A History of the World (68 page)

Though Lincoln’s death shocked the world and turned him into America’s greatest democratic martyr, whose giant memorial statue in Washington makes him seem more the nation’s father than Washington himself, it is as well to remember that, at the time, this assassination delighted many Americans. One Texan newspaper, for instance, the Houston
Telegraph
, said that until God’s judgement day,

Lincoln’s war was the most important conflict of the nineteenth century, more significant than the imperial wars fought by the British or the wars of liberation in South America, or the war Russia lost in the Crimea. It can be plausibly argued that it was more important than the wars fought and finally lost by Napoleon at the beginning of the century, too. French hegemony over the rest of the European mainland would never have lasted, given the limitations of armies and communications at the time; but the American Civil War locked together a huge nation which otherwise would have fragmented, and probably into more than two parts. By doing this, the war created the superpower of the following century. Had the United States broken up in the 1860s, then there would probably have been no Atlantic aid in 1917 or 1941 for the embattled European democracies, nor a single power so great that it could later confront the Soviet empire. It was also a turning-point for the concept of republican government, which
was still rare. Quiet supporters of the Confederate cause included most of the Conservative and aristocratic right in Great Britain, Napoleon III in France, and the monarchical party in Spain. Lincoln’s war changed America; and therefore changed the modern world.

Its bare statistics measure up to the scale. The American Civil War of 1861–5 was the most lethal war fought by any country in the West between 1815, Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo, and the German advance into Belgium which started the First World War. It was easily the most lethal war in US history. Some 620,000 soldiers died, only 60,000 short of the deaths of US servicemen in every other war put together. Four times as many Americans died in a single Civil War battle, Antietam, as died on D-day in 1944. A quarter of all the white males of serving age in the Confederacy were killed.
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But what was the war about?

It had not started as an attempt to end slavery in America. Lincoln was a consistent and loud opponent of slavery. For many Americans, particularly in the South, his election as President made the war inevitable. But he had been very clear that he did not mean to abolish slavery in the states that already practised it. He only meant to ensure that slavery did not spread into the new states being carved out of the US landmass, and to maintain the authority of the federal government over all states existing up to then. In a letter written at the start of the war he declared: ‘My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.’ He believed that slavery would eventually die out, even if it took until the following century, and he took seriously the idea that America’s blacks might all be sent to Africa. Yet in an address to the newly formed Republican Party in 1858 he acknowledged that the slavery argument could not be avoided: ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave, and half free . . . It will become all the one thing or all the other.’

Now that slavery is almost universally regarded with abhorrence, the rise of anti-slavery opinion in the North, driven by Protestant clergy and others influenced by the European Enlightenment, seems inevitable. The more interesting question is why slavery was such a powerful force across the southern United States, and why it provoked so many people who felt themselves to be honourable, religious and
decent, to die and kill in order to defend their ‘peculiar institution’. It was not because most were themselves slave-holders. Of the eight million whites in the fifteen slave states at the beginning of the war, just 383,000 had slaves, of whom half had fewer than five. A small minority of whites, some three thousand out of those eight million, had more than a hundred slaves, and so were very roughly equivalent to the popular image of grandees in big houses with slave plantations.
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The majority even of the slave-holders were relatively small-time farmers working alongside their slaves; in fact, most people in the South were just farmers, often struggling on poor land.

American slavery, though it long pre-dated the Declaration of Independence, had been an intimate vice of the founding fathers of the United States. Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave-owners, as were most of the grandees of Virginia and the other southern states. They might have felt the odd tweak of conscience, but they could not run their complex agricultural businesses without it. At the time of independence, slavery was legal in all the thirteen states. In the South, tobacco, sugar, rice and cotton required grindingly hard work in the fields, and without mass immigration or the willingness of native Americans to do this work, slavery seemed the only option. In the northern states, where the climate and soil necessitated a different kind of farming, it was far less widespread. The enforced discipline of the field-work, often for fourteen hours a day, did produce an agriculture that has been calculated as 35–50 per cent more efficient than that of the free northern states, making the South, at the beginning of the war, richer than any European country except Britain. Far from being a basket-case economy, as later northern propaganda suggested, it has been argued that ‘Only Sweden and Japan have been able to sustain long-term growth rates substantially in excess of that achieved by the ante-bellum South between 1840 and 1860.’
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So this was a boom economy which urgently wanted to spread into new US states such as Kansas and Texas. To understand what was at stake, we have to remember the extraordinary, westward-leaping expansion of the new republic. Jefferson, the third US President, had prepared a grid of new lands, mapping out fourteen new states. During the Napoleonic wars, his government had vastly increased the size of the US in a single deal, perhaps the most significant real-estate
deal of all time, the ‘Louisiana Purchase’, mentioned earlier. In April 1803 Napoleon, who like most conquerors was short of money, and was fixing his sights on an invasion of his last remaining serious foe, Britain, had sold the sprawl of French-claimed territories west of the US to Washington, announcing that irresolution was no longer in season: ‘I renounce Louisiana.’ For $15 million, arranged by Barings Bank of London, the Americans got land more than twice the size of what King George had surrendered, taking the borders of the country to the Rocky Mountains. In 1812 they fought and lost a war against the British which they had hoped would bring them Canada as well, yet had only resulted in the burning and occupation of Washington.

But this barely halted the story of expansion. In 1819 the Spanish gave up Florida too. The old barrier of the Appalachians was breached, and within thirty years half of the citizens of the US were living beyond them, reaching deep into the continent’s heartland. The spread continued at breakneck speed. Texas, seized from the Mexican Spanish and starting out as an independent state (which briefly toyed with the idea of joining the British Empire), became part of the US in 1845. Three years later, after a vicious war with Mexico, the US purchased all of California and New Mexico for another paltry sum.

