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Did violence resolve the Civil War?
Quick answer:
Violence played a crucial role in resolving the Civil War by forcing the South to abolish slavery, which political means could not achieve. However, violence alone did not resolve all the issues that led to the war, such as deep-seated distrust and cultural differences between the North and South. The Union's victory was also influenced by factors like the North's larger population, industrial capacity, and the South's lack of international support and internal political unity.
The previous answer discusses one interpretation of the question: did violence address the root causes of the Civil War? But the question could be read another way: was violence the primary reason that the North emerged victorious?
The short answer is: not entirely.
For starters, the population of the North outnumbered that of the South by a factor of three to one. Robert Krick, a historian and author, cites this as the primary determinant of the war's outcome: more people meant more soldiers, more productivity, more industry, and more money to finance the North's war efforts.
Related to this was the Confederacy's inability to gain international recognition. Without finances and support from foreign governments, particularly the Europeans, the South was denied access to a variety of resources that could have sustained them against the North's superior numbers.
Finally, the South became politically fractured as the war went on. Noah Andre...
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Trudeau, an author of several Civil War analyses, puts it this way:
Ask the question, “What was the South fighting for; what was the Southern way of life that they were trying to protect?” and you will find that Southerners in Arkansas had a very different answer from Southerners in Georgia or Southerners in Virginia.
Compare this to Lincoln's simple message of preserving the Union, and you begin to see how Southern morale could falter.
Of course, none of these factors would have mattered without violence. The Civil War was, after all, a war, the deadliest war for U.S. soldiers in our history. And violence did play a role in the South's eventual loss. Opinions are divided as to the precise strength of the respective armies and exact competence of the armies' respective leaders, but irrespective of whether the South was somehow superior in military capability, the North fought and won enough to allow their other accumulated advantages to take their toll. Gary Gallagher, a professor of history at Penn State, said the following:
The principal cause of Confederate failure was the fact that the South’s armies did not win enough victories in the field–especially enough victories in a row in the field–to both sustain Confederate morale behind the lines and depress Union morale behind the lines.
The Confederate armies did win several battles, including the first and second battles of Bull Run, but tides began to shift when southern forces were driven out of Maryland in the battle of Antietam.
In summary: Without violence, the Civil War might not have been resolved. But violence alone cannot account for the Civil War's final resolution.
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I assume that this question is really asking whether violence solved the problems that led to the Civil War. If this is really the question, the answer is that violence did solve the problems to some degree, but it did not solve them completely.
The major problem that led to the Civil War was the fact that the North and the South distrusted one another and were very different in many ways. The most important way in which they were different was that the South had slavery and the North did not. The issue of slavery was clearly solved by violence. The North could not make the South abolish slavery through political means. However, it was able to force the South to do so after it defeated the South in the Civil War. Thus, violence most definitely solved the problem of whether the US would be a country with slavery.
However, the violence did not solve all of the problems that led to the Civil War. Violence could not make the North and the South trust one another any more than they previously had. Violence could not make the two regions of the country similar in terms of culture and history. These problems, in a sense, continue to be with us even up to the present day.
Violence is able to solve some problems. When all you need to do is force people to change laws or give up territory or something like that, violence can solve problems. However, violence cannot solve problems that are based mainly in people’s minds. It cannot change the way people think or feel. To the extent that it was differences in laws (on slavery) that caused the Civil War, the violence did solve those problems.
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