by Jerry Curtis

Created on: September 01, 2007   Last Updated: January 12, 2012

The U.S. Civil War had several significant outcomes:

• It abolished slavery as a legal institution in the United States.

The one irreconcilable difference between the North and the South during a time when our country was expanding was the introduction of slavery into new territories. In fact, the main prelude to the bloodbath to come was in "Bleeding Kansas" during the late 1850's as people actively killed one another over the question of slavery. It took two additional amendments to the U.S. Constitution and an additional hundred years of civil rights struggle to completely erase the stain of slavery, but the Civil War and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation began the process.

• It resolved the question of the legality of secession.

The war settled once and for all an issue not addressed in our Constitution: Does an individual state have the right, through the will of its people, to dissolve its voluntary affiliation with the Federal Union? Jefferson Davis and his cohorts in the eleven states of the Confederacy thought yes and convened state conventions to dissolve their relationship to the federal government. Abraham Lincoln saw the secessionist movement as an unconstitutional attempt to nullify a presidential election. Lincoln, therefore, saw the issue as a simple matter of preserving the democratic process. No government, Lincoln said, could have in its philosophy the means to destroy itself. The issue that was left out of our Constitution, that could not be resolved by peaceful consensus,was settled by the Civil War. The North won, and the seceded states were eventually reabsorbed into the Union.

• The Civil War united the country as never before.

Prior to the four-year blood bath, there was no particular sense of nation and commonality among the individual states. Sectional differences and profound resentments brought on by slavery, and egalitarian issues brought on by industrialization and immigration in the North became a toxic brew that could only boil over into the struggle our Civil War became. When the North won the struggle through force of attrition and overpowering industrial strength, the South had to succumb and accept what they already knew was true: The United States was an indissoluble country and their future was with the Union. Before the Civil War, sentences began with, "The United States ARE" After the war, it became, "The United States IS."

• The war sped up invention and technology.

Battles on the scale of Gettysburg,

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