Life after the civil war

During the course of the civil war 360,000 union soldiers and 260,000 confederate soldiers died. The amount of soldiers that died totaled nearly all the amount of deaths from all other us wars combined. A contributor to these deaths was an advancement of military technology that far outweighed the medical technology of the day, the civil war was considered one of the last old wars or the first modern war. All of the destruction in the war, increased the federal government's power. They passed laws for income and conscription laws, and gave much more control over the individual citizen's laws. The economy of the north greatly increased while the south's was devastated,banning slave labor and destruction of farm land reduced their economy to almost nothing. The emancipation proclamation only freed slaves who lived in states that were behind confederate lines and not yet under union control. Lincoln believed the best course of action was a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, this was known as the thirteenth amendment. Lincoln's further plans to reunify the nation after the civil war would go unknown, when he was assassinated on April 14th, 1865 five days after General Lee surrendered to Grant, by John Wilkes Booth, he escaped from authorities for 12 days, when he was found by union soldiers and then shot. The civil war was over, but the country was still divided between north and south, and four million newly freed African Americans now had to find their way as free men.

Written by Walker and Zack