There were more than a dozen other battles of the Confederate war which in slaughter fairly deserved comparison with Waterloo. These included the Seven Days' battle before Richmond, and the battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Antietam, Shiloh, Chickamauga, the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor, the Second Manassas (or Bull Run), Stone River, Petersburg, Franklin, Lookout Mountain, Nashville and several others.
Still another measure of the magnitude of a war is its duration. It is duration indeed that chiefly determines the amount of human suffering caused by a war, especially to the women and children who are war's chief victims.
Measured by this test of duration the Confederate war exceeded all other recent conflicts in the magnitude of the suffering it inflicted.
Its first gun was fired at Fort Sumter in April, 1861: its last armed conflict did not occur until May, 1865. Thus for four years and a month the war endured. The Crimean war—one of the longest of nineteenth century conflicts—endured for less than half that length of time and the actual fighting of it lasted less than one fourth as long. The duration of the Confederate war was seven times as great as that of the stupendous Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870, which overthrew the second Napoleonic empire, consolidated Germany and made the republic an enduring fact in France. It was twenty-four times as long as that of the French-Austrian war, which set Italy free, or as the War of 1866 between Austria and Prussia which laid the foundations of the present German empire.
Measured by its enduring consequences the superior magnitude of our war in its influence upon national and human destinies is still more conspicuous.
It made an end of human slavery in the last civilized country on earth in which slavery was permitted.
It freed the nation from a reproach that sorely afflicted its citizens.
It ended a political conflict which had threatened the very foundations of the Republic from the hour of its institution.
It freed the Southern States of the Union from an incubus that their statesmen and their best citizens had for generations desired to be rid of, an incubus that had restricted their development and retarded their growth in wealth and population as no other evil influence had ever done in any part of our country.
Still more important so far as human history is concerned, this war of ours settled at once and forever, the vexed and vexatious questions of constitutional interpretation that had beset the Republic from the hour of its formation.