In regards to the civil war...?

The North had great industrial capacity that the South did not. The North was able to afford to replace dead men with newly-trained fresh men and ammunition more so than the South can recruit. The South relied mostly on their own supplies and if they ran out, they had to buy imported stuff but they take a very long time and thus slowing down their process to win the war.

The north did not win the war; the south lost it. To win the Union had to occupy and subdue hundreds of square miles of hostile territory. The Confederates only had to avoid loosing.

The Confederates had access to everything they needed from France and Britain. They paid for it with cotton bonds which were readily accepted by merchants in both countries. At the end of the war there were warehouse bulging with supplies and other supplies piled outside in Wilmington, NC, a port that was open until well into 1865.

However, instead of fighting a defensive war to wear down the Union the Confederates, under General Robert E. Lee, were very aggressive. And they got seemingly brilliant results. Lee won almost every battle he fought. But each battle cost Confederate lives, lives that could not be replaced and so the life blood of the Army of Northern Virginia was draining away. And then Lee decided he had to bring the hardship of war home to the Union by taking it to Yankee land. He planned to march up and take Harrisburg, PA and then turn east to capture Philadelphia. Then south to Baltimore where there was already a lot of Confederate sentiment. Washington would be cut off. Lincoln would be forced to sue for peach at any price.

But Lee wound up fighting at Gettysburg and he lost so many men there he could never mount an offensive again. And as he did that Vicksburg also fell to the Union. Vicksburg fell because Lee had refused its pleas for help, help that would have staved off the Union for months. And Lee refused the pleas because of his grand scheme to capture Baltimore and cut off Washington.

After Gettysburg all Lee could do was to get back to Virginia and try to defend it, a scheme that succeeded for a while but had to end in failure.

So in the end Lee, who was a genuinely brilliant man and general, lost the war for the Confederates.

They had manufacturing capacity and the South did not. They could make their own guns, ammunition, and uniforms. The South was primarily agrarian, so when their initial supplies ran out, they had to import them from Europe or buy them on the black market from the North.

They outnumbered and outresourced the Confederacy in every category that mattered.Once this superiority was harnessed into a strategy of attrition,a Northern victory was just a matter of time.

As Baron Rothschild,a leading British financier commented when the civil war began,and he was asked who would win and why:

"The North"

"Because they have the largest purse"

Not much really changed in society for almost a century.Although slavery was ended and black Americans were given citizenship and the vote,ex Confederate states passed state laws that effectively prevented most of them from voting,and segregated them into second class citizens.

So,not much change on the ground from the pre war situation.