Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (4 page)

The slavery issue would probably have caused an eventual showdown between North and South in any circumstances. But it was the country's sprawling growth that made the issue so explosive. Was the manifest destiny of those two million square miles west of the Mississippi River to be free or slave? Like King Solomon, Congress had tried in 1820 to solve that problem for the Louisiana Purchase by splitting it at the latitude of 36° 30′ (with slavery allowed in Missouri as an exception north of that line). But this only postponed the crisis. In 1850 Congress postponed it again with another compromise. By 1860 it could no longer be deferred. The country's territorial growth might have created a danger of dismemberment by centrifugal force in any event. But slavery brought this danger to a head at midcentury.

II

At the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 the United States was an insignificant nation on the European periphery. Its population was about the same as Ireland's. Thomas Jefferson thought that the empire for liberty he had bought from Napoleon was sufficient to absorb a hundred generations of America's population growth. By 1850, two generations later, Americans were not only filling up this empire but were spilling over into a new one on the Pacific coast. A few years after 1850 the United States surpassed Britain to become the most populous nation in the Western world save Russia and France. By 1860 the country contained nearly thirty-two million people, four million of them slaves. During the previous half-century the American population had grown four times faster than Europe's and six times the world average.
¹

Three factors explained this phenomenon: a birth rate half again as high as Europe's; a death rate slightly lower; and immigration. All three were linked to the relative abundance of the American economy. The ratio of land to people was much greater than in Europe, making food supply more plentiful and enabling couples to marry earlier and to have more children. Though epidemics frequently ravaged North America, they took a lesser toll in its largely rural environment than among Europe's denser population. The land/people ratio in the United States raised wages and offered opportunities that attracted five million immigrants during that half-century.

Although the United States remained predominantly rural in this period, the urban population (defined as those living in towns or cities with 2,500 or more people) grew three times faster than the rural population from 1810 to 1860, going from 6 percent to 20 percent of the total. This was the highest
rate
of urbanization in American history. During those same decades the percentage of the labor force engaged in non-agricultural pursuits grew from 21 to 45 percent.
²
Meanwhile the rate of natural increase of the American population, while remaining higher than Europe's, began to slow as parents, desiring to provide their children with more nurture and education, decided to have fewer of them. From 1800 to 1850 the American birth rate declined by 23 percent.

1
. Peter D. McClelland and Richard J. Zeckhauser,
Demographic Dimensions of the New Republic
(Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 87.

2
. Stanley Lebergott, "Labor Force and Employment, 1800–1960," in Dorothy Brady, ed.,
Output, Employment and Productivity in the U.S. after
1800, Studies in Income and Wealth (Princeton, 1966), 119.

The death rate also declined slightly—but probably no more than 5 percent.
³
Yet the population continued to grow at the same pace through the whole period—about 35 percent each decade—because rising immigration offset the decline of the birth rate. For the half-century as a whole, the margin of births over deaths caused three-quarters of the population increase while immigration accounted for the rest.
⁴

Economic growth fueled these demographic changes. The population doubled every twenty-three years; the gross national product doubled every fifteen. Economic historians do not agree when this "intensive" rate of growth began, for the data to measure it are fragmentary before 1840. What remains clear is that until the early nineteenth century economic growth was "extensive"—virtually the same as population growth. At some point after the War of 1812—probably following recovery from the depression of 1819–23—the economy began to grow faster than the population, producing an estimated
per capita
increase of national output and income averaging 1.7 percent annually from 1820 to 1860.
⁵
The fastest rates of growth occurred in the 1830s and 1850s, interrupted by a major depression from 1837 to 1843 and a lesser one in 1857–58.

Although most Americans benefited from this rise of income, those at the top benefited more than those at the bottom. While average income rose 102 percent, real wages for workers increased by somewhere between 40 and 65 percent.
⁶
This widening disparity between rich and

3
. An improved diet and standard of living, which should have lowered the death rate more than this, were partly offset by urbanization and immigration. Mortality rates were always higher in cities before the twentieth century, and many immigrants suffered an initially higher death rate as they entered a new disease environment. Large numbers of Irish immigrants arrived with lowered resistance because of malnutrition; they also crowded into the poorest districts of cities.

4
. McClelland and Zeckhauser,
Demographic Dimensions
, 101, 108–9; Robert V. Wells,
Revolutions in Americans' Lives: A Demographic Perspective on the History of Americans, Their Families, and Their Society
(Westport, Conn., 1982), 92–104.

5
. For a summary of recent research on this question, see Susan Lee and Peter Passell, A
New Economic View of American History
(New York, 1979), 52–62; Robert E. Gallman, "Economic Growth," in Glenn Porter, ed.,
Encyclopedia of American Economic History
, 3 vols. (New York, 1980), 133–50; and Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, "U.S. Economic Growth, 1783–1860,"
Research in Economic History
, 8 (1983), 1–46.

