The Civil War is a transformational period for people’s consciousness in the United States. It happened between 1861-1865 and was a pivotal event to determine the kind of nation the US citizens would be (Masich 3). The Civil War began on account of inflexible contrasts between the states which were divided into those who supported freedom and people who preferred to keep slavery. At that time, the number of people who wanted to prohibit enslavement in the South was gradually increasing. Northern triumph in the war protected the United States as a unified country and finished establishing servitude that had isolated the nation from its start. The war settled the question of whether the US would be a sectioned confederation of sovereign states or an inseparable country with a sovereign public government. Consequentially, the long battle built the fundamental way of thinking that a person’s freedom should not be determined by his or her race and ethnicity.
The Civil War led to the improvement of the economy and industrialization of the United States. The economy extensively differed in various sections of the US on the verge of the war. While most Americans lived and worked on farms, their financial lives substantially varied from one another. In the South, life was based on unfree work and staple harvests. The North contained a more prominent variety of industry, money, business, and little owners (Oakes 220). After the Civil War, sharecropping and occupant cultivating replaced servitude and the manor framework in the South (Schoen 71). Shared farming was frameworks in which white property owners made contracts with ruined homestead workers to crop their lands (Oakes 221). The area of southern land assigned to cotton cultivating inside the previous Confederate states increased four times between the war and 1920 (Ransom 375). Hence, farming and trading were popularized during the Civil War.
What is more, the abolishment of slavery brought the development in world interest for cotton. There was a considerable improvement in worker efficiency on cotton manors. The war was advantageous to northern ranchers, who reacted to wartime work deficiencies with more prominent utilization of mechanical collectors, which helped yields (Ransom 380). The involvement of the government in the finances was the main change for the North. Conservative Congresses during the Civil War passed a progression of laws that rebuilt the connection between the public authority and the market and set up for the Gilded Age (Oakes 217). New tax laws protected the northern industry from European rivalry. With the production of the National Banking System, Congress supplanted many state-certified receipts with an arrangement of government money that quickened exchange a lot between districts of the nation (Schoen 72). Thus, the war contributed to the economic stability and capitalization in the country.
Moreover, it was a transitional period which profoundly affected the improvement of current weapons and innovation. There were numerous advancements, and it was the principal battle in history in which ironclad warships conflicted. The creations as the message and railroad created new jobs. The war was the first to widely use rifled weapons and shell firearms and present a machine rifle (Gordon 173). During the battle, to enhance the correspondence, there was a wide newspaper delivery and voting by the field workers in national elections (Gordon 173). Other than that, medical services became more organized and individuals began to utilize land and water mines and a submarine that could sink a warship (Gordon 211). It was the first battle in which armed forces utilized aeronautical surveillance (Gordon 377). As a result, the Civil War facilitated the industrial and innovational revolution in the world.
Subsequently, individuals understood that equal opportunity was a natural right. Additionally, they comprehended that in a democratic country, all men were equally qualified for job opportunities and justice. Albeit African Americans had assumed a life-changing part in assisting with saving the Union, they discovered their way to a democratic system covered with political and legitimate hindrances. The organizations and philosophy of a manor society and a slave framework, which were common before 1861, were destroyed with the Civil War (Masich 268). The principle of free-work and paid work emerged after that (Masich 270). The war added to the civilians’ understanding of democracy and race. The Civil War reminded individuals of the significance of democracy and the role of race intricacy in determining their values.
In conclusion, the Civil War was a critical point which determined the type of government and characterized the American’s consciousness and morality. The adjustments in innovation and the economy brought all people into consistent and close contact. For example, the upgrades in the print machine allowed the news publication. The improvement of the message framework surpassed intellectual provincialism boundaries and made everyone aware of what was happening all through the nation. Hence, the Civil War transformed many aspects of the governmental system and defined the meaning of democracy for countries. It also contributed to technological and financial development of the United States.
Works Cited
Gordon, Robert J. The Rise and Fall of American Growth: the U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War. Princeton University Press, 2017.
Masich, Andrew E. Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861-1867. University of Oklahoma Press, 2018.
Oakes, James. “Capitalism and Slavery and the Civil War.” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 89, 2016, pp. 195–220, Web.
Ransom, Roger L. The Oxford Handbook of American Economic History. Edited by Louis P. Cain et al., vol. 2, Oxford University Press, 2018.
Schoen, Brian. Transnational Significance of the American Civil War. Edited by Jorg Nagler et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.