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In 1860, the leading manufacturing industry in the United States was the northeastern cotton-textile industry, whose output was valued at $115 million, while wool and iron accounted for roughly $73 million apiece.
⁷¹
Although Boston was the center of abolitionist activity, most Massachusetts textile-mill owners did not want to antagonize their southern suppliers. They and their political representatives like Daniel Webster were denounced as craven “Cotton Whigs” by New England radicals.

Many of the fortunes in early industrial New England were based on processing cotton grown by southern slaves.
⁷²
The merchants and financiers of New York City also had reason to appease the southern planters. New York was deeply involved in the cotton trade, as the third point on a triangle that connected the South with Liverpool, from which cotton moved to the steam-powered mills of the British West Midlands. In 1860, New York City voted against Lincoln. Its mayor, Fernando Wood, argued for the acceptance of southern secession and even suggested that New Yorkers should defend slavery even more ardently than southerners: “As commercial people it is to our interest to cherish and keep so good a customer. . . . Not only let us avoid making war upon her own peculiar system of labor but let us become even stronger defenders of the system than the South itself.”
⁷³
Early in 1861, as southern states seceded, Wood proposed that New York and several neighboring counties secede to form an independent commercial city-state. The prospect of losing the midwestern trade to the ports of a low-tariff Confederacy, however, persuaded many merchants in New York to support the Union.
⁷⁴

Counting on northern allies like these, in the decades preceding the Civil War the confident and aggressive southern planter class used the threat of secession to intimidate the rest of the country into submitting to its goals. Their strategy of extortion succeeded in producing the compromises of 1820 and 1850, which maintained the outnumbered South’s equality in the US Senate, and in the compromise tariff of 1833.

As a result of the United States–Mexican War of 1846–1848, the territory of the United States increased by more than two-thirds, from 1.8 million square miles to 3 million. The geographic expansion of the Union threatened the balance among slave and free states in the Senate. In the last great effort of his life, Henry Clay became known as the “Great Compromiser” for brokering the Compromise of 1850.

But in 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as part of a plan to create a transcontinental railroad, repealed the Compromise of 1850. The possibility that the slave-plantation system could be universalized drove many midwestern Jacksonians together with former Whigs in the new Republican Party, which sought to prevent the extension of slavery beyond the South. Denouncing the Republicans as a purely sectional party, the southern slaveholders threatened secession when General John C. Frémont was nominated as the first Republican presidential candidate in 1856 and carried out their threat when Abraham Lincoln was elected president in the four-way race of 1860. The refusal of the federal government to recognize the new Confederacy made war inevitable, even before Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861.

Hail to victory without the gaud

Of glory; zeal that needs no fans

Of banners; plain mechanic power. . . .

No passion; all went on by crank
,

Pivot, and screw
,

And calculations of caloric.

—Herman Melville, 1866
¹

Who else would have declared a war against a power with 10 times the area, 100 times the men, and 1,000 times the resources?

—William Faulkner, 1942
²

I
n the early 1850s, the North and South were divided over the question of the location of a railroad that would connect the East with the West. With the intention of making Chicago the eastern terminus of a transcontinental railroad, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois sought to win southern support for his proposed northern route through the yet-unorganized Nebraska Territory. Because the Nebraska Territory was above the line of 36°30' latitude that divided the slave and free states as part of the Missouri Compromise, Douglas proposed to repeal that portion of the compromise and split the territory into two states, Kansas and Nebraska, whose inhabitants would choose whether the states were slave or free.

Douglas had hoped that allowing “popular sovereignty” to settle the question of slavery in the new states of Kansas and Nebraska would remove controversy. Instead, the northern public was alarmed by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which was followed in 1857 by the Supreme Court’s holding in a fugitive-slave case,
Dred Scott v. Sanford
, that the Missouri Compromise had been unconstitutional all along because Congress lacked the power to prohibit slavery in US territories. The debate over the extension of slavery shattered the older party system. From the wreckage emerged a new party, the Republican Party, composed of former Whigs, abolitionists, and antislavery Jacksonian Democrats, who feared that the “slave power” might obtain a permanent majority of states in the US Senate and bring slaves to the North and West to compete with free white farmers and workers. One of the leaders of the new Republican party was a former Whig from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, who gained national prominence by debating his rival, Stephen A. Douglas, in an unsuccessful campaign for the Senate seat from the state. When Lincoln was elected president of the United States in 1860, in an election polarized along regional lines, first South Carolina and ultimately a total of eleven Southern states seceded to form the Confederate States of America.

Douglas, one of the losers of the 1860 presidential election, gave his full support to Lincoln and the Union during the war. He did not get the presidency, but the nation got the transcontinental railroad he wanted.

