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8 ways how the the Civil War affects us today-(4)

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But above all, Lincoln loved the telegram. Invented just a few decades earlier, the telegraph system had gone national in 1844.

As Tom Wheeler recounts in his book, Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War, the White House had no telegraph connection. Twice daily throughout his presidency, Lincoln walked to the telegraph office of the War Department (on the site of today's Eisenhower Executive Office Building, just west of the White House) to receive updates and to send orders to his generals on the front. He sent this one to General Ulysses S. Grant on Aug. 17, 1864: "Hold on with a bull-dog grip, and chew & choke, as much as possible."

Before Lincoln's day, letters and speeches were often long-winded. With the telegraph came the need for concise communication. After all, every dot and dash of Morse Code carried a cost. Gone were the "wherefores," "herewith" and "hences." Flowery, formal speech was out.

Lincoln's Gettysburg and Second Inaugural addresses both demonstrate this new economy of phrase. "Events were moving too fast for the more languid phrases of the past," historian Garry Wills writes in his book Lincoln at Gettysburg. "The trick, of course, was not simply to be brief but to say a great deal in the fewest words. Lincoln justly boasted, of his Second Inaugural's six hundred words, 'Lots of wisdom in that document, I suspect.'"

Not only did Lincoln's wartime dependence on the telegraph eventually lead to a wave of investment in new communication devices, from the telephone to the Internet (the latter invented, not coincidentally, for military use), but it also signaled the evolution of a language that morphs as quickly as the devices that instantaneously tweet our words around the globe.
5. We identify ourselves as Democrats and Republicans.
Before 1854, you might have been a Whig. Or a Free Soiler. But that year the Republican Party was founded by anti-slavery activists and refugees from other political parties to fight the iron grip of powerful southern Democrats.

As the name of their party suggests, these activists believed that the republic's interests should take precedence over the states'. In the years before the war, many northern Democrats defected to join the new party - and, in 1860, to elect Abraham Lincoln as the first Republican president - while southern Democrats led the march to secession.

The Democratic and Republican parties both survived the war and have held their spots as the dominant U.S. political parties ever since. The "Solid South," as it was known, protected the interests of agrarian Southern whites and consistently elected Democrats to Congress from Reconstruction through the early 1960s, when the national Democratic Party's support of the civil rights movement allowed the Republican Party to begin making new political inroads below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Within a few years, North and South swapped party hats. Conservative southerners grew disenchanted with the Democratic Party's increasingly progressive platforms. Republicans capitalized on this with their "Southern Strategy," an organized plan to make headway there on a socially conservative, states' rights platform. In reverse, historically Republican strongholds in the Northeast began voting Democrat, establishing the pattern of red and blue that we see on election-night maps today.
6. We see war "up close and personal."
The Civil War was the first war in which people at home could absorb battle news before the smoke cleared. Eyewitness accounts by reporters and soldiers were relayed via telegraph to the country's 2,500 newspapers, printed almost immediately and then read voraciously by citizens desperate to know how their boys were faring. The Civil War created a tradition of intimate war reportage that is still with us today.

Take this excerpt from a dispatch from George Townsend, who was just 20 when he began to cover the war for the New York Herald:

"In many wounds the balls still remained, and the discolored flesh was swollen unnaturally. There were some who had been shot in the bowels, and now and then they were frightfully convulsed, breaking into shrieks and shouts. Some of them iterated a single word, as, 'doctor,' or 'help,' or 'God,' or 'oh!' commencing with a loud spasmodic cry, and continuing the same word till it died away in cadence. The act of calling seemed to lull the pain. Many were unconscious and lethargic, moving their finger, and lips mechanically, but never more to open their eyes upon the light; they were already going through the valley and the shadow."

