When most people look at the American Civil War they see a disagreement between the Union (which represented the North) and the Confederacy (which represented the South) that could not be solved in a civil matter and escalated into a war. While this is mostly true there were many other factors that led to the Civil War. It is easiest for us to view the situation through the lense of homeostasis. On a large scale there was a country that was split into differing opinions and the only way to obtain internal stability of the country was war. The American Civil really began in 1860 when Abraham Lincoln was elected as the first republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories. This caused seven states from the deep south to secede from the Union or United States. They attempted to form a new nation, the Confederate States of America. The Union didn't take very kindly to this idea, refusing to recognise the legitimacy of secession. They feared that it would discredit democracy and create a fatal error that would eventually split the United States into several small, weak countries. Ultimately they considered it to be close to treason, worthy of death. At the time there were no …show more content…
The last major Confederate armies surrendered to the United States in April of 1865. The war bankrupted the South, left its roads, farms, and factories in ruins, and all but wiped out an entire generation of men. The southern states were occupied by Union soldiers, rebuilt, and gradually re-admitted to the United States over the course of twenty difficult years known as the Reconstruction Era. In the beginning the Confederacy was worried about the stability within their states if they were no longer allowed slaves, but in the end the states were left in shambles. The confederacy lost ten times more by fighting in the Civil War than they would of if they would have abolished