WHY THE CONFEDERACY LOST

The new constitution adopted by the Confederate States of America was poorly designed to enable the South to prevail in a long and costly war for independence. The Confederate Constitution was the US Constitution rewritten to reflect the anti-statism and anti-industrialism characteristic of extreme Jeffersonian and Jacksonian ideology. The differences between the two documents began with the preambles. The preamble to the US Constitution states: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” The preamble to the Confederate Constitution replaced “the people” with “the Confederate States,” replaced “to form a more perfect union” with “to form a permanent federal government,” and dropped the phrases “provide for the common defense” and “general welfare.”

The provisions of the Confederate Constitution were carefully crafted to forestall the possibility that the new government would ever attempt anything like the programs of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay for national economic development. The constitution banned the Confederate Congress from appropriating money “for any internal improvement intended to facilitate commerce,” with the exception of improvements for the waterborne commerce that the cotton oligarchs needed to ship their crops to foreign markets. The Confederate Constitution also outlawed government promotion of manufacturing, providing that “no bounties shall be granted from the Treasury; nor shall any duties on importation from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry.”

Confederate senator W. S. Oldham of Texas in March 1862 described national defense itself as a tyrannical infringement on the rights of the states and the people: “The tendency to indoctrinate the people into the belief that there was no reliance in the State Government was the bane of the old republic, and would be, if not avoided, the bane of this. That government, from its commencement, gradually taught the people to centralize upon it, as the only reliance for their honour and welfare, and bought and bribed them not to rely upon the States themselves. The first measure was the establishment of a National Bank, the next the establishment of a Military Academy at West Point, and a Naval Academy at Annapolis, and so on.”
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“A PECULIAR PEOPLE”

Even more important in the downfall of the Confederacy than the design of its political institutions was the structure of its economy. The underlying cause of the war was the economic specialization of the South in the export of cotton to the steam-powered textile mills of industrial Britain, and the hope of southern secessionists that the South could play the same role in the steam-era world economy as a sovereign nation rather than as part of the United States.

A few years earlier, Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina made the phrase “King Cotton” famous in a speech in the US Senate on March 4, 1858: “What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? . . . this is certain: England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you do not dare make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is King.”
⁴

Hammond and other planters had reason to be confident. They counted on being supported by Britain. In 1860, more than eighty years after the beginning of the American War of Independence, the economy of the United States remained deeply integrated with that of Britain. America’s largest trading partner by far, Britain received more than half of all American exports and provided 40 percent of American imports.
⁵
In 1860, America’s industries were still in their infancy. Sixty-three percent of imports were finished and semifinished manufactured goods; only 16.3 percent of American exports fell in those categories. US exports were dominated by crude materials, including cotton (61.6 percent) and foodstuffs (22.1 percent).
⁶

Once the Civil War broke out, the Confederacy placed an informal embargo on cotton, similar to Jefferson’s ill-fated embargo of 1808. The purpose of the embargo was to force Britain and France to recognize their dependence on southern cotton and to intervene to help the South win its independence from the United States.

While the embargo as well as the Union blockade hurt the British textile industry, the damage was limited by supplies left over from the southern bumper crops of 1859 and 1860. The impact was further limited by imports of cotton from India and other sources. And British capital and labor found new uses, in building ships and arms for both sides in the American conflict. In 1864, the London
Times
observed, “We are as busy, as rich, and as fortunate in our trade as if the American war had never broken out and our trade with the states had never been disturbed. Cotton was no king.”
⁷

The failure of Britain to intervene to secure southern independence meant that the Confederacy was forced to mobilize its own resources. While the Union was able to muster the power of northern finance and industry, the Confederacy found itself handicapped by the undeveloped banking and manufacturing sectors of the South.

In 1861, former US senator from Texas Louis T. Wigfall told a British correspondent: “We are a peculiar people, sir! . . . We are an agricultural people; we are a primitive but a civilized people. We have no cities—we don’t want them. We have no literature—we don’t need any yet. . . . We want no manufactures; we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes. . . . As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want from those nations with which we are in amity, and to lay up money besides.”
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The journalist James B. D. Debow, writing before the Civil War, did not share Wigfall’s complacency: “Our slaves work with Northern hoes, ploughs, and other implements. The slaveholder dresses in Northern goods, rides a Northern saddle . . . reads Northern books. . . . In Northern vessels his products are carried to market . . . and on Northern-made paper, with a Northern pen, with Northern ink, he resolves and re-resolves in regard to his rights.”
⁹

The southern states paid an enormous price for their specialization in export agriculture. At the beginning of the Civil War, the Union had a population of nineteen million, while the Confederacy had only nine million, one-third of whom were slaves. Northern industry produced ten times as much as industry in the South; the manufactured products of the entire Confederacy added up to less than one-fourth of New York State’s manufacturing by value added.
¹⁰
The North had thirty-eight times as much coal, fifteen times as much iron, and ten times as much factory production.
¹¹

