Civil War

he American Civil War, until halfway through the Vietnam War, was bloodier then all other American wars combined. Nearly one million soldiers were killed during its four years. From its ruins, a new freedom would come for millions of Americans previously held in bondage. The nation would pay a great cost for those four years, and the years after were no less turbulent. It would take nearly a century to complete the changes that the war brought about and many feel those changes have not yet been fulfilled.

Some historians believe the war was avoidable. Called revisionists, they held that far from being an irrepressible conflict, it was quite preventable. They blame northern and southern firebrands for causing the war, the former being Anti-slavery and the latter pro.

Years after the revisionists arrival, other historians would emerge to present a countervailing opinion. They contend that the conflict was anything but avoidable and that the South and the North were locked in a deadly game of, "Chicken," which neither could stop; the only outcome foreseeable was war. Many have agreed with this irrepressible conflict argument, but for different reasons; some place the inevitability of the war on the fact that the South was unwilling to do away with slavery. This argument is quite persuasive, given slavery's importance to the agrarian economy of the South. Some will tell you that the South was destined to clash with the North because of a crisis of nationalism. This argument presents the South as a separate nation that could no longer tolerate life within the United States. Ernest Gellner would write decades later, "Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent."(1) The South, held these historians, could no longer tolerate the North's "abusive ways."