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Chapter 14 Summary In spite of political leaders’ last-minute efforts to find a compromise over slavery that would preserve the Union, the election of Lincoln, followed by the secession of six southern states, pushed the country into war. The North had twice the resources of the South, and the ability to create an activist centralized government to tap these resources to wage a total war. The South, however, needed only to fight a defensive war and …

…at Appomattox, Virginia, on April 9. At the cost of 360,000 men and enormous material expense, the Union had destroyed the South and slavery. The South had lost one in three of its soldiers, its economy was shattered, and many of its farms and cities lay in ruins. How the United States government would now reconstruct southern society, which had been both revolutionized by emancipation and devastated by war, became the main question of the postwar period.