That Never Goes Away

The Civil War was the bloodiest war in all of United States history. The war had different reasons of coming about. The war began as a fight for national unity, but the cry for the abolition of slavery soon took a hold and set forth a new reason to continue the fight. The people experienced exponential devastation with the amount of casualties from this war and that is one reason this war haunts so many. The act of the south seceding almost tore apart this democracy as we know it, and the end of this war made it clear whether this democracy would work or not. The civil war was originally fought for liberty, but changing motivations and the horrible number of casualties changed the mood of the war, and the results of it.

"If asked to define it [the war] in a single word, many soldiers on both sides would have answered: liberty." (pg. 268) the Civil War began when several southern states seceded or "revolted" from the Union after the election of northern republican Abraham Lincoln. The people of the south believed this was within their rights to do, after all, this country was built from revolution. Lincoln however, believed that "the right of revolution . . . is never a legal right . . . at most it is but a moral right, when exercised for a justifiable cause." Unfortunately, their cause was not justified because Lincoln was elected by the people, and the south thought it was legal to leave the Union once they lost an election. (pg. 269) The liberty that the north fought for was the preservation of the ideals our constitution set forth to us in 1776. The abolition of slavery, was mostly a side effect of the war, but it soon became a so called "American paradox" (pg. 270) because, when slaves were viewed as property, they were legally confiscated as contraband of war, but the participation of blacks in the war, "a series of congressional acts plus Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation" (pg.