8 THE CIVIL WAR inexpensive widely available newspapers magazines and books along with the telegraph By contrast the Southern economy was based principally on large farms plantations that produced commercial crops such as cotton and that relied on slaves as the main labor force Rather than invest in factories or railroads as Northerners had done Southerners invested their money in slaves even more than in land By 1860 84 percent of the capital invested in manufacturing was invested in the free nonslave holding states Yet to Southerners as late as 1860 this appeared to be a sound business decision The price of cotton the South’s defining crop had skyrocketed in the 1850s and the value of slaves who were after all property rose correspondingly By 1860 the per capita wealth of Southern whites was twice that of Northerners and three-fifths of the wealthiest indi viduals in the country were Southerners The extension of slavery into new territories and states had been an issue as far back as the North west Ordinance of 1784 When the slave territory of Missouri sought statehood in 1818 Congress debated for two years before arriving at the Missouri Compromise of 1820 This was the first of a series of political deals that resulted from arguments between proslavery and antislavery forces over the expansion of the peculiar institution as it was known into the West The end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 and the roughly 500,000 square miles 1 3 million
INTRODUCTION 9 square kilometers of new territory that the United States gained as a result of it added a new sense of urgency to the dispute More and more Northerners driven by a sense of morality or an interest in protecting free labor came to believe in the 1850s that bond age needed to be abolished White Southerners feared that limiting the expansion of slavery would deliver the institution to certain death Over the course of the decade the two sides became increasingly polarized and politicians less able to contain the dispute through compromise When Abraham Lincoln the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party won the 1860 presi dential election seven Southern states South Carolina Mississippi Florida Alabama Georgia Louisiana and Texas carried out their threat and seceded organizing as the Confederate States of America The Civil War focuses primarily on the war itself its major battles campaigns and military leaders and the cost and significance of the conflict
CHAPTER ONE 10 FORCES AND STRATEGIES OF THE NORTH AND SOUTH In the early morning hours of April 12 1861 Confederate rebels opened fire on Fort Sumter at the entrance to the harbor of Charleston South Carolina Curiously this first encounter of what would be the bloodiest war in the history of the United States claimed no victims After a 34-hour bombardment Major Robert Anderson surrendered his command of about 85 soldiers to some 5,500 besieging Confederate troops under P G T Beauregard a brigadier general With war upon the land President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 militiamen to serve for three months He proclaimed a naval blockade of the Confederate states although he insisted that they did not legally constitute a sovereign country but were instead states
FORCES AND STRATEGIES OF THE NORTH AND SOUTH 11 Photographer Mathew Brady took this picture of the Company A 9th Indiana Infantry At the start of the Civil War President Abraham Lincoln called for loyal states to furnish state militiamen to help defend the Union in rebellion Lincoln also directed the secretary of the treasury to advance 2 million to assist in the raising of troops and he suspended the writ of habeas corpus first along the East Coast and ultimately throughout the country The Confederate government had previ ously authorized a call for 100,000 soldiers for at least six months service and this figure was soon increased to 400,000
