The American Civil War

by John Keegan

  The United States was still an industrial client of Europe, particularly Britain, from which most manufactured goods came, but that was due to Britain’s head start in the industrial revolution. By the end of the century this would no longer be the case. In the meantime, America was ceasing to be a predominately rural country and becoming an urban one. At the outbreak of the Civil War, America had more country-dwellers than town-dwellers, many more in the South, but the trend was for town-dwellers to outnumber country-dwellers. Cities were being founded at a breakneck rate and growing at exponential speed. The old cities of colonial settlement, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, retained their importance, but new cities were appearing and expanding, particularly beyond the Appalachian chain and even beyond the Mississippi; for a time Cincinnati promised to be the most important of the new metropolises, but it was rapidly overtaken by Chicago, which grew from a population of 5,000 in 1840 to 109,000 in 1860. It might be said that Chicago was only keeping pace with the United States itself, whose population increased from 5,306,000 in 1800 to 23,192,000 in 1850. Part of the increase came from migration, though the decades of mass immigration lay in the future; most of it was the result of a high birthrate. The astonishing productivity of the United States furnished work for all who chose to stay in the towns, while the abundant availability of land for settlement in the new states beyond the Appalachians and the Mississippi attracted would-be farmers, or employed farmers seeking better land, in large numbers. In whichever direction a visitor to the United States looked, the country was growing.

  It was not that America was giving up the land. On the contrary: in the twenty years before 1860 enormous areas of the subcontinent were put under the plough; but the work was done by internal migrants who abandoned their homes on the thin, worked-out soils of New England, Virginia, and the Carolinas to trek westward into the new land in and beyond the Mississippi and Missouri valleys. Federal land policy encouraged the migrants. In 1800 public land was sold at $2 an acre, with a quarter to be paid down and four years to pay off the residue. By 1820 the price had gone down to $1.25 an acre. Land was sold in subdivisions of a section of 640 acres. By 1832 the government accepted bids for a quarter of a quarter section, 40 acres. In 1862 Congress passed the Homestead Act, which allowed a settler free possession of 160 acres if farmed for five years. The legislation effectively transferred eighty million acres of public land into private hands, and accommodated half a million people. American land policy was the making of such states as Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, the Middle West proper. As settlement moved on to the more distant lands of the prairies in Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska, the first comers got the best of the deal. The prairies were settled during an uncharacteristic era of moist climate, which conferred bountiful crops on the hardworking. By the twentieth century, desiccation had set in and many farms joined the dust bowl.

  Settlement was not exclusively by free men. Cotton profits pulled plantation owners westward into new lands during the period 1830–50, particularly onto the dark, rich soils of the “black belt” of Alabama and Mississippi, but even as far away as the river lands of Texas. It is calculated that 800,000 slaves were moved, by their owners, from the Atlantic coast farther inland between 1800 and 1860.

  America was growing not only in population but also in wealth. Not yet an exporting country, except of cotton, its enormous internal market consumed all that could be produced. The whole of America was industrialising in the 1850s, particularly those parts settled since the eighteenth century: New England, Pennsylvania, New York, and some of Virginia. The industrialisation had its centre in Connecticut, which had both excellent river and canal connections with other parts of the region, and plentiful waterpower to drive factory machinery. Even as a pre-industrial economy, America wanted and bought the output of New England’s workshops and factories, which worked by methods that would be copied all over the world. It was in Connecticut that what came to be called “the American system of manufacture” first established itself. The American system also became known as the “system of interchangeable parts,” which is exactly descriptive. A well-educated and well-trained workforce learnt to make parts in metal or wood to such narrow tolerances that one manufactured item could be assembled from a random selection of parts. The American army’s rifle, the Springfield, was such a product. It so impressed British visitors to the Springfield armoury that the British government bought the appropriate machinery to equip its armoury at Enfield for the Crimean War. When in 1861 the American government was gripped by demand for large quantities of rifles, the Enfield armoury supplied much of the need. Because the Springfield and Enfield products were manufactured in almost the same calibre, the Enfield being slightly larger, American cartridges fitted both quite satisfactorily, so well in fact that Union soldiers did not differentiate between Springfields and Enfields. Many good republicans thus went into battle with a weapon which bore the letters VR under a crown on the plate of the lock. The “system of interchangeable parts” also enabled the manufacture and assembly of clocks, watches, household and agricultural machinery, and the increasing number of labour-saving devices which American inventiveness brought to the world. America was chronically short of labour, both in town and country, so that any device that could multiply the work of a pair of hands was rapidly adopted. The sewing machine, which allowed housewives to dress themselves and their families at home or the local dressmaker to set up as a businesswoman, was widely adopted across America as soon as it was perfected. American farmers meanwhile were buying reaping machines, binders, and seed drills which could perform the tasks for which labour was lacking. The most significant element of mechanisation antedated the nineteenth century. It was the invention by Eli Whitney in 1793 of the cotton gin, a machine that separated the cotton fibre from the seed on which it grew, the boll. The gin revolutionised cotton production. A process which required a slave’s hard labour for an hour to produce a pound of cotton could be completed by the machine in a few minutes. Little was turned into manufactured goods in the South, which, having sent raw cotton north to be spun, then had to buy it back as woven cloth or finished apparel.

  The South’s dependence on the industrial resources of the North underlay a visible social split. The South remained, as the North had been in the eighteenth century, agrarian and rural, with most Southerners living on the land and working as subsistence farmers, raising corn, hogs, and root crops, most of which they consumed themselves or sold locally, while the Northerners began during the nineteenth century to migrate from the land to towns in which they found wage-paying work. The readiness during the war of the two sides to fraternise at times of truce, formal and informal, and the willingness of both to be taken prisoner dispose of the idea that North and South were markedly different societies; despite the war, Americans remained American. Accent apart, and many Northerners complained they could hardly understand the way Southerners spoke, the soldiers of the two sides resembled each other much more than they differed. Both, in overwhelming majority, were country boys, in their twenties, farmers’ sons who had left their land to join the army. Nevertheless, North and South were different, and the differences showed in the character of the armies.

