Life During the Civil War

Despite the atrocities that the Civil War wrought on American life, many social improvements emerged in response to the nation's underlying problems. These issues, such as insufficient war medicine, unjust drafts, and discrimination within the military were brought to the attention of the American public during the war and many quickly acted to fix them.

One of the these improvements was the American Red Cross, which Clara Barton, a dedicated Union nurse, founded after coping with the inadequate medical care of both Union and Confederate soldiers. The lack of medical technology combined with the squalid conditions on the battlefield, such as sparing diet and exposure to excrement, stimulated the contraction of dysentery and diarrhea and the spread of body lice. War prisoners commonly fell ill with pneumonia in overcrowded and unsanitary war prisons, which seldom provided enough food, space or medicine. Thousands of women from both the North and the South rose to the challenge of caring for these sickly soldiers. The Union alone provided 3,000 army nurses, one of whom was Clara Barton.

The Civil War also underscored the injustice of forcing citizens into war. In an attempt to augment battalions after heavy casualties and desertions, the North and the South enacted a draft, which was met with violent remonstrance. Draft riots sprang up in cities across the North, such as the one portrayed in the final scenes of Martin Scorsese's historical film Gangs of New York.



And even in the fight to rid the States of discrimination, African-American soldiers in the Union Army were paid less than their white counterparts and were assigned to separate regiments. Perhaps even more outrageous is the fact that black soldiers constituted about 10% of the Union army, even though the North's black population was a miniscule 1%. In the modern U.S. military, soldiers are not separated by ethnicity nor are specific racial groups targeted for service.