Beard and Hacker focused on the narrow economic aspects of these changes, interpreting them as the efforts of an emerging class of industrial capitalists to gain control of economic policy.
More recently, historians have taken a broader view of the situation, arguing that the sectional splits on these economic issues reflected sweeping economic and social changes in the Northern and Western states that were not experienced by people in the South. Table 2 presents some additional statistics on urbanization by region.
In 6. A glance at either the map or Table 2 reveals the enormous difference in urban development in the South compared to the Northern states. More than two-thirds of all urban counties were in the Northeast and West; those two regions accounted for nearly 80 percent of the urban population of the country. By contrast, less than 7 percent of people in the 11 Southern states of Table 2 lived in urban counties.
Urban Population Northeast b 3,, Source: U. S Census of Population, The region along the north Atlantic Coast, with its extensive development of commerce and industry, had the largest concentration of urban population in the United States; roughly one-third of the population of the nine states defined as the Northeast in Table 2 lived in urban counties. In the South, the picture was very different. Cotton cultivation with slave labor did not require local financial services or nearby manufacturing activities that might generate urban activities.
The 11 states of the Confederacy had only 51 urban counties and they were widely scattered throughout the region. Western agriculture with its emphasis on foodstuffs encouraged urban activity near to the source of production. These centers were not necessarily large; indeed, the West had roughly the same number of large and mid-sized cities as the South.
However there were far more small towns scattered throughout settled regions of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan than in the Southern landscape. Economic policy had played a prominent role in American politics since the birth of the republic in With the formation of the Whig Party in the s, a number of key economic issues emerged at the national level. To illustrate the extent to which the rise of urban centers and increased market activity in the North led to a growing crisis in economic policy, historians have re-examined four specific areas of legislative action singled out by Beard and Hacker as evidence of a Congressional stalemate in Egnal ; Ransom and Sutch ; ; Bensel ; McPherson Land Policy.
Settlement of western lands had always been a major bone of contention for slave and free-labor farms. The manner in which the federal government distributed land to people could have a major impact on the nature of farming in a region. Northerners wanted to encourage the settlement of farms which would depend primarily on family labor by offering cheap land in small parcels. Southerners feared that such a policy would make it more difficult to keep areas open for settlement by slaveholders who wanted to establish large plantations.
The bill passed, but President Buchanan vetoed it. Bensel Transportation Improvements. The need for government- sponsored improvements was particularly urgent in the Great Lakes region Egnal The appearance of the railroad in the s gave added support for those advocating government subsidies to promote transportation.
The bill that best illustrates the regional disputes on transportation was the Pacific Railway Bill of , which proposed a transcontinental railway link to the West Coast. The bill failed to pass the House, receiving no votes from congressmen representing districts of the South where there was a significant slave population Bensel The Tariff. Southerners, with their emphasis on staple agriculture and need to buy goods produced outside the South, strongly objected to the imposition of duties on imported goods.
Manufacturers in the Northeast, on the other hand, supported a high tariff as protection against cheap British imports. People in the West were caught in the middle of this controversy. However the tariff was also the main source of federal revenue at this time, and Westerners needed government funds for the transportation improvements they supported in Congress.
Southerners complained that even this level of protection was excessive and that it was one more example of the willingness of the West and the North to make economic bargains at the expense of the South Ransom and Sutch ; Egnal Banks were a relatively new economic institution at this point in time, and opinions were sharply divided over the degree to which the federal government should regulate banks.
In the Northeast, where over 60 percent of all banks were located, there was strong support by for the creation of a system of banks that would be chartered and regulated by the federal government. But in the South, which had little need for local banking services, there was little enthusiasm for such a proposal.
Here again, the western states were caught in the middle. The growth of an urbanized market society in the North produced more than just a legislative program of political economy that Southerners strongly resisted. Several historians have taken a much broader view of the market revolution and industrialization in the North.
A leading historian of the Civil War, James McPherson, argues that Southerners were correct when they claimed that the revolutionary program sweeping through the North threatened their way of life ; James Huston carries the argument one step further by arguing that Southerners were correct in their fears that the triumph of this coalition would eventually lead to an assault by Northern politicians on slave property rights.
All this provided ample argument for those clamoring for the South to leave the Union in But why did the North fight a war rather than simply letting the unhappy Southerners go in peace? Still, war is always a gamble, and with the neither the costs nor the benefits easily calculated before the fact, leaders are often tempted to take the risk. The evidence above certainly lent strong support for those arguing that it made sense for the South to fight if a belligerent North threatened the institution of slavery.
An economic case for the North is more problematic. However, Gerald Gunderson points out that if, as many historians argue, Northern Republicans were intent on controlling the spread of slavery, then a war to keep the South in the Union might have made sense.
