CHAPTER THEME The Democratic Party split in mid-1860, permitting the Republican candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln, to win the November election with a mere 40 percent of the popular vote. Lincoln carried the North and West solidly, but his name did not even appear on 10 state ballots in the South. The South’s political strategy had been to control the Senate and the presidency. Both were lost in 1860.
By the time of Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861, 10 southern states had followed South Carolina’s decision to secede. One of Lincoln’s first tasks was to counter threats to Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. His order to reinforce the fort gave South Carolinians the excuse they sought to begin shooting.
Slavery was the root cause of the Civil War. The United States had equivocated on the slave issue both in 1776 and in 1790. The last “slavery truce,” in 1850, was based on popular sovereignty in the western territories, and it ended within a decade. By 1860, the South was prepared to fight to save its social order, based on plantation slavery. The North was prepared to fight to save the Union and to save the Republican victory that “finally had contained the slave power within the political framework of the United States” (Ransom 1989, 177). Permitting independence to the southern states would have divided the nation and allowed the South to pursue a separate foreign policy committed to the expansion of slavery.
Lincoln’s key miscalculation, like the South’s, was his belief that a strong show of force would bring the fighting to a speedy end. The South’s victory at Bull Run, the first great battle of the Civil War, added to southern confidence and resolve to maintain the course of rebellion.
The war proved to be longer and more destructive than anyone in power imagined at its start. An estimated 620,000 American soldiers and sailors would lose their lives, nearly as many as in all the rest of America’s wars combined. By the time the war ended, America’s society and economy had been radically transformed. The most important change was the freeing of 4 million slaves. Moreover, the institutional framework (Economic Reasoning Proposition 4, laws and rules matter, in Economic Insight 1.1 on page 9) of nearly every aspect of economic life—including finance, education, land policies, and tariff policies— was altered in some way. In the North and parts of the South, recovery from the war was rapid. But in parts of the South, the institutional framework that developed after the Civil War prevented the former slaves and poor whites from being rapidly integrated into the mainstream of the American economy.
World History
