<P> The economic and political - power determinism forcefully presented by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard in The Rise of American Civilization (1927) was highly influential among historians and the general public until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s . The Beards downplayed slavery, abolitionism, and issues of morality . They ignored constitutional issues of states' rights and even ignored American nationalism as the force that finally led to victory in the war . Indeed, the ferocious combat itself was passed over as merely an ephemeral event . Much more important was the calculus of class conflict . The Beards announced that the Civil War was really: </P> <P> (A) social cataclysm in which the capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West drove from power in the national government the planting aristocracy of the South . </P> <P> The Beards themselves abandoned their interpretation by the 1940s and it became defunct among historians in the 1950s, when scholars shifted to an emphasis on slavery . However, Beardian themes still echo among Lost Cause writers . </P> <P> The first efforts at Civil War battlefield preservation and memorialization came during the war itself with the establishment of National Cemeteries at Gettysburg, Mill Springs and Chattanooga . Soldiers began erecting markers on battlefields beginning with the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, but the oldest surviving monument is the Hazen monument, erected at Stones River near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in the summer of 1863 by soldiers in Union Col. William B. Hazen's brigade to mark the spot where they buried their dead in the Battle of Stones River . In the 1890s, the United States government established five Civil War battlefield parks under the jurisdiction of the War Department, beginning with the creation of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park in Tennessee and the Antietam National Battlefield in Maryland in 1890 . The Shiloh National Military Park was established in 1894, followed by the Gettysburg National Military Park in 1895 and Vicksburg National Military Park in 1899 . In 1933, these five parks and other national monuments were transferred to the jurisdiction of the National Park Service . </P>

Who was fighting against who in the civil war