Dramatic effects of the Civil War

¶ … American Civil War surely had an impact on the enslaved men, women and children and the restoration of the Union. However, it had many other far-reaching effects on different populations and socio-cultural aspects. These included the American women, children, religion, British labor, Northern industry.

Naturally, much of the literature regarding the Civil War deals with the men of this time -- the soldiers and the male slaves. However, women were influenced as well. According to Attie (1998) the Northern women were impacted in a specific way. During the war in women were praised for their patriotic spirit and hard work via public ceremonies, political speeches, church pulpits, and, shortly after the war commemorative volumes, Union. However, the women also were confronted with the fact that their citizenship was not so much due to direct participation in the political arena, but rather through their benevolent deeds and status as housewives. Women were still under the control of their male counterparts. They watched male allies from the abolitionist movement ignore woman's rights to elevate black suffrage as the overriding political goal of Reconstruction, and sensed a growing wave of antifeminist feeling. When the Civil War began, woman's rights' activists had publicly put aside their political in defense of the Union, believing that they would be reward at the end of the war. Yet, once the women were excluded from the widening of suffrage in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, these feminist leaders began working toward their own strategy to advance female political rights.

Young boys fought in the Civil War, a scores of them were killed from both sides. However, the youths who stayed home were living in a war-torn country. What did this do them? Marten (1998 3). Children first learned about the war through newspapers, novels, and public performances and panoramas, and from games and toys designed expressly for them. They learned about the issues that sparked the war and about responses to the conflict. They also received letters from absent fathers, who provided firsthand information about the blood and violence, as well as the wounded or killed fathers and brothers. Then they experienced the war first hand as battles destroyed towns and families fled their homes to safety and patriotic excitement gripped northerners and southerners alike. Marten (1998) argues that such experience politicized the children in both the North and South and led them integrate the war into their everyday lives and to contribute in a myriad of ways to their countries' war efforts. In addition, "affected, in striking ways, how they viewed the world, their country, their communities, and themselves" (4).

In addition to the populations of women and children, the war had an effect on socio-cultural aspects, such as religion. As in any traumatic experience or disaster, people will question their relationship to a higher order. Some people will entirely lose their faith, believing that they have been forsaken. Others will become more religious with the hope that God will be on their side. According to Miller, Stout and Regan (1998), many Americans gave the war cosmic meaning, as Lincoln at Gettysburg. Preachers and politicians stressed the belief that the war not only touched and tapped America's soul but also directed them to the salvation of republican order and society everywhere. Historians, too, noted the pervasiveness of religious symbols among soldiers and civilians and the ways Americans invoked religion to drum up support for their side in the war and justify their actions.

On the other extreme from religion, war had an influence on business and industry. Much is written about the influence on the Southern plantations and cotton and tobacco industries. However, the northern industries were also influenced. The Civil War's effect on Northern industry was inconsistent. Many materials from this time report to evidence that the North's industrial capacity was greatly expanded by the conflict. On the other hand, other significant statistical information suggests that the war exercised no major influence on Northern industry and may have even reduced its growth. Several historians have been studying this topic, including Faust (2002).

Faust (2002) states that one considerable economic result of the war was that it helped change the nation from a country with a primarily agricultural society to one reliant on mechanization and a national market system. Prior to the war, only the North had an industrial base, although quite small. During the fiscal year ending in June of 1860, the country possessed some 128,300 industrial establishments. Of these, 110,274 were located in states that remained in the Union. The war made this disparity even greater.

Faust explains that statistics show that even though the loss of the Southern crop led to a steep war-long decline in production of cotton textiles, the North's largest industry, its woolen industry had a 100% production rise during the conflict. The second largest consumer industry in the Union, shoes and leather, also experienced tremendous growth, due to army contracts that more than offset the loss of the Southern market. Other war related industries, especially firearms, gunpowder, and wagon manufacturing, rose quickly, based on the number of military contracts being requested at various times during the battles..

Similarly Northern iron production declined earlier in the war but boomed 1863-64, and reached a production level 29% higher than that of the entire country in the busiest prewar year, 1856. Meanwhile, the coal industry experienced the same growth, and in 1861-65 enjoyed an expansion rate 21% higher than for the whole country during the four years immediately preceding civil strife.

It was not only the Americans who were influenced by the war, but other countries who were involved as well, including the British (Campbell 2003). When the Civil War came to an end, both the North and South condemned Britain for supposedly sympathizing with the other side. Many have believed that after the conflict, that the British divided their sentiment between the Union progressivism and Confederate conservatism. Campbell says, however, that this belief has been wrong all along.