One hundred and fifty years ago, the United States entered the most perilous five years of its… One hundred and fifty years ago, the United States entered the most perilous five years of its entire existence. South Carolina seceded from the Union on Thursday, Dec. 20, 1860, with six other states following in short order. The situation deteriorated and on April 12, 1861, the opening guns of the U.S. Civil War were fired in Charleston, S.C.

The importance of the war to the era can hardly be exaggerated. Dr. Van Beck Hall of Pitt’s history department made this very clear. More than 600,000 Americans died, roughly 2 percent of the entire population of the nation at that time. A comparable war today would have 6.2 million deaths. In three days, a single battle, Gettysburg, claimed more lives than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. As a percent of the American population, a comparable battle today would leave 70,000 dead. The largest modern misconception of the Civil War, according to Hall, was that it was somehow romantic “with the fancy uniforms and beautiful women … [when] it really was the Battle of the Somme.”

In this multi-part series I aim to examine the war in three major areas: its impacts, its causes and its battles. This cannot be comprehensive. After all, it took Shelby Foote 16 years and three volumes to tell his version of the war, and James M. McPherson 909 pages in one volume, “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.” So, three columns is a little light by comparison. But I do the best I can.

Why should the war still be relevant to us today, these 150 years later? Largely because the impacts of the war were widespread enough that they still affect us in the 21st century. According to Hall, perhaps the most enduring impact was a redefining of the role of the federal government. The first income tax and a forerunner to the IRS were set up to fund the war. The government was also heavily involved in subsidizing railroads and also dramatically expanded the reach and scope of the mail service. Civil War pensions were also an early example of a government-funded social program. I also note that the right of habeas corpus was suspended by the Lincoln administration, giving the president the power to detain people on a scale that makes our modern debate over detention of terrorists seem trivial.

The Civil War changed how we thought of ourselves. Foote said that before the war, people said “the United States are” whereas afterward they said “the United States IS.” “And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an ‘is.’” Before the Civil War, some states asserted their rights to nullify the will of the federal government. After the war, this didn’t happen. Once the federal government finally acted against segregation, Southern states didn’t pass nullification ordinances. After the president ordered him to stop blocking that schoolhouse door, George Wallace sullenly did so.

Another measure of the impacts that the Civil War has had on us today is just how different our history would have been had the war gone differently. And it could have. Hall notes that a Confederate victory in the Civil War was a very real possibility because “all they have to do is make the United States go away.” I enjoy mulling over sometimes trivial things that changed the course of history.

What if Gouverneur K. Warren hadn’t rushed troops to Little Round Top at Gettysburg? The South might have won the battle and changed the course of the war. What if some careless courier hadn’t dropped Robert E. Lee’s Special Order No. 191 in a Maryland field, orders that changed the Antietam campaign when they were found by Union troops? What if John Wilkes Booth had twitched his hand, sending the ball that killed Lincoln a few inches too wide?

We cannot forget the most important change of all, the abolition of slavery. This shook society and the economy to their roots to a degree many don’t really comprehend. Hall estimates that up to a quarter of all wealth in the United States before the war was measured in slaves, and that the best investment a plantation owner could make was buying more land and more lives. Unfortunately, he notes that the slaves were largely cut loose without any particular planning or thought, and the struggle to find answers to the persistent questions of what to do about former slaves was part of the reason Reconstruction was so messy. It was also incomplete — the goals of some radical Republicans regarding the rights of freedmen wouldn’t be realized for another hundred years.

Long after Confederate battle flags were handed to federal troops at Appomattox, Va., Bentonville, N.C., and countless other places around the re-United States, the Civil War had left difficulties and a legacy that are still with us today in many more ways than just stone monuments and halls of the Grand Army of the Republic.

I would like to thank Hall for two very informative interviews. To learn more about the Civil War, he recommends James McPherson and James K. Hogue’s “Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction.”

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