Was the American Civil War worth it?

 This topic continues to be a source of debate even in the modern era for it is difficult to place a metric onto the cost of human life. More Americans in fact died during the Civil War than all other conflicts that the Nation has been involved in put together (The Department of Defense claims that 1.1 million Americans have died in wars from the Revolutionary War to the conflicts of 2026 inconclusive).

The victims were not only the dead but their families. Lives were shattered and entire infrastructures and economies were destroyed. Sherman’s march to Savannah wrecked much of the South for decades to follow, rendering the challenge of the Reconstruction that followed to be a task of significant magnitude.  In fact one could easily make the case that the South spent the next century in recovery mode. While Slavery did end and the full benefits of the Constitution could be enjoyed by a greater swath of the population the necessary changes did not happen immediately. 

Southern States resisted integration and the backlash against the freed Black population was seen in the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and on a much more extensive level the Jim Crow Laws that followed. It would take until the Civil Rights era - almost a century later - for these vestiges if discrimination to be swept aside by both Legislative and Judicial action.

Yet the war did save the Union as Lincoln intended. He of course wouldn’t live long enough to see the outcomes of the immediate transition as he was assassinated by a Southern sympathizer (John Wilkes Booth) in 1864 but there is no doubt that if the Union had lost the United States would have undergone a binational fission setting up a scenario of differential north and south development. This in all likelihood would have limited the American influence globally with dangerous consequences if we extrapolate to the World Wars of the 20th century. A weakened United States offering a truncated stance for liberal democracy would undoubtedly play into the hands of the totalitarian ideologies of Fascism and Communism - both of which based on the death toll alone took a tremendous toll on humanity several decades after Lincon’s death.

Some have made the point that the war was unnecessary in that Slavery  being the flawed moral and economic system would have died a natural death in the United States as it held elsewhere. Given enough time and slavery would have disappeared into the embers of history as it did in the British Empire. Perhaps this is true but time is a cruel component and history offers little guarantees. Millions suffered as a result of slavery and the US could not saunter along as the divided nation it was through a likelihood of one ‘Bleeding Kansas’ after another as clashes between pro and anti Slavery sides into the expanding territories.  These prolonged conflicts were just not worth it.