6
. This is the range of estimates contained in three studies of the subject, all of them based on fragmentary data: Alvin H. Hansen, "Factors Affecting the Trend of Real Wages,"
American Economic Review
, 15 (1925), 27–41; Donald R. Adams, Jr., "Prices and Wages," in Porter, ed.,
Encyclopedia of American Economic History
, 229–46, which summarizes all relevant research up to the time of its writing; and Donald R. Adams, Jr., "The Standard of Living During American Industrialization: Evidence from the Brandywine Region, 1800–1860,"
Journal of Economic History
, 42 (1982), 903–17.

poor appears to have characterized most capitalist economies during their early decades of intensive growth and industrialization. American workers probably fared better in this respect than those of most European countries. Indeed, a debate still rages over whether British workers suffered an
absolute decline
of real wages during the first half-century of the industrial revolution.
⁷

Improved transportation was a prerequisite of economic development in a country as large as the United States. Before 1815 the only cost-efficient means of carrying freight long distances were sailing ships and downriver flatboats. Most American roads were rutted dirt paths all but impassable in wet weather. The cost of transporting a ton of goods thirty miles inland from an American port equalled the cost of carrying the same goods across the Atlantic. To travel from Cincinnati to New York took a minimum of three weeks; the only feasible way to ship freight between the same two cities was down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans and then by salt water along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts—a trip of at least seven weeks. It is not surprising, therefore, that America's transatlantic trade exceeded internal commerce, that most manufactured goods purchased in the United States came from Britain, that artisans sold mainly custom goods in local markets, that farmers living more than a short distance from navigable water consumed most of what they raised—and that the economy grew little if any faster than population.

All this changed after 1815 as a result of what historians, without exaggeration, have called a transportation revolution. Private companies, states, even the national government financed the construction of all-weather macadamized roads. More important, New York state pioneered the canal era by building the Erie Canal from Albany to Buffalo, linking New York City to the Northwest by water and setting off a frenzy of construction that produced 3,700 miles of canals by 1850.

7
. For a summary of that debate for Britain and other countries, see John Komlos, "Stature and Nutrition in the Habsburg Monarchy: The Standard of Living and Economic Development in the Eighteenth Century,"
AHR
, 90 (1985), 1149–51. See also Donald R. Adams, Jr., "Some Evidence on English and American Wage Rates, 1790–1830,"
Journal of Economic History
, 30 (1970), 499–520.

During those same years, steamboats made Robert Fulton's dream come true by churning their way along every navigable river from Bangor to St. Joseph. The romance and economic importance of steamboats were eclipsed in both respects by the iron horse in the 1850s. 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. Iron ribbons breached the Appalachians and bridged the Mississippi. An even newer invention, the telegraph, sent instant messages along copper wires and leaped beyond the railheads to span the continent by 1861.

These marvels profoundly altered American life. They halved overland transport costs by road to 15 cents a ton-mile. But roads soon became unimportant except for short hauls and local travel. Canal rates dropped to less than one cent a ton-mile, river rates even lower, and rail charges to less than three cents by 1860. Despite higher rates, the railroad's greater speed and dependability (most canals froze in winter; rivers became unnavigable in low water or floods) gave it an edge. Towns bypassed by the tracks shriveled; those located on the iron boomed, especially if they also enjoyed water transport. Springing from the prairie shores of Lake Michigan, Chicago became the terminus for fifteen rail lines by 1860, its population having grown by 375 percent during the previous decade. Racing at breakneck speeds of thirty miles an hour, the iron horse cut travel time between New York and Chicago from three weeks to two days. Train wrecks soon exceeded steamboat explosions as a prime cause of accidental death. But together these modes of transport reduced the shipment time of freight between, for example, Cincinnati and New York from fifty days to five. Cincinnati became the meatpacking capital of the United States. The difference between the wholesale price of western pork in Cincinnati and New York declined from $9.53 to $1.18 a barrel; the difference in the wholesale price of western flour between the same two cities dropped from $2.48 to 28 cents.

The telegraph provided instant quotations on these and other price changes all over the country. Along with the railroad and with technological innovations in printing and paper-making, the telegraph vastly increased the influence of newspapers, the country's principal medium of communication. The price of a single issue dropped from six cents in 1830 to one or two cents by 1850. Circulation increased twice as fast as population. The "latest news" became hours rather than days old. Fast trains carried weekly editions of metropolitan newspapers (like Horace Greeley's
New York Tribune
) to farmers a thousand miles away, where they shaped political sentiments. In 1848 several major newspapers pooled resources to form the Associated Press for the handling of telegraphic dispatches.
⁸

The transportation revolution refashioned the economy. As late as 1815, Americans produced on their farms or in their homes most of the things they consumed, used, or wore. Most clothing was sewn by mothers and daughters, made from cloth that in many cases they had spun and woven themselves by the light of candles they had dipped or by natural light coming through windows in houses built of local materials from a nearby sawmill or brickyard by local carpenters or masons or by the male members of the household. Shoes were made by members of the family or by the village cordwainer from leather cured at a local tannery. Blacksmiths forged the tools and farm implements used in the community. Even firearms were built with handicraft skill and pride by a nearby craftsman. In larger towns and cities, master tailors or shoemakers or cabinetmakers or wheelwrights presided over small shops where they worked with a few journeymen and an apprentice or two who turned out fine custom or "bespoke" goods for wealthier purchasers. In an age of slow and expensive overland transport, few of these items were sold more than twenty miles from where they were made.