Allowing the South to leave the Union would mean that the North could no longer control the expansion of slavery anywhere in the Western Hemisphere Ransom ; Ransom and Sutch ; Weingast ; Weingast ; Wolfson That is not to say that either side wanted war — for economic or any other reason. In part this reflects the enormous effort expended by both sides to conduct the war. What was the cost of this conflict? The most comprehensive effort to answer this question is the work of Claudia Goldin and Frank Lewis ; The Goldin and Lewis estimates of the costs of the war are presented in Table 3.
The costs are divided into two groups: the direct costs which include the expenditures of state and local governments plus the loss from destruction of property and the loss of human capital from the casualties; and what Goldin and Lewis term the indirect costs of the war which include the subsequent implications of the war after Indirect Costs:. Total Costs of the War.
Source: Ransom, 51, Table ; Goldin and Lewis. While these figures are only a very rough estimate of the actual costs, they provide an educated guess as to the order of magnitude of the economic effort required to wage the war, and it seems likely that if there is a bias, it is to understate the total. Even so, the direct cost of the war as calculated by Goldin and Lewis was 1. What stands out in addition to the enormity of the bill is the disparity in the burden these costs represented to the people in the North and the South.
Staggering though these numbers are, they represent only a fraction of the full costs of the war, which lingered long after the fighting had stopped. All the figures for the costs in Table 3 have been adjusted to reflect their discounted value in Ingenious though this methodology is, it suffers from the serious drawback that consumption lost for any reason — not just the war — is included in the figure.
Particularly for the South, not all the decline in output after could be directly attributed to the war; the growth in the demand for cotton that fueled the antebellum economy did not continue, and there was a dramatic change in the supply of labor due to emancipation.
The magnitudes of the indirect effects are detailed in Table 3. What Table 3 does not show is the extent to which these expenses were spread out over a long period of time.
In the North, consumption had regained its prewar level by , however in the South consumption remained below its level to the end of the century. We shall return to this issue below. No war in American history strained the economic resources of the economy as the Civil War did. Governments on both sides were forced to resort to borrowing on an unprecedented scale to meet the financial obligations for the war.
With more developed markets and an industrial base that could ultimately produce the goods needed for the war, the Union was clearly in a better position to meet this challenge. The South, on the other hand, had always relied on either Northern or foreign capital markets for their financial needs, and they had virtually no manufacturing establishments to produce military supplies.
From the outset, the Confederates relied heavily on funds borrowed outside the South to purchase supplies abroad. Figure 3 shows the sources of revenue collected by the Union government during the war. In and the government covered less than 15 percent of its total expenditures through taxes. But what of the other 75 percent? In Congress authorized the U.
Treasury to issue currency notes that were not backed by gold. This still left a huge shortfall in revenue that was not covered by either taxes or the printing of money. The remaining revenues were obtained by borrowing funds from the public.
The financial markets of the North were strained by these demands, but they proved equal to the task. Consequently, the Northern economy was able to finance the war without a significant reduction in private consumption. While the increase in the national debt seemed enormous at the time, events were to prove that the economy was more than able to deal with it. Indeed, several economic historians have claimed that the creation and subsequent retirement of the Civil War debt ultimately proved to be a significant impetus to post-war growth Williamson ; James Wartime finance also prompted a significant change in the banking system of the United States.
In Congress finally passed legislation creating the National Banking System. Their motive was not only to institute the program of banking reform pressed for many years by the Whigs and the Republicans; the newly-chartered federal banks were also required to purchase large blocs of federal bonds to hold as security against the issuance of their national bank notes.
The efforts of the Confederate government to pay for their war effort were far more chaotic than in the North, and reliable expenditure and revenue data are not available. Figure 4 presents the best revenue estimates we have for the Richmond government from though November Burdekin and Langdana But enough supported the contrasting goals of Lincoln and Davis that the war continued four long years, ending only when Southern resources and Confederate armies had been so eviscerated that they were no longer capable of fighting.
The toll of more than a million casualties, , of them dead, was far greater than in any other war this country has fought. The , dead were 2 percent of the total American population North and South in By way of comparison, if 2 percent of the American people were to die in a war fought today, the number of American deaths would be more than six million.
Note: Recent scholarly studies suggest that at least , and possibly more died as a direct result of the Civil War. Both sides were willing to sustain such punishment and keep fighting because the stakes were so great: nationality and freedom. If the Confederacy lost the war, it would cease to exist. And by or , when emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery became a Northern war aim, the institution of African-American bondage that was a cornerstone of Southern society would also cease to exist.
