Introduction

The Civil War cost the lives of 620,000 Americans and the expenditure of $6.5 billion in national treasure. In destroying slavery, the fundamental social and economic system of the fifteen Southern states, it emancipated 13% of the American people. Three million Americans served in blue or gray uniforms over the course of four years. The Civil War was, in sum, the most important disruption of American lives in the entire history of the republic. And yet, its significance to the social history of the United States is still not entirely clear to historians.

Who were the Americans of 1860? They were one of the fastest-growing nations in history. The population of the United States grew by 30-35% in every decade from 1790 to 1860, from four million to thirty-one million on the eve of the Civil War. This growth rate is roughly three times faster than the nation experienced at the end of the 20th century.

They were an expansive, mobile people. By 1860, many lived along the coasts of the Atlantic and the Pacific, as well as the Gulf of Mexico. Many had also spread over much of the nation's interior, at least east of the Great Plains.

Eighty per cent of Americans lived on farms or in small rural communities, but New York City (Manhattan) had swelled to 800,000 people (more than half of them foreign-born) in 1860. Five million immigrants had arrived in the country since 1815, half of them from England and another 40% from Ireland.

Four million African Americans were held in slavery in 1860. Another half-million were free, in both North and South, but in either case almost always living in circumstances sharply constrained by legal discrimination, economic disability, and vulnerability to violence and prejudice.

The Americans had preserved many diverse strains of European, African, Caribbean, and even Asian heritage in their culture, but they were by no means a traditional people. Most were living far from the homes of their grandparents, uprooted by the appeal of the city, immigration across the Atlantic, and migration over the Appalachians. Some Americans had already moved four or five times in their lifetimes. Many African Americans were forcibly moved from the Chesapeake and the Carolina Lowcountry to burgeoning cotton plantations in the Southwest (Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas).

Wherever they went, Americans became more deeply enmeshed in a commercial and industrial society. American agriculture was rapidly adopting technological innovations like the reaper and steam-powered threshing mills, in the service of production of staples for export markets. Americans had also adeptly appropriated the three great British inventions that comprised "the first industrial revolution"-the steam engine (based on burning coal), water-powered (and then steam-powered) machines for spinning thread and weaving cloth, and the making of iron at blast, puddling, and rolling furnaces. The descendants of many Yankee and foreign country folk were now working for weekly cash wages at the thousands of textile and shoe mills that dotted the river valleys of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.

With industrialization and urbanization, disparities in income and wealth grew. Miserable conditions framed the everyday lives of enslaved work gangs extracting turpentine from Southern forests, and of Irish and Scandinavians digging canals and building railroads, docks, and levees. At the same time, other Americans were also inventing the notion of a middle-class home and the nuclear family as a refuge from the world's troubles. In the idealized "woman's sphere," a stay-at-home mother could tend to the material and spiritual needs of a smaller brood of children, as the birthrate fell, as well as to the cultural and charitable aspirations of her community.

More than half of American children were enrolled in schools by 1860, aided by the advent of cheaper textbook printing and the widespread recruitment of single women as the backbone of the teaching profession. Americans, except for the newest immigrants and those in slavery, were largely literate. Even among the enslaved who were forbidden by law or social custom from learning to read, five per cent were reported as literate at the time of the Civil War. It was a society that prized individual achievement and personal experience, skeptical about authorities in government, religion, or cultural life.

What was the social experience of the war itself? Historians have been turning their attention to the home front more intensively in the past two decades, but the full measure of the war's disruption is not easy to gauge. Unlike World War II, the Civil War did not necessarily spark much industrial development in either section. (More, proportionately, in the South than the North.) In fact, the diversion of so many men and so much money to the war effort undeniably limited growth. Households were shattered by the absence of fathers and husbands. Southern women, it appears, were particularly hard-pressed to sustain production, discipline over slaves, and even basic subsistence as the war swirled around their farms and plantations. Still, war afforded opportunities for many on the margins of society to alter their life expectations. Most important, of course, was the way hundreds of thousands of enslaved Southerners simply walked away from bondage. Many women in both sections seized the chance to join the war effort by organizing and tending the ill and wounded. And out of the turmoil of war, the most dangerous men found outlets for banditry and guerrilla war, particularly on the western frontier.

During the war, the Republican administration initiated many policies that would substantially alter American social and economic life in the long term. Higher tariffs, cheaper money (the first "greenbacks"), the land-grant college system, and the Homestead Act would all generate growth in the decades after war's end, but they had little effect before Appomattox.

Slavery had never actually been an obstacle to American economic expansion. It was not a dying institution in 1860, and seemed supple enough to be applied to a whole array of new enterprises. But the slave society of the South, constantly afraid of rebellion from within and criticism from outside the region, was increasingly at odds with the "free labor" civilization of northern life. By 1861, the United States was the largest slave-holding society left in the world and yet its ruling ideology was built on the language of individual liberty. This was the inconsistency that Lincoln and others feared, in wondering whether a nation could survive "half slave and half free."

Freedom was itself a contested term in 1861. Many Americans-free people of color, immigrants, women, the impoverished, many workers living in company towns-were not close to being accorded equality in the social, political, or economic sphere. For them, however, the struggle against slavery was ultimately a step toward establishing the indivisibility of American freedom, a challenge that occupied almost all of the 20th century.

For black Americans, the Civil War was surely a "second American Revolution." For many of the large plantation owners of the South, the Civil War forever ended their unquestioned power and prestige. For most other Americans, the war advanced some aspects of a long social transformation well underway, and retarded others.