Was the result of the civil war worth the loss of lives?

Answer 1

The answer probably depends on your point of view. The most visible result, and the one people think of most often today, was the end of slavery. But slavery almost certainly would have died out within a generation or two anyway - international pressure was strongly against human slavery. The US was not the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to still have slavery - at the end of our Civil War there was still slavery in places like Cuba and Brazil, for example (and there is still slavery today, in Africa and the Muslim world, and other places), but slavery ended in Cuba and Brazil, within a generation or two after our Civil War. If eventually the US government had agreed, and obtained the acquiescence of the slave holders, to compensated emancipation - where the government pays the slave owner the value of the slave, who is then free - it would have been expensive, but still far cheaper than what the war cost financially, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of dead. So whether you believe the end of slavery twenty, thirty, maybe forty years before it would have expired on its own was worth 620,000 dead soldiers (plus uncounted civilians, black as well as white) is a matter of opinion. Descendants of slaves may well say of course it was worth it, but, was going from possibly benign, paternalistic slavery to impoverished, disenfranchised share cropping all that much of an improvement?

The other and perhaps the main result of the Civil War, which is hardly mentioned and little understood today, is the transformation of government within the US. From the start up to the Civil War what we had in America was exactly what the men who wrote the Constitution designed - a loose conglomeration of sovereign states, with a central government of weak and LIMITED powers. The Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, still says today that the central government has only those powers SPECIFICALLY given to it by the states in the Constitution, and NO MORE, and that all other powers are still in the state governments, or in the people themselves. This just does not really mean anything anymore. The central government, as a result of the Civil War, is immensely more powerful than what was envisioned by the framers of the Constitution, far more powerful than anyone agreed to when the Constitution was adopted, and has been increasing its power over the states and the people continuously since the Civil War ended. One can argue that this is a good thing - that a powerful central government was probably necessary for the US to be on the winning side in the world wars; that a government with the ability to tax individual citizens can do much more good for more of the people than would be possible under the original system. But still, no one has ever yet agreed to accept this all-powerful, intrusive "nanny state" we have today, which emerged as the real (and unmentioned) result of our Civil War.

AnswerAs pointed out above, the two biggest changes brought about by the American Civil War were the abolition of slavery (and the fundamental change this wrought on the South) and the rise of the Federal Government as supreme in power to that of the devolved States.

Frankly, though, there is one additional change that is monumental: the change in the American character. This is a superset of the above two results, and is most likely the biggest beneficial outcome of the Civil War, in terms of how it affected the United State's destiny.

Gradual emancipation would almost certainly (but not inevitably) happened by about 1900 - there were increasing calls for compensated emancipation, and, in any case, the likelihood of a "phase out" of slavery was high - that is, no person born after a certain date (likely around 1875 or so) OR who was brought in after that time could be a slave, while all then current slaves would remain property. However, the damage that such a transition does in terms of cultural mores is immense - the reason slavery was such a big deal in the USA vs most of the rest of the world which had abolished it was that slavery was radically bigger here than anywhere else. Up to a third of the South's population were slaves, and roughly 20% of the total US population were slaves.

Even a gradual emancipation would leave a large portion of that population slaves for extended periods of time, and the cultural mentality that goes with "owning" a fellow human being is immensely damaging. Racial animosity between blacks and white would have remained extraordinary high for far, far longer than they have today - in fact, such a gradual emancipation would almost certainly have left the USA with an apartheid culture far stronger than even the one it had post-Civil War. With slavery only fading away after 1900, and a large former slave population still alive well into the 20th century, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s seems highly unlikely, at least until well into the 21st Century. Put it this way: very few former slaves were alive during WW1, and (virtually) none by the time of WW2. Particularly with WW1, how likely would US involvement have been if, at that time, 20% of the population was either a former slave or directly related to one? Sending soldiers to fight for someone else's freedom a continent away seems far less likely when Americans were unwilling to do that same thing on their own soil.

The tremendous sacrifice of so many Northern soldiers in the Civil War changed that possible outcome. Rightly or Wrongly, the vast majority of blacks (and a substantial minority of whites) in the USA at the time interpreted the Civil War as a moral crusade against slavery, and the North's victory radically rewrote many of the underlying assumptions Americans made about themselves. True equality of personhood would have to wait 100 years, but the fundamental assumption that all human beings were free and deserved liberty became a benchmark American trait. That trait is a huge driving force between much of the 20th century American movements: the woman's suffrage movement, the eventual Civil Rights movement, and the American Internationalism view that drove US involvement in global affairs, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt and through the two World Wars and beyond.

In terms of a change in view on government, the American Civil War had less of a practical change in how government was organized, or even the "proper" functioning thereof. That is, both pre- and post-war, the general American view of the central government was still one of a limited reach and limited responsibility. It would take the mass industrialization and death associated with the First World War to radically remake the Federal government into the sprawling animal it is today.

That said, what the Civil War did do was radically remake the relationship and power structure between the constituent States and the Federal government. While Marbury v. Madison may have established the principle that Federal law was supreme, the idea that the U.S. was a nation first and foremost, and a collection of states secondly was a direct result of the Civil War. The Civil War forever broke the idea that the USA was a voluntary association of states. That is, the USA became a nation made up of people, not a collection of states, and that ultimate sovereignty lie in the people, not at the state. It was the defining moment in US culture where people switched from thinking of the US as a form of confederation, and to one of the USA as a monolithic nation.

This is a world-shattering change. No more would people think of themselves a Virginians, or New Yorkers, or Delewarians, who happened to work with (and have some passing association with) people from other states. Even in the South (and, particularly amongst the black population there), the culture moved away from allegiance (and identity) to state, and to one of being an American. The Civil War is what produces the American Identity. And that American Identity is the driver behind the vast majority of major events for the next Century and beyond.

In many ways, the American Civil War was the shock required to move the USA beyond the cozy compromises and resulting comfortably static culture that was a result of the compromises required to make the original Constitution work, and into a society and identity much closer to that originally espoused by many of the Founding Fathers.

As to whether or not it was worth the 600,000+ dead and 1 million wounded and billions of dollars in damage, that's an individual assessment. Personally, I think it was. The reforging of the American Identity around a great moral crusade could not have happened without the Civil War. It changed the US from being an inward-looking, ultimately selfish (or at least merely self-involved) people into one continually looking outward for the improvement of all humankind. Even if it usually fails at such aspirations, it is one of, if not the only nation on earth, that has such a universal moral view and impulse to improve the human condition everywhere, not merely for its own people.