But "the enemy"--Northerners--did not believe they could "retire into their own country" if they lost the war and "possess everything they enjoyed before the war began. The words " United States" would become an oxymoron. The nation would become two nations, and a fatal precedent would have been created for its further division into several nations until there was no "nation" at all.
Two Union infantry officers, one from New York and the other from New Jersey, agreed that "if we lose this war, the country is lost and if we win it is saved. There is no middle ground. For African Americans the stakes were freedom if the North won, or continued slavery if the Confederacy prevailed. Two hundred thousand of them, mostly former slaves, fought for the Union and for their own liberty. A growing number of Northern white soldiers also came to see freedom as a vital issue in the contest.
Northern victory in the war resolved two festering issues that had been left unresolved by the Revolution of and the Constitution of that gave birth to the United States. The first was the nagging question whether this fragile republic, this precarious new democracy, would survive in a world bestrode by monarchs, czars, tyrants, and aristocrats.
Americans were painfully aware that most republics through history had collapsed into anarchy or tyranny or had been overthrown by foreign invaders. Some Americans alive in had seen two French republics rise and fall. Latin American republics seemed to succumb regularly to dictators, military rulers, or anarchy. The hopes for the birth of democratic government in Europe during the revolutions of had been dashed by counterrevolutions that entrenched the Old Order of monarchy and aristocracy.
Could the United States endure as one nation, indivisible, with a government based on majority rule? The secession of eleven states in represented the greatest challenge to survival. The nation met that challenge and prevailed in The Compromise of averted a violent confrontation.
This series of laws admitted California as a free state, divided the remainder of the Mexican cession into the territories of New Mexico and Utah, and left to their residents the question whether or not they would have slavery.
Both territories did legalize slavery, but few slaves were taken there. At the same time, Congress abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia, ending the shameful practice of buying and selling human beings in the shadow of the Capitol.
This political cartoon captures Senator Henry S. Library of Congress. But the Compromise of compensated the South with a tough new fugitive slave law that empowered Federal marshals, backed by the Army if necessary, to recover slaves who had escaped into free states.
These measures postponed but did not prevent a final showdown. The fugitive slave law angered many northerners who were compelled to watch black people—some of whom had lived in their communities for years—returned in chains to slavery.
Southern anxiety grew as settlers poured into northern territories that were sure to join the Union as free states, thereby tipping the sectional balance of power against the South in Congress and the Electoral College. In an effort to bring more slave states into the Union, southerners agitated for the purchase of Cuba from Spain and the acquisition of additional territory in Central America. Private armies of "filibusters," composed mainly of southerners, even tried to invade Cuba and Nicaragua to overthrow their governments and bring these regions into the United States as slave states.
The events that did most to divide North and South were the Kansas-Nebraska Act of and the subsequent guerrilla war between pro- and anti-slavery partisans in Kansas territory. The region that became the territories of Kansas and Nebraska was part of the Louisiana Purchase, acquired by the United States from France in Considered by northerners to be an inviolable compact, the Missouri Compromise had lasted 34 years. But in southerners broke it by forcing Stephen A.
Douglas anticipated that his capitulation to southern pressure would "raise a hell of a storm" in the North. The storm was so powerful that it swept away many northern Democrats and gave rise to the Republican party, which pledged to keep slavery out of Kansas and all other territories. An eloquent leader of this new party was an Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, who believed that "there can be no moral right in the enslaving of one man by another.
But they intended to prevent its further expansion as the first step toward bringing it eventually to an end. The interior of Fort Sumter on April 17, , days after the Confederacy bombed it. The United States, said Lincoln at the beginning of his famous campaign against Douglas in for election to the Senate, was a house divided between slavery and freedom.
Lincoln lost the senatorial election in But two years later, running against a Democratic party split into northern and southern factions, Lincoln won the presidency by carrying every northern state. It was the first time in more than a generation that the South had lost effective control of the national government.
Southerners saw the handwriting on the wall. A growing majority of the American population lived in free states. Pro-slavery forces had little prospect of winning any future national elections. The prospects for long-term survival of slavery appeared dim. To forestall anticipated antislavery actions by the incoming Lincoln administration, seven slave states seceded during the winter of — Before Lincoln took office on March 4, , delegates from those seven states had met at Montgomery, Alabama, adopted a Constitution for the Confederate States of America, and formed a new government with Jefferson Davis as president.
As they seceded, these states seized most forts, arsenals, and other Federal property within their borders—with the significant exception of Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
When Lincoln took his oath to "preserve, protect, and defend" the United States and its Constitution , the "united" states had already ceased to exist. When Confederate militia fired on Fort Sumter six weeks later, thereby inaugurating civil war, four more slave states seceded.
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