The United States fought a civil war mainly because of the differences between the states from the north and the states from the south. The author McPherson in his overview of the American Civil War, as well as Morison in his book “Historia de los Estados Unidos de Norteamerica”, agree that the main differences between the northern and the southern states were economic and social differences. Following to this argument both authors are consistent in that the states from the north were basing their economy in an industrial development, construction of factories and the research and the use of new technologies. Meanwhile the states from the south had an agrarian economy; their economy was based on the work in cotton, tobacco and sugar crops. This also meant a dependence of the northern states because this states had the infrastructure and the technologies so that the farmers from the south could export their products to Great Britain.
The authors mentioned above don’t only look the economic differences; they also argue that there are important social differences between these two parts: the northern states, because of their style of economy, were building a free-labor capitalist society, adding to this the progress that they had, slavery was seen as something trivial for their economy, they didn’t need that amount of labor inside their economy, the fabrics had replace that. Contrary to this, because of the economy of the south was based on the work on the crops they needed a major labor force, which was provided by the slaves they owned.
After this war the American society had some drastic changes inside their society, after the “victory” of the states of the north, there were some important consequences. According to Asimov, the most important consequence was the implementation of the 13th Amendment to the 1865 Constitution. This Amendment completed the total abolishment of slavery inside the United States. According to a document on the web page of the United States Embassy, this Amendment gave the liberty to almost four million slaves were most of them were located in the states of the south.
In addition to this important change in the Constitution of the United States, few authors and analysts of this war agree that after this confrontation the idea of the United States as an indivisible nation grew inside the American citizens. The idea of the government of not having semi-independent states but a sole nation, was legitimize by this feeling of nation that grew on the Americans. This legitimization gave an important authority to the federal government and gave cohesion to the whole idea of the United States of America.
On top of the mentioned above, there were also important changes regarding banking, currency, education, infrastructure, and the idea of reconstruct the devastating consequences of the war. All this new measures were going to be based on the idea of having a nation based on a free-labor capitalism country and therefore the institutions inside the system were going to follow the same logic.
All this conflict and its consequences were very important for the development of the American state for several reasons, especially one in particular: the idea of starting a nation based on the ideology of free-labor capitalism and therefore their institutions would be based on this same logic as well. This would give the first vision for the United States of America to have a liberal point of view on economic issues and becoming the basis for this country to be the main promoter of capitalism, as well as being one of the world powers, economically speaking.
Asimov in his book “Los Estados Unidos de la Guerra Civil a la Primera Guerra Mundial” gives us an idea of the changes in the point of view the Americans had after the civil war. According to this author this change of perspective could be clearly seen in the response this country had on the First World War, were they decide that they didn’t wanted to participate actively in the conflict, and it was only because a major events such as the difficulties they were having on trading issues and the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, they decide to participate actively in the conflict.
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