Why Did The North Win The Civil War Essay

Why the North Won the Civil War

When the first shots were fired on April 12, 1861, at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, both the Northern and the Southern sides expected the American Civil War to be short and sweet. When the war did not end until spring of 1865, four long years later, with a victory for the Union, many Americans were shocked. The Civil War came about primarily because of economic differences between the North and the South. The North and South had very different economies, moral beliefs, and cultural differences. While the Union had many advantages, such as manpower, industry and political structure, the Confederacy was able to compensate for most of these with their own strategic advantages, such as military leadership, control

As both the North and the South mobilized for war, the relative strengths and weaknesses of the "free market" and the "slave labor" economic systems became clear with their ability to support and sustain a war economy (National Park Services 2016). In 1860, the South was still mostly agricultural and highly dependent upon the sale of cash crops to a world market. The South relied solely on a one crop economy, while the North became more and more industrialized. The South felt that since they were becoming so different from the North that secession was the only way for them to keep their economic status and protect their culture. The authors of the Constitution knew that slavery would eventually become a huge controversy and avoided dealing directly with the morality of slavery due to the fact that it was a necessary part of their economy. People have argued that because the South grew the cotton and the North shipped it that they should not have had such a disagreement on the institution of slavery. However, the South very much disliked the way the system worked because they had to pay both the North and Great Britain in order to ship the cotton. This was because the North would take the shipment of cotton down the Mississippi River and then take it to a port where the British would ship it to England from the port. The trading of items from Europe to the South for cotton was a major part of the southern

Grant and Robert E. Lee were the generals primarily responsible for the outcome of America’s Civil War. Both leadership parties had different strategies on how they were going to attempt to win the war and each was an important factor to the outcome of the war. In 1865 Grant, the commanding general of the Northern army, led the Union to victory over the Confederacy (Biography.com). Ulysses S. Grant was the most successful general of the American Civil War. He drove the Confederates from the Mississippi Valley through a series of well-organized battles and campaigns. The campaigns varied from the early capture of both Fort Henry and Fort Donelson all the way through the Vicksburg campaign. Although the South only needed a stalemate to maintain its independence but knew it was massively outnumbered, Lee was determined to lose his men for victory and initiated the Maryland and Gettysburg strategic campaigns, used overly aggressive tactics that annihilated his army, and would then place the Confederacy in a condition that assured the reelection of Lincoln (Civilwarroundtable.com). When Grant was brought to the East to face Robert E. Lee’s army he defeated it within one year. Ulysses S. Grant took advantage of railroad lines and steamships to move his soldiers and had an endless supply of troops, supplies, weapons, and materials to use towards crushing Robert E. Lee's often malnourished and undermanned army. Robert E. Lee failed because he should have been fighting