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The greatest danger to American survival at midcentury, however, was neither class tension nor ethnic division. Rather it was sectional conflict between North and South over the future of slavery.
All this changed after 1815 as a result of what historians, without exaggeration, have called a transportation revolution.
The 9,000 miles of rail in the United States by 1850 led the world, but paled in comparison with the 21,000 additional miles laid during the next decade, which gave to the United States in 1860 a larger rail network than in the rest of the world combined.
Even more important than the fugitive slave issue in arousing northern militancy was the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed by Congress in May 1854. Coming at the same time as the Anthony Burns case, this law may have been the most important single event pushing the nation toward civil war. Kansas-Nebraska finished off the Whig party and gave birth to a new, entirely northern Republican party.
‘A house divided against itself cannot stand,’ “ said Lincoln quoting Jesus. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.”
Not that the flag-waving, singing crowds in Charleston and Savannah and New Orleans wanted or expected war; on the contrary, they believed that “the Yankees were cowards and would not fight"—or said they did, to assure the timid that there was no danger. “So far as civil war is concerned,” remarked an Atlanta newspaper blithely in January 1861, “we have no fears of that in Atlanta.”
It became a common saying in the South during the secession winter that “a lady’s thimble will hold all the blood that will be shed.”7
“War I look for as almost certain,” wrote Alexander Stephens, who also warned that “revolutions are much easier started than controlled, and the men who begin them [often] . . . themselves become the victims.”
“Rather than concede to the State of Missouri for one single instant the right to dictate to my Government in any matter . . . I would see you . . . and every man, woman, and child in the State, dead and buried. This means war.”24
The actions of the eight upper South states in 1861 had an important but equivocal impact on the outcome of the war. One can begin to measure that impact by noting the possible consequences of what did not happen. If all eight states (or all but Delaware) had seceded, the South might well have won its independence.
II The United States has usually prepared for its wars after getting into them. Never was this more true than in the Civil War. The country was less ready for what proved to be its biggest war than for any other war in its history.
For the war as a whole the Union experienced inflation of only 80 percent (contrasted with 9,000 percent for the Confederacy), which compares favorably to the 84 percent of World War I (1917–20) and 70 percent in World War II (1941–49, including the postwar years after the lifting of wartime price controls).