CONFEDERATE WAR SOCIALISM

Apart from the privately owned Tredegar Iron Works of Richmond, which were put under contract to the military, the Confederate states lacked the industry they needed to manufacture military supplies. The response was a crash program of state-guided industrialization from above that was more Hamiltonian than Hamilton. Among the government-owned factories of the Confederacy the most impressive was the Augusta Powder Works at Augusta, Georgia, created under the direction of Colonel George W. Rains on the basis of a pamphlet describing a British original.
¹²
In the absence of a native southern class of industrialists, military officers supervised the war socialism of the Confederacy, including, along with Colonel Rains, General Josiah Gorgas, who headed the Confederate Ordnance Bureau, and Colonel John W. Mallet, who supervised the production of explosives and ammunition.
¹³

The Confederacy, like the Union, used a draft to fill its ranks. In both North and South, affluent men could pay for substitutes to serve on their behalf. Another exemption from draft service in the Confederacy for white men on plantations with twenty or more slaves inspired the bitter quip, “Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.”
¹⁴

To finance the war effort, the Confederacy used produce loans (bonds paid for by promised crop shares). When this expedient was not sufficient, the government turned to tariffs and a progressive income tax. Out-of-control inflation in the final years of the war constituted an even more extreme form of taxation.
¹⁵

TECHNOLOGICAL WARFARE

The Civil War was one of the first large-scale conflicts of the industrial era, foreshadowing the mechanized carnage of World War I. Both sides not only exploited existing technologies like the railroad and the telegraph but also sought to gain advantages by sponsoring technological innovations.

The North controlled twenty-two thousand miles of railroad compared to the South’s nine thousand. Both sides used trains to move their troops rapidly from one region to another and to transfer supplies. And both sides destroyed the railroads of their enemies when they could.

The South had the advantage that it could use its railroads as internal lines of communication. Attempts by the Union forces to concentrate at one point could be met by Confederate troops, rushed by railroads to that location. General Ulysses S. Grant understood this, and promoted his “anaconda strategy” of squeezing the South all along its border, to prevent it from massing its forces. In his memoirs, he explained that those who could not skin could hold a leg. Grant created a huge railroad depot to supply his forces when they besieged Richmond and Petersburg, while William Tecumseh Sherman, during his march through the South, trained thousands of his troops to repair railroads that Confederate guerrillas had damaged so that they could be quickly used again.

The telegraph system helped to coordinate the war on both sides. To the discomfort of his generals, Lincoln used the telegraph to monitor events and pepper his subordinates with instructions. Telegraphy allowed far greater control over military operations by the president than had been possible in the past. Because the White House had no telegraph line, Lincoln spent much of his time in the War Department’s telegraph office. It was there that he drafted the Emancipation Proclamation, between waiting for news and sending instructions.

MINIÉ BALLS AND IRONCLADS

More than two million Springfield model 1861 rifled muskets and similar British Enfield rifled muskets were used by both sides in the Civil War. Named after a French inventor, Claude-Étienne Minié, the minié ball—actually a conical bullet—was used in a musket whose rifled bore imparted a spin to the projectile, giving it longer range, accuracy, and deadliness. The US arsenals at Harpers Ferry, Virgina, and Springfield, Massachusetts, developed the new technique.

Most of the guns used in the war were still muzzle loaded, with the bullets inserted from the front. But in the Battle of Gettysburg, Union forces successfully deployed Spencer repeating rifles, which were breach loaded (side loaded) and could fire around fourteen shots per minute.

Experimental machine guns were developed during the war, but not in time to play a role. President Lincoln tested one. During the Civil War, Lincoln met with inventors and urged his military officers to test or adopt new weapons, sometimes to their annoyance. He took part in tests of new weapons in the Washington Navy Yard and on the White House lawn. Lincoln’s aide John Hay wrote: “He was particularly interested in the first rude attempts at the afterwards famous mitrailleuses [machine guns]; on one occasion he worked one with his own hands at the Arsenal, and sent forth peals of Homeric laugh [
sic
] as the balls, which had not power to penetrate the target set up at a little distance, came bounding back among the shins of the bye-standers.”
¹⁶
After watching the test-firing of a gun that worked because gas was prevented from escaping, Lincoln turned to a journalist and asked, “Now have any of you heard of any machine, or invention, for preventing the escape of ‘gas’ from newspaper establishments?”
¹⁷
In his White House office, Lincoln had a model of a brass cannon that rested on land patents and a grenade that he used on his desk as a paperweight.
¹⁸