…showed first 75 words of 1649 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1649 total…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.