Our Civil War was our defining moment as a nation. I believe above all that the war preserved the Union; we would remain a united nation, one that would not, could not, be diminished in any way. This is now the bedrock of our national heritage.

A further result of the war was that slavery in all its forms was abolished. All people in the United States are, by law, free. It is as simple as that.

After the war, the United States was looked on as a nation rather than a collection of states. The United States was considered and acted as a unit, as opposed to individual states acting in their own interests. Men who had actually walked this nation considered its grandeur and its philosophical concepts and deemed it a nation worth fighting for.

One of the biggest effects of the war was the intrusion of the federal government into our everyday lives. Before the war, the only thing from Washington that actually touched our lives was the postal service; it was a national service, and a letter sent from Smalltown, Ohio, could go in perfect safety to Smalltown, La.

But during the war, a host of programs instituted by both Washington and Richmond intruded into our everyday lives. Example: The draft was used by both South and North to bring men into military service. Once started, it became part of our national fabric.

National taxes on income began in the North in August 1861. Administered by the Internal Revenue Service, they provided a way of paying for the war. Eventually, the North used income taxes to collect about 21 percent of the money it needed for the war. The Confederacy, with a much smaller base upon which it could levy taxes, raised only about 5 percent of its war expenses. But the precedent had been set, and in 1913, with the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, the federal government was given the right to pay its expenses by taxing the income of its citizens. The right lives to this day.

After the Civil War, the first of the social welfare programs began. Most people think social welfare began with President Franklin Roosevelt as his response to the Depression; they look at the Work Projects Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps and National Recovery Administration, all social welfare programs designed to jump-start our economy and end the severe unemployment of the 1930s.

Not so: The first of the national social welfare programs was the Freedmen's Bureau, established in 1865 to help former slaves make the transition to freedom. It provided education and medical benefits. It was administered by the War Department and also provided work to both blacks and whites in areas devastated by the war. The bureau answered critical needs and did a fine job until, riven by politics, it was discontinued in 1869.

Women stepped in during the war, and in addition to performing their traditional role of caring for the family, also ran the farms and the businesses. The Confederate states started the war with a total population of about 10.4 million, including some 3.9 million slaves. With 1 million white men off to war, someone had to do the day-to-day work to put food on the table.

It was the same in the North. With a population of about 18 million, the Union put more than 2 million men in uniform. On farms and in cities all across the North, women did the same as their Southern sisters: They stepped in and did what had to be done. Women worked in areas they had never worked before. And did well.

The women of the Civil War era kept the home fires burning. There is a marvelous scene in the movie "Gone With the Wind": Scarlett visits Rhett while he is a prisoner of the Yankees, and they greet each other warmly. He holds her hand for an instant, and frowns. The hand is rough and calloused, the result of field and farm work. Like all women, Scarlett did what had to be done.

One of the worst legacies of four years of combat was the number of amputations in both armies. While Civil War medicine started out in disastrous fashion, it soon was the best military medicine in the world. But this was not the age of penicillin and sulfa drugs and helicopter evacuation. Wounded men generally had to wait until nightfall, when their comrades would gather them up for transport to a field medical facility. In most cases, a gunshot wound would result in death, although if the wound was in an arm or a leg, the standard treatment was amputation, and more often than not, the soldier would survive. (In his excellent book "Civil War Medicine," Dr. Alfred Bollet shows the fatality rate for an arm amputation was 12.6 percent; for a leg amputation, 40.2 percent.)

But the result was that after 1865, a bitter byproduct of the war was a veteran on the farm or in the town who was missing an arm or a leg.

To this old veteran, our military medicine today would be a marvel. A soldier who is wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan is stabilized in the battle zone and then flown to superb medical facilities in Germany, where he is given more treatment. If possible, and within 72 hours, he is flown to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where recovery continues. The dedication and professionalism of the medical personnel in the entire chain of treatment is a thing of beauty.

But this ability to save lives has a cost: Wounds that would have been fatal in previous wars can now be treated.

Once again, the price our men and women are paying for being able to survive is the loss of limbs -- just like the veterans 140 years ago.

WANT TO WRITE? NED HARRISON is a Greensboro, N.C., writer who specializes in military history and writes a monthly Civil War column for The Roanoke Times. He wants to hear about your ancestors who were part of our Civil War. Write him at News & Record / RT, P.O. Box 20848, Greensboro, NC 27420, or e-mail him at: n-b-h@mindspring.com.