USA: The Civil War
From the moment of its inception, the unity of the United States had been based on shaky foundations. Great care had gone into devising a Constitution that balanced the need for a strong federal government with the aspirations for autonomy of its component states. That was achieved by giving Congress two separate chambers - the House of Representatives , in which the number of representatives from each state depended upon its population, and the Senate , in which each state, regardless of size, had two members. Thus, although in theory the Constitution remained silent on the issue of slavery , it allayed the fears of the less populated Southern states (where, of course, the slaves themselves did not have the vote) that the voters of the North might destroy their economy by forcing them to abandon their "peculiar institution." However, it gradually became apparent that the system only worked so long as there were roughly equal numbers of "Free" and slave-owning states. At first it seemed possible that the balance could be maintained - in 1820, under the Missouri Compromise, Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave-owning state simultaneously with Maine as a free one.Abolitionist sentiment in the North was not all that great before the middle of the nineteenth century. At best, after the importation of slaves from Africa ended in 1808, Northerners had vague hopes that slavery was an anachronism that might simply wither away. In fact, the profitability of the Southern plantations was dramatically boosted by the development of the cotton gin, and the increased demand for manufactured cotton goods triggered by the Industrial Revolution . What ultimately changed the situation was the rapid growth of the nation as a whole, making it ever more difficult to maintain a political balance between North and South.
There was a clear difference between tacitly acknowledging the existence of slavery in the Southern states as a matter for those states to decide, and being obliged to let it spread into one out of every two new states that joined the Union. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act brought matters to a head, sparking off guerrilla raids and mini-wars between rival settlers by allowing both prospective states self-determination on the issue. That same year, the Republican Party was founded, on the platform of resisting the further expansion of slavery. Escaped former slaves such as Frederick Douglass were by now inspiring Northern audiences to moral outrage, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin found unprecedented readership.
In October 1859, John Brown - a white-bearded, wild-eyed veteran of some of Kansas's bloodiest infighting - led a dramatic raid on the US Armory at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, intending to secure arms for a slave insurrection. Swiftly captured by forces under the command of Robert E. Lee, he was hanged within a few weeks, proclaiming that "I am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood."
The Republican candidate for the presidency in 1860 was the little-known Abraham Lincoln from Kentucky; he won no Southern states, but with the Democrats split into Northern and Southern factions he was elected with 39 percent of the popular vote. Within weeks, on December 20, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union; the Confederacy was declared on February 4, 1861, when it was joined by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. Its first (and only) president was Jefferson Davis, also from Kentucky; at their inauguration, his new vice-president remarked that their government was "the first in the history of the world based upon the great physical and moral truth that the negro is not equal to the white man." Lincoln was inaugurated in turn in March 1861, proclaiming that "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." He was completely inflexible, however, on one paramount issue: the survival of the Union.
The Civil War began just a few weeks later. The first shots were fired on April 12, when a much-postponed federal attempt to resupply Fort Sumter, in the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina, was greeted by a Confederate bombardment that forced its surrender. Lincoln's immediate call to raise an army against the South was greeted by the further secession of Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. Within a year, both armies had amassed 600,000 men; Robert E. Lee had been offered command of both and opted for the Confederacy, while George McLellan became the first leader of the Union forces. Although the rival capitals of Washington, DC and Richmond, Virginia, were a mere one hundred miles apart, over the next four years operations of war reached almost everywhere south of Washington and east of the Mississippi.
Tracing the ebb and flow of the military campaigns - from the Confederate victories of the early years, via Grant's successful siege of Vicksburg in 1863 and Sherman's devastating March to the Sea in 1864, to Lee's eventual surrender at Appomattox in April 1865 - it's easy to lose sight of the fact that it was not so much generalship as sheer economic power that won the war for the Union. It was the North that could maintain full trading with the rest of the world while diverting spare resources to the production of munitions, and could go on doing so despite matching Southern losses man for man. Conversely, defeat for the South spelled destruction for its economy; two-thirds of its wealth was lost, its share of national assets collapsed from thirty percent in 1860 to twelve percent in 1870, and one in four Southern white males of military age had been killed. Moreover, when Lincoln's wartime proclamation emancipating the slaves achieved full legal force under the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, the plantation system was rendered inoperable.
Lincoln himself was assassinated within a few days of the end of the war, a mark of the deep bitterness that would almost certainly have rendered successful Reconstruction impossible even if he had lived. There was a brief period, after black men were granted the vote in 1870, when the Southern states elected black political representatives, but without a sustained effort to enable former slaves to acquire land, social relations in the South swiftly deteriorated. Thanks to white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, nominally clandestine but brazenly public, Southern blacks were soon effectively disenfranchised once more. Anyone working to transform the South came under attack either as a carpetbagger (a Northern opportunist who headed South for personal profit) or a treacherous scalawag (a Southern collaborator).
The aftermath of the Civil War can almost be said to have lasted for a hundred years. While the South condemned itself to a century as a backwater, the rest of the re-United States embarked on a period of expansionism and prosperity
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