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Was Northern Victory in the Civil War Inevitable? Essay

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Was Northern Victory in the Civil War Inevitable? Several factors played in to the American Civil War that made it have the outcome that it did. Although the South had better trained officials due to their military school, the North was far more advanced than they. The North had the advantage over the South in several ways. However, the outcome of the Civil War was not inevitable: it was determined as much by human decisions and human willpower as by physical resources, although the North’s resources gave them an edge over the South. The South seceded in part out of growing awareness of its minority in the nation. The Union held twenty-three states, including four border slave states, while the Confederacy had eleven. Ignoring …show more content…

They had most of the trained mechanics, most of the shipping and mercantile firms, and the bulk of the banking and financial resources. Even in farm production the northern states overshadowed the rural South, for most of the North’s population was still rooted in the soil. The Confederacy produced enough foodstuffs to meet minimal needs, but the disruption of transport caused shortages in many places. The North, meanwhile, produced a surplus of wheat for export at a time when drought and crop failures in Europe created a critical demand. King Wheat supplanted King Cotton as the nation’s main export, becoming the chief means of acquiring foreign money and bills of exchange to pay for imports from abroad. The North’s advantage in transport weighed heavily as the war went on. The Union had more wagons, horses, and ships than that of the Confederacy, and they also had an impressive edge in railroads. The Confederacy had only one east-west rail connection, between Memphis, Tennessee and Chattanooga, Tennessee. The latter was an important rail hub with connections via Knoxville, Tennessee into Virginia and down through Atlanta, Georgia to Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. But the North already had an extensive railroad network. Three major lines gave the western

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