The Civil War - A Nation Divided

Before 1861 Americans commonly wrote the United States are. After 1865 they wrote the United States is. The historian Shelby Foote pointed at that change of verb as the whole meaning of the war in two words: a plural collection of states went in, and a singular nation came out.

It cost around 750,000 lives to settle, which was roughly two percent of the population — the equivalent of something over six million Americans today. Nearly every town in the country north and south has a monument from these years, usually the oldest public memorial it has, because it was the first time communities had to find a way to say something about losses on that scale.

And it settled two questions that the founding generation had deliberately left open, because they could not agree and wanted a union more than they wanted an answer: whether a state could leave, and whether a country built on the proposition that all men are created equal could keep four million people in bondage. Both were decided by force, and the second one took another century of argument about what the decision actually meant.