Before the Civil war? What do you mean. The Globe was at war everywhere else. All throughout the 1800s. It fought continuous war. It hasn't changed much today either. But unlike today, it was everywhere. All around the globe everywhere was in some form of conflict. Whether it was competing Empires, civil unrest, warring city states, or warring kingdoms, bands of pirates, marauders, and savages. There aren't many nations where there was peace in the 1800s. The majority of the globe had some form of conflict or another. No not ever city was persay. Hardly that point.

The American Civil War was simply about America becoming a nation that stretched from coast to coast instead of a federation of separate states. States becoming more powerful than their nation. A nation that simply robbed them. America had the South won would be a vastly different nation than today. It would be at least 3 or 4 different nations in the country of today. What the North did was rob the South and then it went to war itself into the country today. Slaves are fiction. Slavery in the South would have fizzled out eventually by century end. Black slavery is bullshit compared to the white slavery. What could you actually do with a black savage you couldn't do with a white prisoner. White prisoner is already educated by comparison. Black slaves then required an education meaning they weren't exactly prisoners. Slaves getting educated aren't slaves. A fetish perhaps. But criminals aren't purchased. Watch Papillion, it was in the 1900s for an idea on white slavery. The chain gangs in America lasted until about the 70s, later prisoners got a wage? The war was about taxes. South was selling and trading with Europe, growing powerful. The Mississippi the entrance into America, traded all over the Americas and to Europe. But the North had all these dumb immigrants growing into large cities needing the taxation and the agriculture to sustain an economy in constant debt. It also needed the land owned by the Spanish and the Indians. America as a nation had no gold until after the civil war. It was in California and Alaska and maybe some in Colorado and Utah. Utah which also has the metals away from largely Tennessee. The south had gold and assets from the agriculture and plantations selling to Europe, rich settled and fertile land and the entrance to America via the Mississippi. An easy war when they didn't want to fund a bunch of dumb immigrants. The North simply told them they were gonna be prisoners of the South. No sooner were those dumb immigrants taxed even more into buying even dumber immigrants and also conscripted for every conflict since.

As far as the cannibals obviously a small joke at civil war. But also factual in those times, it existed, and has done in many wars since even in Yemen today. With the later Geneva convention after WW1, POWs were treated better instead of starved into acts of cannibalism. Mass agriculture after WW2 has seen less food shortages globally unlike prior farming methods. In the American Civil War it saw crops destroyed, and employed bands of pillaging marauders. A common seige tactic was to starve an enemy out by attacking warehouses supply lines and burning their crops to force desperation and surrender. Although then there was far more horses and also dogs and carrier pigeons on hand, still acts of unimaginable barbarity and cannibalism occurred.