Tony Horwitz, a former war correspondent and the author of Confederates in the Attic and the forthcoming Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, says that the front-line dispatches influenced his modern battlefront reporting. "Having been moved by soldiers' writing from the 1860s, I also sought them on foreign battlefields, even going through the pockets of the Iranian dead at Majnoon and getting a Farsi speaker to translate letters and diaries for me," he says. "This sounds ghoulish, I know, but I think you need to personalize the dead to bring home the shock and tragedy of it all. Otherwise, they're just statistics."

Photography, still in its infancy, was not yet a part of the daily news cycle. But the Civil War was the first such conflict recorded by photographers (the most famous of whom was Mathew Brady). Because the primitive wet-plate technology of the era required that subjects be still at the moment the camera's shutter snapped, images of the era depict virtually every aspect of the war but one: battle. But that in time would change, too.
7. We hold certain rights to be sacred.
Think of these three amendments to the U.S. Constitution, all ratified within five years of the end of the Civil War:

13th Amendment (1865). Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. ...

14th Amendment (1868).Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. ...

15th Amendment (1870). Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. ...

Before the Civil War, the concept of liberty and justice for all meant little unless you were white and male. Going beyond the abolition of slavery, the 14th and 15th amendments were the first extensions of citizenship and voting rights to minority groups.

Of course, half of us - women - went without a voice until 1920, but the postwar laws set a precedent that eventually would lead to suffrage for all adults. Imperfect in practice over the next 100 years, voting rights finally gained protection through the 1964 Civil Rights Act, ensuring that bigotry could never again disenfranchise any U.S. citizen.
8. We're all Americans.
It took the War Between the States to make us one nation, indivisible. Before 1861, the United States were loosely tied entities and always described as a plural noun, as in, "The United States are in trade with France."

The war's bloodiest battle came at Gettysburg in 1863, with 51,000 casualties in just three days. Although the Union stopped Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's Northern invasion, young men's bodies littered the farms and gardens that had turned into a battleground. Was the preservation of these united states worth the cost in blood?

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how did the civil war change the united states

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But above all, Lincoln loved the telegram. Invented just a few decades earlier, the telegraph system had gone national in 1844. As Tom Wheeler recounts in his book, Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War, the White House had no telegraph connection.

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How the US became so powerful due to war-(3)

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The United States is the world's most powerful country by far, with a globe-spanning network of alliances and military bases. It's practically unrecognizable from the way the country began - and, indeed, what many early Americans thought it would be. The above video tells the story of how America changed from an insular former colony to a globe-spanning superpower.

Expansionism was always in America's DNA, as a country founded by the expulsion and slaughter of American Indians. But after America reached the Pacific coast, there was a real debate as to whether it should go further - whether the US should continue its growth as an imperial power beyond North America's shores.

This debate came to the fore after the Civil War, which removed the principal barrier to expansion (the controversy over whether slavery would be expanded to newly acquired territories). Though the expansionists were initially stymied, they won out for a surprising reason: the Industrial Revolution.

As Fareed Zakaria documents in his excellent book From Wealth to Power, the rapid postwar growth of the US economy required an increasingly centralized state to manage it. The more power that was concentrated in the executive branch and bureaucracy, the easier it was for the president to acquire territories abroad.

This culminated in the Spanish-American war in 1898, which ended with America acquiring a whole lot of different territories around the globe. America was officially a global power, one that intervened in a number of countries, made major diplomatic moves in East Asia, and played a critical role in ending World War I.

The next crucial step, though, came after World War II. The United States was the only country to emerge from the war in strong economic and military shape, and thus was in a unique position to shape the terms of the peace. The result was a global financial system, called the Bretton Woods system, aimed at coordinating the global economy and preventing another Great Depression - and the United Nations, created to preserve the postwar peace.

Competition with the Soviet Union led the United States to establish its first permanent major non-wartime alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It also led the United States to grow its military and political presence around the world in an effort to contain the spread of communism, leading to interventions in places like Vietnam and Afghanistan and alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia and South Korea.

After the Soviet Union fell, the US could have chosen to withdraw from these alliances and international commitments. But it didn't, seeing them as critical institutions for preserving peace and prosperity even after the Soviet threat had receded.