The great question was: what kind of society would this new America be once its original inhabitants had been defeated, killed or shoved into reservations? For the time being, most of the new territories were wild and lawless: ‘mountain men’, trappers, explorers, fevered gold-prospectors and adventurers were pushing hard westward against the divided native people. But already two different versions of the US were apparent. To the south was a slave and plantation economy, which hoped and expected to expand, perhaps even into the Caribbean and Latin America. To the north was first the small-farmer economy, then quickly the industrial economy driven by European immigrants – Germans, Irish, Scandinavians, as well as English and Scots. This was essentially an urban-capitalist America, with strong Christian-Protestant influences echoing the hostility to slavery by now so vehement in Britain.

One by one those northern states had abolished slavery on their own territory, beginning with Vermont in 1777. By 1804 all the northern states were at least in the process of doing so, and in 1808
Congress, following the British lead a year earlier, voted to end American involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. But this only led to a programme of internal slave-trading and slave-breeding developing in the cotton and sugar-growing South. The founders of the Union understood very well that this was a dangerous division. John Adams, one of the original Boston rebels and the second US President, feared that it might ‘produce as many Nations in North America as there are in Europe’.
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In 1820 a rough deal had been struck, the Missouri Compromise, dividing the continent laterally along a line south of which slavery was allowed, and north of which it was not. But nobody thought this could hold, once the great expansion began. There was too much land and money in play.

The South had been accustomed to dominate Washington politics, providing a disproportionate number of Presidents, judges, leading Congressmen and senators. It was affronted by the growing power of the anti-slavery campaigners of the North. In 1850 things nearly came to a head when California was admitted to the Union. Southern threats to secede were only halted by a last-minute compromise that it should be admitted as a non-slavery state, but that fugitive slaves who escaped to the North must be returned. Yet the pressure piled up again. We saw earlier how the railway was transforming America, but the real prize was a line connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic. The promise of such a huge investment was partly what kept California in the Union. But to make the connection with the new industrial hub of Chicago, the line would have to run through Kansas and Nebraska. This would bring statehood for Kansas, a territory north of the Missouri line, which ought therefore to have been free. But Kansas also had land suitable for tobacco and hemp, which attracted the slave-owning plantation lobby.

Pro-slavery politicians argued that it was the right of new states like Kansas to decide their own destiny. Owners, with their slaves, poured in from one direction. Abolitionists and northern farmers poured in from another. A spectacularly vicious guerrilla war began, with atrocities committed by both sides. John Brown, the militant abolitionist, whose hanging was watched by Booth and whose corpse featured in a famous Union war song, led a raid of blacks and whites on Harpers Ferry, a small town in West Virginia with an arsenal. He had hoped to start a general slave insurrection, and failed. Caught and
hanged, he became a martyr for the North and a terrorist in the eyes of the South.

So by the time the war began there was already a trail of blood, and huge unresolved arguments about the limitations of slavery in America. There had also been passionate warnings from the southern states that they would leave the Union rather than submit.

The final key factor was the growing economic and demographic power of the industrial North. Immigrants went there for the jobs; in the plantations of the South, there was little that poor whites from Europe wanted to do. The raw figures on industrial development at the time tell the tale. Of the money invested in manufacturing in America, just 18 per cent came from the South. The North had nine times the South’s industrial capacity, two and a half times as many people, the vast majority of the new European immigrants, and far higher rates of literacy. The new America growing to the north-west, with cities like Chicago and Detroit, was on the urbanizing, capitalist side. The South had three times as many illiterate whites as the North. So the plantations may have been more efficient than the northern farms, and in their own way plugged into a global economy, but this was a fight between entire societies, and one side had started off as clearly more developed than the other.

These are the economic and geographical facts. Layered on top of them were cultural differences which may have felt, to those involved, more important. In the South many regarded slavery as a natural human system, with honourable origins in biblical and classical times, and actually kinder than the industrial ‘wage-slavery’ of the northern cities, with their ‘factory niggers’. This had a germ of truth. By 1850, children born as slaves in the South lived on average a dozen years longer than children born in the industrial heart of England, in Manchester. The slave population was growing fast, no longer needing to be topped up by Atlantic-plying ships, which suggested a certain level of health. For the pro-slavery Americans, slaves were also property, and property rights were fundamental to their constitutional rights, something the federal government had no authority to tamper with. Had not slavery existed
throughout
the US at the time of the thirteen colonies’ rebellion? Confederates would put the face of the slave-owners Jefferson and Washington on their banknotes.

Most Southerners were poor whites or slaves, but the Confederacy
presented itself not just as a hierarchical, romantic and conservative society, but as finer-grained and more humanly authentic than the seething, turbulent Yankee North. There are links between the aristocratic values of the English royalists of that earlier Civil War, the Jacobite romantics of the following century, and the southern US planters’ attitudes. They shared a distaste for the merchant values of the city, which would develop into deep loathing for the values of urban, industrial capitalism. We have already seen how the defeat of absolute monarchy in England, and then of the Jacobite cause in Scotland, pushed forward enlightenment, science and then industry. To the south, all this was anathema. At the beginning of the war, William Howard Russell, the London
Times
’s fine reporter, remarked that the South was ferociously hostile to ‘trade, commerce, the pursuit of gain, manufacture and the base mechanical arts’.
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One American historian of slavery writes of a ruling elite in the slave states, with their aristocratic spirit, ‘emphasizing family and status, a strong code of honour, and aspirations to luxury, ease and accomplishment’.
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