Civil War

Over the course of her lengthy history, America has been involved in several horrific conflicts. World War I and World War II were very arduous battles that put a strain on the nation's resources. But none of those battles can compare to the Civil War, not just in terms of its cruelty and loss of human life, but also in terms of the societal harm it wrought.

America is proud of the fact that it has never fought a war on its own land. We have never been attacked on our own land, with the exception of Pearl Harbor and 911. So it took a war pitting brother against brother, American against American, to even consider the potential of conflict within America's borders.

For such a brief fight, the war's numbers are startling. On April 12, 1861, the war began. The Confederacy was the first to shed blood when it attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The Civil War battles were legendary. Many of those ancient battlefields have been preserved to this day to memorialise the fallen of both sides in this violent fight.

The North had an edge in terms of planning, equipment, and supply throughout the conflict. However, Confederate Army commander General Robert E. Lee was a skilled tactician, and fights frequently resulted in large deaths on both sides. Over 970,000 Americans perished as a result of the Civil War, according to the ultimate total. While this statistic does not compare to the massive casualties in the two global wars that followed, it did represent 3% of the American population at the time. And, given that the vast majority of those killed in the war were from America's young, the conflict's impact on the country's economic progress was absolutely astonishing.

In modern times, the Civil War is remembered as a monumental war to eliminate the evils of slavery in the United States. To be sure, the Civil War is and will always be an important element of black history and the start of the American civil rights movement. However, the roots of the Civil War were complicated and varied, making pre-conflict negotiations and resolution much more challenging.

Part of the debate was whether states' rights to self-determination should be weighed against the federal government's ability to control matters in particular states. On the surface, this may appear insignificant in comparison to abolishing slavery, but in light of our recent revolt against England for attempting to impose arbitrary rules on the colonies, it was an important connection to iron out.

Americans are fiercely independent people, and that spirit was established in the conflicts of the Revolutionary War, when America declared unequivocally that it would no longer submit to a monarch or allow a centralised government to have such wide influence over individual lives. The fury over England's attempt to enslave the colonies was the catalyst for the Revolutionary War. And great care was taken to ensure that the federal government's ability to interfere in the lives of its inhabitants was severely restrained in the constitution and other important texts.

Beyond that, the Civil War fought for the preservation of the union as a single country. The moral issue of slavery, however, was what made the Civil War such an emotive topic and one that drove individuals to fight with such zeal to protect their side. Even Abraham Lincoln, in the end, made slavery the major rationale for the war, deciding that the abolition of this horrific system would be the war's legacy.

But one legacy of the Civil War was the decision that we, as Americans, would never again use our military to attack our own population. Family members were torn apart by the conflict, which pitted brother against brother. The country has had a bruise in its national psyche over this war since reconstruction and the union of America, and that bruise reminds us that we are one people and will always be one people devoted to the causes of truth, justice, and the American way of life.