So here we are: The United States is the world's most connected and pivotal power, and will remain so - unless President-elect Donald Trump makes good on his proposals to withdraw America from these commitments.

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How America became a superpower, explained in 8 minutes

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The United States is the world's most powerful country by far, with a globe-spanning network of alliances and military bases. It's practically unrecognizable from the way the country began - and, indeed, what many early Americans thought it would be. The above video tells the story of how America changed from an insular former colony to a globe-spanning superpower.

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New Us laws-(1)

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Research federal laws and find out how they are made. Learn about impeachment, copyrights, and how to get copies of your government files.

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How modern US government is-(2)

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The role of government in the United States and other western democracies has expanded dramatically over the last century. Compared to its pre-twentieth century functions, government has taken on new and vast roles, including old-age pensions, government-provided health care, and a host of other programs that typically comprise a modern welfare state.

What would Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosopher, say about the expanded role of our modern government? For Smith, the ideal functions of government were few and well defined. In his classic work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, written in 1776, Smith outlined three important government functions: national defense, administration of justice (law and order), and the provision of certain public goods ( e.g., transportation infrastructure and basic and applied education). Clearly, government has grown beyond the bounds of these simple duties.

Some would argue that government has expanded because of necessity, that modern society requires redistribution of wealth for stability and regulation to constrain the excesses of an unfettered market. Many believe it is unrealistic for government in the twenty-first century to adhere to the limited roles envisioned by Smith. We have our doubts about these arguments. However, we raise a different but related question: if Smith is right that national defense, administration of justice, and public goods are essential to a free and prosperous society, might government's expanded roles one day crowd out its traditional and essential functions to that society's detriment?

When we examine evidence on this question, the findings are striking. We first categorize national government expenditures according to whether or not Smith would support them. Under the category Smith would support, we include expenditures on national defense, administration of justice, transportation, and education. We consider social expenditures on Social Security, Medicare, health, income security, and labor and social services beyond the bounds that Smith would support. Next, we examine trends in these expenditures.

Here are some of our findings:

In 1962, expenditures that Smith advocated accounted for 54.4 percent of the U.S. budget. Yet, by 2005, this percentage had fallen to 27.6 percent, with the Congressional Budget Office projecting this percentage to fall to 22.0 percent by 2011.

The trend for the social expenditure category runs in the opposite direction. In 1962, social expenditures accounted for only 23.4 percent of the U.S. budget, but by 2005, they accounted for 58.1 percent, and they are expected to account for 63.3 percent of the budget by 2011.

When we examine state and local government expenditures, we find the same trends, though they are less pronounced than their federal counterparts. The trends show no sign of reversal for either level of government.

Our analysis shows that social spending is rapidly replacing expenditures on traditional government functions advocated by Smith. As a result, governments will find it increasingly difficult to provide and maintain traditional services without significant tax increases or larger deficits.

These observations are not lost on federal budgetary experts. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) documents that the amount and composition of federal spending have "changed dramatically," and that most of that growth has been in three programs: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. These programs now account for 42 percent of federal expenditures. In total, mandatory programs now account for over half of federal spending. The CBO notes that health expenditures will increase much more than Social Security expenditures in coming years, and that "if past growth rates persist, spending for health care will eventually consume such a large share of the nation's output that real (inflation-adjusted) spending on other goods will have to decline sharply."

The consequences are clear. Continued higher rates of social spending will require higher taxes, larger deficits, or dramatic cuts in other government programs, such as those deemed essential by Smith. These, in turn, may cause "slow private capital formation, lower economic growth, and in the extreme...a sustained economic contraction," according to the CBO. These outcomes are the opposite of Smith's model for economic prosperity.

Despite these dire predictions and their resulting consequences, the political will for change is weak. And the longer these trends continue, the more difficult it will be politically to change them. Perhaps it is time for the American public and its elected officials to give more heed to the wise words of a Scottish philosopher who wrote some 230 years ago.

