History is an endless time of wars and peace, at times feels like there is too much of one and not an enough of the other. However there are certain wars that stick out as defining who we are as a people. In recent history a examples, such as World War II with the world standing up to the tyranny and debauchery that was Adolf Hitler's Nazi German. For the United States there are a few examples of wars that defined who we are as a country. First there was the Revolutionary War which the soon to be Americans threw off the yoke of an oppressive English government under the war cry, "no taxation without representation." Then there was the mostly forgotten War of 1812 which we reaffirmed our standing as a true viable country. However, one war stands out above the rest for the United States, the Civil War. The Civil War defined what we were going to be as a country and whether or not we would be able to stand as a shining beacon of light for the rest of the world. The Civil war was like all civil wars was fought between two factions residing a country, for this war it was the United States and the players were the Northern Union and the Southern Confederacy. The fight between these two sides started over various reasons slavery been but one, however, by the end of it, it came down to whether or not the country was going to remain a slaveholding country. .
At the time of the war it was unclear whether or not the North would be able to maintain the Union and bring the South back into the fold. However, looking back there was never and other outcome that was possible. There was no way that the South could have won the war and there was no way that the North could lose the war. There were many reasons for this unavoidable outcome, the first of which was pure numbers, the North just had them. The North had a population advantage of five to two, this number is even further reduced if you take into account that more than one third of the South's population consisted of slaves.
