557. The Cost of the War.—The cost of the war was enormous; but it cannot be accurately told. In addition to about $780,000,000 that had been paid by taxation, while the contest was going on, the national debt had, from $65,000,000, in June, 1861, grown in 1865 to be $2,850,000,000. If to this vast sum we add the debts of states and cities, and the pensions that were paid before 1900, the total cost of the war to the country, exclusive of expenditures by the Confederates, can hardly have been less than ten billions of dollars.
558. Suffering.—In the South the suffering in consequence of the war was vastly greater than in the North. The freeing of four million slaves completely changed the organization of society. Wherever the Northern armies had gone, there had been great destruction of property and thousands of homes had been ruined. Throughout the later years of the war there had been much suffering of individual families, and the sources of income of many that had previously known independence or affluence, had been entirely taken away. When emancipation took place, the suffering was somewhat increased, although, as a rule, the negroes showed remarkable fidelity to their owners.
559. Final Review.—On the 23d and 24th of May such parts of the Armies of the East and of the West as were within reach, had the privilege of passing in review before their commanders and the representatives of the nation. For two whole days the armies filled the long stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to Georgetown, and, in a compact mass, from curbstone to curbstone, passed in front of the reviewing stand at the White House. The spectacle was the mightiest the continent had ever seen; but it was much more than a spectacle. It was a vast army of citizens peaceably going home after the most bloody and terrible of modern wars. Of the more than a million Union soldiers under arms in the spring of 1865, before the next winter all but about fifty thousand had been quietly mustered out and become, in the main, orderly and industrious citizens.
560. The Military Lessons of the War.—As time has passed, students have learned that the military lessons taught by the war were numerous and important. Four of them are especially worthy of note.
(1) The battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac convinced every one that wooden vessels could no longer be of any service against ships of iron. In less than a generation, every navy of importance in the world was made up exclusively of iron ships.
(2) The habit of instantly throwing up protecting intrenchments, whenever either army came to a halt near the other, completely revolutionized military field practice.
(3) More important still was the lesson that military training of officers cannot be dispensed with in any nation. The successful commanders of the war in the North, as well as in the South, were, almost without exception, officers who had been trained in the military schools. In the early part of the contest, especially in the North, men with political influence were often put into responsible positions; but such appointments generally proved disastrous, and the authorities had to fill their places with men who had received a careful military training.
(4) But the greatest lesson of all was taught by the rapidity with which a great army could be put into the field in an emergency, and then quietly disbanded. Stanton, in his report as Secretary of War in 1865, called attention to several remarkable facts in this connection. After the disaster in the Peninsula more than eighty thousand troops were enlisted, organized, equipped, and sent into the field in less than thirty days. Sixty thousand new troops repeatedly went into the field within four weeks; and from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin ninety thousand men were raised and sent into the armies within twenty days.[[261]] These facts showed that a large standing army is unnecessary in a self-governing nation.
561. The French in Mexico.—The immense military power and prestige of the United States were soon illustrated in a striking manner. Throughout the war the imperial government of France, under Napoleon III., was in active sympathy with the effort to destroy the Union. When Napoleon III. found that Great Britain would not, as he desired, acknowledge the independence of the Confederacy, he turned his attention in another direction, and stirred up a revolution in Mexico, which overthrew the Republican form of government and established an empire under Maximilian, an Archduke of Austria. While the United States government was at war, it was in no condition to do more than to issue a formal protest; but when the war was over, and there were a million men available, France perceived the advisability of withdrawing her troops from Mexico at the suggestion of the United States. With a courage worthy of a better cause, Maximilian refused to withdraw with them. The Mexicans soon revolted, and in 1867, the emperor was taken prisoner and shot. The United States government entreated for his life, but the request was formally refused.