The Civil War was important because it settled the question of slavery that had been tearing the United States apart politically and morally through most of the mid-nineteenth century.
Allowing some former colonies to enter the Union as slave states had been an uneasy compromise made at the nation's beginning in order to found a single country after the end of the American Revolution. Many of the country's founders, even if slave owners themselves, were uncomfortable with an institution that most hoped would gradually fade away. However, the invention of the cotton gin and the opening of western territories to statehood both created a new impetus for slavery and increased opposition to it.
Decisions such as letting territories' residents vote to decide whether their new state be a free or slave state were meant to solve the problem of reconciling slavery to westward expansion but instead escalated tensions and bloodshed....
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The Dred Scott decision, the Mexican-American war that brought Texas (a huge slave state) into the nation, and the publication by Harriet Beecher Stowe ofUncle Tom's Cabin polarized positions on slavery. As abolitionists became increasingly vocal about ending slavery immediately, a backlash developed in which slave owners moved from defending slavery as a necessary evil to asserting it as a positive good.
The country was paralyzed and preoccupied in the years leading up the Civil War by this divisive moral and economic issue, and compromise became impossible. The Civl War was a bloody and costly conflict, but it ended race-based slavery in the United States and allowed the country to move forward.
What was the significance of the Civil War?
The Civil War (1861–1865) was significant for a variety of reasons.
First, it was America's bloodiest and most destructive war. The South lost 258,000 dead, and the North 360,000. Many of the dead died from disease or in prison camps. Both sides had predicted a short war, but the length of the war was one reason for its destructiveness. The South was devastated because most of the battles had occurred on its soil.
Second, the war decided the question of secession. Prior to the conflict, states like South Carolina had claimed that states had the right to leave the Union. The war decided that they did not have that right.
Next, the main cause of the war was slavery. The end of the war brought an end to that institution. The question of slavery had vexed the country since its inception.
There are present-day echoes of the war in the United States. Recently, there was a controversy over statues of Southern leaders on display. Many of them have since been removed from public display.