The Civil War left far too much the same
Susan-Mary Grant, Professor of American History at Newcastle University
In The Gilded Age, the novel that named the postwar era, Mark Twain observed that the Civil War had ‘uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations’. This quotation frequently pops up in discussions of the war’s legacy. Yet whatever America’s civil conflict did, it did not uproot centuries-old institutions. At the time of writing, the United States’ centenary as a separate, political state was still three years away.
Twain initiated a tendency to accord the Civil War a more profound legacy than it merits. Largely this tendency revolves around slavery and emancipation in respect of the betrayal of the opportunity that the war provided to secure social, economic and political equality for all. Although the Civil War did expand the power of the American state, increasing the number of federal employees almost tenfold, the power of this state was limited in significant ways. Then, as now, there was often a disconnect between what the law allowed and what the government and the people actually did.
Despite the downsizing of the military after 1865, the war confirmed and reinforced the martial strain in the American national character. America had long placed its faith in the power of the people in arms and in their relinquishing of said arms once the danger was over. But historians are increasingly uncovering the destructive long-term costs, physical and psychological, to those involved in the Civil War, combatants and non-combatants alike.
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