At the close of the war the North had over 1,000,000 men in arms; the loss in battle and by disease had been great,— not far from 300,000 men. The Southern loss was presum ably not much less. The expenditure of wealth had likewise been enormous; in fact, the real loss is incalculable, for no one could even esti mate what the South had given up. When the war ended, the national debt was $2,850,000,000; and in the four years nearly $800,000,000 had been raised by taxation. The expense of the war of defeating the Confederacy was increased by the hesitation of the government to resort to adequate taxation and by the issue of legal tender paper, a measure possibly justified by political considerations. In July 1864, gold touched 285, and this meant an excessive price for other commodities, which were in the long run paid for in good money. On the other hand, the establishment of the national bank system by the acts of February 1863, and of June 1864, greatly facilitated the government's control of the national resources.
At the beginning it was not thought at the North that the war was a war against slavery. In July 1861, Congress declared "the war is not prosecuted . . . for any purpose of con quest . . . nor for the purpose of over throwing . . . the rights or established in stitutions of those States, but to . . . main tain the supremacy of the Constitution . . . and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, Equality and rights of the several States unim paired)) But in the course of the struggle, slavery was doomed to fall. Foreign opinion and radical Republicanism alike demanded its destruction. Whatever might be said to the contrary, slavery had caused the war. On 22 Sept. 1862, Lincoln issued the Proclamation of Emancipation, declaring free all persons held as slaves within any State or parts of States in which the people should be in rebellion the fol lowing 1 January. But the Proclamation of Emancipation was a mere military order; its efficiency upon the ensuance of peace was, there fore, open to question. Moreover, it did not affect slavery in the loyal border States. In February 1865, the 13th Amendment was pro posed to the various State legislatures, and the following December it became a part of the Constitution. The Civil War resulted in the freeing of 4,000,000 slaves, and in demonstrat ing the American Union to be, in the words of Chief Justice Chase, "an indissoluble Union of indestructible States)) Even before the war was over, the question had arisen as to how the Union could be re constructed; in case the South was beaten, what steps should be taken to establish the Southern States once more in their constitutional rela tions? The early Republican theory had been that the States could not secede, and hence it could now be logically argued that the States, having never gone out, were still in the Union. Lincoln's theory was not inconsistent with this idea; to him the task of Reconstruction was not to restore the States, but to see that the gov ernments were in the hands of loyal men who would do their duty as citizens of the United States The assassination of Lincoln, 14 April 1865, brought sorrow to millions of devoted people at the North. His successor, Andrew
Johnson, was not well adapted to the difficult and delicate work that lay before him. On the one hand was a distracted South, overwhelmed with defeat ; on the other was a triumphant North made up of different factions (1) the radical Republicans, whose antagonistic spirit had been aroused by conflict ; (2) the extreme advocates of negro rights like Charles Sumner, who acted in most respects with the radical partisans; (3) a number of men who had been acting with the Republicans but whose ante cedents were those of the Democracy or whose inclinations held them with fragile threads to the Republican party; and (4) lastly the Demo crats, who were strong in opposition. Johnson could not possibly hold together the elements on which he must rely. The fault was not al together his; the situation was replete with difficulties. And yet, if ever a nation needed wisdom and unselfish service rather than par tisan bitterness and strife, it was during the trying years of Reconstruction that followed on the heels of Civil War. Lincoln had (July 1864) refused to sign the Wade-Davis bill, which proposed a plan for Congressional par ticipation in the process of Reconstruction. Johnson, like his predecessor, believed that Reconstruction could be accomplished by execu tive methods. In May he issued an Amnesty Proclamation. By December the governments of most of the Southern States had been estab lished in accordance with the Presidential plans, which practically put the States in the hands of those willing to take the oath of allegiance. Representatives came to Washington from nearly all the Southern States. But the process of Reconstruction was not to be so easy. Al ready Sumner had given utterance to his State suicide theory, the theory that a State by virtue of rebellion lapsed into the condition of a Territory. Thaddeus Stevens had announced the conquest theory, in accord with which the South was to be looked on as conquered ter ritory and treated as such by Congress. Mem bers of Congress were not ready to turn the problem over to the President, and little by little the breach between the two departments of the government widened. The Democrats supported Johnson's 'plans, the Republicans op posed, and soon the President and the leaders in Congress were bitterly hostile. By degrees the enmity between Johnson and the Republi cans became so bitter that he was impeached for venturing to disregard the Tenure of Office Act by removing Stanton, the Secretary of War. The Senate failed to convict him.