Much has been made of the superiority of Southern commanders. Although Lee was more than a match for every opponent except Grant, Grant overcame the Confederate general by force of numbers and determination of will. Neither side had another corps commander equal to Stonewall Jackson, but Jackson was killed before the war was half over. In the West, the Union commanders clearly outmatched their opposites. No Confederate leader could stand comparison with Grant, Sherman, or Thomas. In naval operations, Foote, Farragut, and Porter had no Confederate rivals.

Little distinction can be made between Northern and Southern morale. Desertion was common on both sides. The North had its Copperheads, its bounty jumpers, and its draft rioters, and millions of Northerners were weary of the war long before its end. In the South, draft dodging and tax evasion were common, and fortunes were made by profiteers who preferred to run luxuries, instead of war supplies, through the blockade.

The South had two important advantages. First, it did not need to conquer the North. It could win the war simply by defending its soil and by waiting for the North to become so discouraged by repeated failures that it would grant independence. Second, the South could operate with shorter interior lines, thus making better use of its fewer men.

In the long run, Northern superiority in supplies and men was decisive. That Southern armies remained in the field and took a toll from their opponents until the spring of 1865 is a remarkable achievement in determination and fortitude. Lincoln's position on slavery and democracy was equally important in the outcome of the war. The Emancipation Proclamation put an end to Southern hopes of foreign intervention. In the North the majority of the people remained firmly resolved that the Union must be restored.

A. Costs of the War

1. Human

The human cost of the war far exceeded what anyone had imagined in 1861. The North placed roughly 2.2 million men in uniform (180,000 of them blacks), of whom about 640,000 were killed, wounded in battle, or died of disease. Of the 360,000 Northern soldiers who died, two-thirds perished from illnesses such as dysentery, diarrhea, measles, malaria, and typhoid. Casualties in Confederate forces are more difficult to estimate, but they probably approached 450,000 out of approximately 750,000 to 850,000 Confederate soldiers. Of these, it is estimated that more than 250,000 died. The proportion of battlefield deaths to deaths by disease was probably the same as in the Northern armies. Total deaths thus exceeded 600,000, and the dead and wounded combined totaled about 1.1 million. More Americans were killed in the Civil War than in all other American wars combined from the colonial period through the later phase of the Vietnam War (1959- 1975).

Human suffering also extended beyond the military sphere and continued long after fighting ceased. During the conflict, thousands of black and white Southerners became refugees, losing many of their possessions and facing an uncertain future in strange surroundings. Far fewer Northern civilians experienced the war so directly, although the citizens of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, saw their town burned by Confederate cavalry in 1864. An unknown number of civilians perished at the hands of guerrillas, deserters, and, less frequently, regular soldiers in both armies. After the war, many thousands of veterans struggled to cope with lost limbs and other wounds. Thousands of families faced difficult financial circumstances due to the death of husbands and fathers. The United States government made available small pensions for disabled veterans and widows of soldiers, and southern states did the same for former Confederate soldiers and their widows. In neither instance, however, were the funds sufficient to provide for all the needs of a family.

2. Economic

The war generated spending on a scale dwarfing that of any earlier period in American history. In 1860, the federal budget was $63 million; in 1865, federal government expenditures totaled nearly $1.3 billion——a 200-fold increase that did not include the money spent by the Confederate government. An estimate in 1879 placed war-related costs to that date for the United States at $6.1 billion, including pension payments that would continue for many years. Figures for the Confederacy are very unreliable, but one estimate places expenditures through 1863 at $2 billion. After 1863, records for Confederate expenditures are not available. Whatever the total figure, there is no doubt that expenditures and indebtedness grew to a size that were not imaginable before the war.

The war also caused wide-scale economic destruction to the South. The Confederate states lost two-thirds of their wealth during the war. The loss of slave property through emancipation accounted for much of this, but the economic infrastructure in the South was also severely damaged in other ways. Railroads and industries in the South were in shambles, more than one-half of all farm machinery was destroyed, and 40 percent of all livestock had been killed. In contrast, the Northern economy thrived during the war. Two numbers convey a sense of the economic cost to the respective sections: between 1860 and 1870, Northern wealth increased by 50 percent; during that same decade, Southern wealth decreased by 60 percent.