Advantages in the Civil War
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Advantages in the Civil War
No war has killed as many American men as the Civil War. This is because it was a war between ourselves. Leading up to the war were disagreements about slavery and Presidents and other things like that. The South on one side, and the North on the other. When Lincoln was elected, who the North wanted as President but the South didnt, all hell broke loose. The South attacked northern troops at Fort Sumter and thus began the Civil War. In this war the North had almost every advantage but still the war went on for 4 years.
The Northern states had many advantages over the South. For this reason they assumed the war would be over in a couple of months. They were wrong. The first major advantage of the North was simply manpower. Two-thirds of the nations population lived in the northern states. In numbers of men fighting the North had many more than the south.
At this time in Americas history, nine of the ten biggest cities were in the North. This helped with a lot of things. One of the biggest things was that 70 percent of the nations railroad track was in the North. This allowed for easier movement of troops and supplies, which is always a huge factor in war. The North also had twice as many factories than the South. This gave the North a much greater ability to produce guns, ammunition, shoes, clothes and whatever else the armies needed.
The South had to major advantages. The first was generals and officers. Most of the nations military academies are in the south, therefore the south had much better trained officers and generals. The second advantage of the South was simply the home field advantage. They were defending their land and as it always is for some reason defending whats yours gives you kind of more incentive to win.
Even with the Norths many advantages over the South, the Souths two big advantages proved to be as strong as the rest. I believe that because they were defending their own homeland, they were inspired to fight much more fiercely. Although the South put up a great fight and dragged the war on for four years, the North prevailed. The union was preserved and the South lay in ruins. Thus began the reconstruction era and the return to normality in our nation.