Why Didn’t the U.S. Civil War Go On and On?

The post-Civil War reconciliation between the North and the South is a very rare event in the history of civil wars. The South was thoroughly beaten. Top generals, particularly Robert E. Lee, saw further fighting as "useless effusion of blood." There was no call by top Confederate leaders for continuing the fight with the type of bushwacking that occurred in Missouri and Kansas. Reconstruction is often thought of as harsh, but compared to the standards of history Confederates were by and large treated well after the Civil War. Within a decade or so of the end of the Civil War, conservative white elites had established political, economic and social dominance in the South. They had lost their "slave property" and the "government of our own." They could never get back slavery, and a government of their own was not worth fighting for. There was little reason for the kind of persistent low-level guerilla warfare that often occurs after civil wars, or the organization of a succession of rebellions