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The Role of Government in Modern U.S. Society: What Would Adam Smith Say? | Jody W. Lipford

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The role of government in the United States and other western democracies has expanded dramatically over the last century. Compared to its pre-twentieth century functions, government has taken on new and vast roles, including old-age pensions, government-provided health care, and a host of other programs that typically comprise a modern welfare state.

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Us politics and government in modern days-(2/3)

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The 6 Core Principles Behind the US Government

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Here’s information about the organization of the US political system and the six core principles on which the government is based.

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How the US is in debt-(2)

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The national debt is the total amount of money that the U.S. government has borrowed from various sources, including the governments of other nations, from private investors and different federal agencies. The government's ability to pay off that debt is a function of our gross ...read more

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Talking about the past of the US and how the US became the way it is-(3)

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Road to the Constitution - Creating the United States | Exhibitions - Library of Congress

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The Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation, the first constitution of the United States, on November 15, 1777, but the states did not ratify them until March 1, 1781. The Articles created a loose confederation of sovereign states and a weak central government, leaving most of the power with the state governments.

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This has a timeline of WW1 and a summary of the war-(2)

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Two days after the U.S. Senate voted 82 to 6 to declare war against Germany, the U.S. House of Representatives endorses the declaration by a vote of 373 to 50, and America formally enters World War I.

When World War I erupted in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson pledged neutrality for the United States, a position that the vast majority of Americans favored. Britain, however, was one of America's closest trading partners, and tension soon arose between the United States and Germany over the latter's attempted quarantine of the British Isles. Several U.S. ships traveling to Britain were damaged or sunk by German mines, and in February 1915 Germany announced unrestricted warfare against all ships, neutral or otherwise, that entered the war zone around Britain. One month later, Germany announced that a German cruiser had sunk the William P. Frye, a private American vessel. President Wilson was outraged, but the German government apologized and called the attack an unfortunate mistake.

On May 7, the British-owned Lusitania ocean liner was torpedoed without warning just off the coast of Ireland. Of the 1,959 passengers, 1,198 were killed, including 128 Americans. The German government maintained that the Lusitania was carrying munitions, but the U.S. demanded reparations and an end to German attacks on unarmed passenger and merchant ships. In August, Germany pledged to see to the safety of passengers before sinking unarmed vessels, but in November sunk an Italian liner without warning, killing 272 people, including 27 Americans. With these attacks, public opinion in the United States began to turn irrevocably against Germany.

In 1917, Germany, determined to win its war of attrition against the Allies, announced the resumption of unrestricted warfare in war-zone waters. Three days later, the United States broke diplomatic relations with Germany, and just hours after that the American liner Housatonic was sunk by a German U-boat. On February 22, Congress passed a $250 million arms appropriations bill intended to make the United States ready for war. In late March, Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships, and on April 2 President Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war against Germany. Four days later, his request was granted.

On June 26, the first 14,000 U.S. infantry troops landed in France to begin training for combat. After four years of bloody stalemate along the western front, the entrance of America's well-supplied forces into the conflict marked a major turning point in the war and helped the Allies to victory. When the war finally ended, on November 11, 1918, more than two million American soldiers had served on the battlefields of Western Europe, and some 50,000 of them had lost their lives.

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The United States officially enters World War I

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Two days after the U.S. Senate voted 82 to 6 to declare war against Germany, the U.S. House of Representatives endorses the declaration by a vote of 373 to 50, and America formally enters World War I. When World War I erupted in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson pledged neutrality for the United States, a position that the vast majority of Americans favored.

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The backstory and how the Revolutionary War happened-(3)

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Revolutionary War - Timeline, Facts & Battles

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The Revolutionary War (1775-83), also known as the American Revolution, arose from growing tensions between residents of Great Britain’s 13 North American colonies and the colonial government, which represented the British crown.

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This has a list of all the wars the US was in-(5)