Setting The Stage For Civil War

What were the circumstances that faced the North and the South as they sat at the precipice of war? We can learn a lot from the census of 1860, looking on paper, the Confederacy had no chance. Twenty-three states remained in the Union, and more would be added during the war. The population of the remaining Union states was about twenty-two million, four million of them men of combat age. There were one-hundred-thousand factories employing one million-one hundred thousand workers. The Union possessed more that twenty-thousand miles of railroad tracks, more than the rest of the world's combined, and ninety-six percent of the country's railroad equipment. Union banks held eighty-one percent of the nation's bank deposits and fifty-six million in gold.

The eleven Confederate states held a population of approximately nine-million, which included nearly four-million slaves. There were only about twenty-thousand factories employing about one-hundred thousand workers in the Confederate states. Only nine-thousand miles of railroad tracks across the Confederacy totally insignificant compared to the Union. More critical was that as the war progressed, the Confederacy lacked the factories to produce new rails and equipment to replace those captured or destroyed in what would become the first war to move by train. The South further couldn't come close to the Union's production of weapons. Just like we saw about eighty years later when the U.S. production capability buried the warring powers in W.W.II, the Union buried the Confederacy with their factories. Not only did the Union vastly out produce the South in weaponry, but in every category of agriculture production, with the exception of cotton. However, the most important agricultural product of the South would basically go unsold through the war years, first due to a misguided attempt to withhold cotton to England to force England to align with the South, then when realizing it was hurting the Confederacy more than England, the Union Navy was able to effectively blockade cotton shipment from Confederate ports.

There was no question, the Union and Confederate states were not "One Nation Under God." They were two nations, divided by politics,economy, and culture, all of those differences generated by the institution of slavery. The America of the Union states were fast advancing toward the twentieth century, with banks, booming factories, railroads, canals, and steamship lines. Its population was exploding with the influx of immigrants escaping the famine and political unrest in Ireland and Germany.

The southern states were in many ways standing still in time. They remained stuck in the agricultural, slave based economy of Jefferson's time, when the gentlemen planters of Virginia helped create the nation. Most of the South's cash wealth was tied up in slaves, and its chief product was the cotton produced by those slaves. When you learn that George Washington was looking for new cash crops because he was already convinced of the economic disaster that tobacco and slavery were producing. He was aware that slave labor was actually very costly and was causing a steadying decline in real income. Yet, the South was still an economic hostage to slavery and the cotton system.

Despite the common language, religion, race, and heritage, the North and South were already two cultures, two ideologies, two countries if you will. The South saw themselves being rolled over by a Northern economic machine that threatened every aspect of their way of life. This produced the seemingly irrational contradiction in people proclaiming a fight for "liberty" by defending the enslavement of someone else. There was a widely shared belief among many in the Confederacy that their liberty and way of life was being overpowered by northern political, industrial, and banking powers. That fear was whipped into a frenzy with race-baiting hysteria that politicians of the future Confederacy, the slave owning class, who had the most to lose from emancipation. They stoked the fear that freed blacks would ravage the white women. That potent mixture of economic fear and racially tinged emotions pushed past the issue of slavery. Even though the vast majority of Southern whites did not own slaves they thought the powers of the North had no right telling them how to live their lives. With their decided political powers advantage that they held since the founding and the 3/5ths rule gave the South a long held imbalance of power, diminishing in Congress as the free states were growing in number and population. With that the men of the Confederacy turned to the one weapon that they thought they had the right to use, secession.

Even thought the vast majority of the white population in the Confederacy were poor and held no slaves, they lacked political and economic clout. They feared being overwhelmed, this fear was fanned by politicians and editorial pages, who warned of "Black Republicans" of Lincoln and the "abolitionists Yankees" who owned the banks and set the prices for their crops would make them economic slaves. Once the war began, they were strengthened with the more human instinct to defend their own home and property.