  Southerners were almost without exception small-town boys, or the sons of small farmers. Only a minority were slave owners. Of the South’s white population of five million, only 48,000 were identified as planters, that is, men owning more than twenty slaves. Only 3,000 owned more than a hundred slaves, only 11 more than five hundred, truly staggering wealth in times when a fit, young field hand cost a thousand dollars. The white-pillared mansion, surrounded by shade trees and at a distance from the cabins of the field hands, existed, but more substantially in the imagination of outsiders than in reality. Of the four million slaves in the South, half belonged to men who owned fewer than twenty. Most owned only one or two and used them to work subsistence farms on which they raised corn—maize, to Europeans—and pigs. Most Southerners were hand-to-mouth farmers
who owned no slaves at all.

  Hence the phrase, much quoted during the war, particularly at bad times for the Confederacy, of “a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight.” Most Confederate soldiers were poor men from harsh circumstances, a circumstance which has caused a question to be constantly raised: “If so, why did the Southerners fight so long and so well?” Part of the answer is that most Southerners were attached to the institutions of slavery and aspired to slave ownership, which was the mark of Southern prosperity and success. Slave owners dominated Southern politics, and it was by buying slaves that a Southerner moved up the social tree, went from being a small to a large farmer and perhaps eventually a plantation owner. More than that, slavery was the system on which the foundations of Southern society rested. As slaves outnumbered whites in several areas of the South, constituting the majority in South Carolina and Alabama and outnumbering whites in many other local areas, slavery was felt to be a guarantee of social control.

  Even though the planters were often resented as a class by the classes below, they remained objects of envy and jealousy. The sentiments were not unrealistic, since many Southerners did make the transition from yeoman farmer to planter. It is doubtful, however, if many successful social migrants were found in the ranks of the Confederate army, which was disproportionately enlisted from the inhabitants of the upland South, the piney, hilly regions of inland Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia; the Southern soldier’s legendary toughness was a product of hard upbringing in surroundings unsuitable for cotton planting.

  The typical Northern soldier also came from the farm, a farm owned and run by his father which he expected in time to inherit. Unlike the Southerner with his unspoken but persistent hopes of social advancement by graduation to slave owning, the Northerner could not harbour the same hope of elevation unless he abandoned the land, moved to the town, and undertook work as a wage earner. Lives were transformed by leaving the land for the town and in nineteenth-century America much more quickly than they could be in Europe. It was the hope of economic liberation which drew in the thousands arriving as immigrants from the Old World, in numbers that the outbreak of the Civil War diminished but did not staunch. The Northern recruit would almost certainly have been to school for several years and was probably a member of one of the large Protestant denominations, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Baptist. Religious belief and practice characterised a minority in most Northern regiments. It was usually an influential minority however. Captain John Gould of the 10th Maine recorded that it was “painful to know how few profound Christians there were in our large regiment—the number was under fifty—but beyond controversy the regiment was better in every way for the presence of this little handful. Their example was good, for they were good soldiers—a Christian soldier fighting for the right is always the model soldier. In every time of trial the regiment was always the stronger for having its few Christian men.”2 Confederate regiments also usually contained a Christian nucleus which was of equal importance, but with this difference. Southern Christianity was compromised by involvement with slavery, which had led to the pre-war split in the Baptist and Methodist churches. Even devout Confederate soldiers could harbour violently unchristian feelings as a result, applauding the killing of black Union soldiers at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 and the killing of individual black prisoners. The morals of plantation society also compromised Southern Christianity. In an America that had conferred the highest value on the family and on the sacred bond between the mother of the family and her husband, the sexual use of slave women by the planter and his sons, and the presence of mixed-blood cousins in the slave quarters of plantations, was a constant affront to Southern planter wives and daughters. Nothing similar happened in Northern society, which practised what it preached. The Christian family was a reality in the North, and its strength helped to make the Christian woman, exemplified by Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the formidable exponent of abolitionism she so often became.

  Once the Northern soldier began to see the Southland for himself, as he did from 1863 onwards, he was confirmed in his critical opinions. Southerners, except for the truly poor whites of the poorest subsistence farms, were per capita richer than Northerners. This situation was brought about because the capital value of slaves was very high, but slave ownership was patchy. To Northern eyes, however, they looked poor. That had to do with the Southern way of life. Southerners did not care for their houses as Northerners cared for theirs, nor keep the gardens and surroundings as neat and tidy. Elegant Southern women allowed themselves to be accompanied by black servants in rags. Northerners also tended to judge Southerners by the condition of their blacks. If the blacks were badly spoken and ignorant, Northern soldiers concluded that this was because of the example given them by their masters and mistresses.

  Yet despite the real differences between Northern and Southern societies, the soldiers of the two sides shared many similarities. As the war drew out, and its harshness and ordeals bore down on the men in the ranks, that was not in the least surprising. They were the subjects of a common experience, and soldiers came to recognise the fact. Northern soldiers, better fed and better supplied than their opponents, were to form an admiration for Johnny Reb. He had “grit.” He kept going in circumstances that tried the endurance of the hardest men. Johnny Reb commonly thought himself the better man than Billy Yank, an opinion that was to persist long into the war. The result of the first battle, First Manassas, or First Bull Run, seemed to confirm it. Until the exchange of the first shots, the differences between North and South were not that substantial. Once blood had been drawn, they came to seem so. What confirmed the difference was the war itself, a self-fulfilling judgement.