You should blame the railroads rather than rifles: only about a third of Civil War deaths were combat deaths: most were due to disease. Railroads allowed bigger armies, bigger armies lose more to disease.

The losses to the south per capita were much larger if you are counting indirect costs in life. The north build sand filters for their water supplies, and the south didn't because of loss of tax capability because of loss of human labor because of combat and noncombat deaths during the war.
No only did all the direct male Browder ancestors of mine die, but one, but when that one was immigrating to Texas, his family got typhoid from bad water and all of them died but one. That war directly and indirectly pruned my family tree something fierce, for two generations.
Lincoln's second inaugural prettty much had it right as far as the cost to the south went.

Question about staples being tradeable for the first time with steam powered iron ships -- I thought the Australian wheat trade (surely a staple) was carried on in sailing ships through the 30's?

Yes, Australian grain was carried competitively by sailing ships (often from the Alund Islands) as late as the 1930s. Australian and New Zealand dairy and meat products were shipped in sailing ships with steam powered refrigeration in the late 19th century.

And the Roman Empire shipped grain between the time the Carthaginians lost Sicily and the time the Byzantines lost Egypt permanently.

But this is a very US-centric thing. The reason is obvious, only putting it out on the internet is highly misleading.

[troll]

(remove at to reply by email)

1. cost of slaves would have risen if someone had tried to buy all of them: your calculation confuses marginal cost with average cost (perhaps purposefully?)

2. was the South *really* only 60% of average GDP for the next 100 years? Even in the 1950s when my parents travelled the south, the contrast between southern Ontario and the 'prosperous' south (Virginia, Carolinas) appeared to be much greater than that. Southern Ontario would have been 10-20% poorer than the NYC area for example.

I suspect the real number is closer to 40% of US average, especially if you consider the economic conditions of blacks in the South.

When I was in the 1st % 2nd grade in 1946-48 I lived in the rural south in a school district that split the summer vacation. We got out for cotton planting time in the spring. Went back to school for 6 weeks in mid-summer and got out again to pick cotton in late summer. Even at that age it was normal for a child my age to work in the fields picking cotton along with women. So I question your comments that female labor was withdrawn from the fields.

Walter Willis

I entirely agree with you re the extended costs to the South. But it has to be said Lincoln's words still make my eyes mist over (and I am a Canadian/ Brit with all kinds of inbuilt scepticism of the US and its history). In modern times, only Winston Churchill perhaps has had the same power:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Messrs Blair, Bush and others could learn a lot about rhetoric from this man.

The trouble with "buying and freeing all the slaves," of course, is that the South wouldn't sell, had laws restricting manumission, and wouldn't allow free blacks to live there. You can't really think of government manumission as an alternative to the Civil War, when any government policy of manumission probably would have sparked the Civil War or another one just like it.

Incidentally, Lincoln was quite aware of the relative cheapness of manumission, and I recall reading a letter of his where he pointed out how many slaves could be bought and freed for the price of a single day of the war.

gocochran-

Rifles + railroads (and industrialization, which enabled those large armies to be equipped).

The rifles were darn important, though. Pickett's charge may well have worked in 1840--though there is no excuse for Lee not to have realized by then that changes in infantry tactics were necessary to fight effectively with rifled muskets + Minie balls (+Gatling guns, +rifled artillery).

A good generalization is that by 1850 technology suitable for defensive warfare had far outstripped tech suitable for offensive warfare--as it had in Europe by 1914. You get a variety of eerie and deadly previews of WWI trench warfare in the Civil War--Vicksburg+Atlanta for example.

However, apparently no one in Europe was paying attention, so when WWI commenced Frenchmen wearing red uniforms went charging across open fields into a wall of metal.

Also much greater chance of sepsis from Minie-ball (basically a spinning oblong chunk of lead) or shrapnel--pre-1840 warfare had roundball wounds + more stab wounds from close-quarter fighting.

The history of the bullet is moderately fascinating--eventually, lots of concern about how "humane" a particular bullet was. You would -much- prefer to be hit by an M-16 bullet than by a Minie ball.

Avoid temptation and stay well clear of those Civil War reenactors.

ps I meant Lee should have sought new tactics by 1863, not 1840....

1. I'd say no one person was MORE responsible for the breakup of the Union than Douglas, with the possible exception of Lincoln. But in the end it was the South's repudiation of even Douglas's beloved Popular Sovereignty that did the Union in. Once southern Democrats demanded a federal slave code for the territories, a national Democratic Party was doomed, a Republican victory assured, and the breakup of the Union all but certain.

Jim Oakes

2. Black women left the fields only temporarily. The sharecropping system pretty much assumed that the entire family would be planting and weeding and picking cotton.

3. Yes. Lincoln tried desperately to get the border states to read the writing on the wall by emancipating their slaves with compensation for the masters. He repeatedly warned them that if they didn't act on their own then the "friction" of war would do it for them. On June 12, 1862, he called the border state representatives back to the White House for a final meeting to make one last pitch for them to act on their own, but they turned him down. That was it. The next day, on June 13, he showed his draft of the emancipation proclamation to two members of his cabinet for the first time. But even after he made it public on September 22 Lincoln continued to try to get the border states to act on their own, and STILL they refused. The point? That if by late 1862, when it was clear to everyone that the war was not going to be short and the emancipation was coming, if by that late date the border states still would not budge--then how concievable would it have been for the lower South to accept an offer of compensated emancipation in late 1860 or early 1861? Absolutely inconcievalbe. So the $90/head figure is an interesting parlor game, isn't it?

Minie bullets tend to shatter bones (requiring amputation), while the older roundballs were more likely to cause a fracture. Gatling guns were not in general use until after the Civil War, and rifled artillery, while nice, was greatly outnumbered by smoothboore artillery. I've seen rifled artillery vs. smoothbore on the range, and a smoothbore loaded with canister shot would slaughter anyone within range( think of a really big shotgun). But disease was still the main cause of death.

[troll]

[troll]

Warning: Evil Troll post follows. With, you know, history and stuff in it.

'Read James M. MacPherson's excellent book 'Battle Cry of Freedom' and see if you still think that

'What Douglas actually does is:

Create a low-leel guerrilla war in Kansas
Create the Republican Party
Elect Lincoln president in 1860
And the South then secedes
And Lincoln says that he will fight '

My, what shocking, shocking trolling. Suggesting that someone read a few secondary sources, or even one, before he makes silly statements about an Illinois politician of the 1860s...

[Arguments, people, arguments: If you want to say that there would have still been a Civil War in 1861 if Stephen Douglas had not opened Kansas to settlement under "popular sovereignty" in 1854, make the argument. Calling other participants "silly" and enjoining them to read books that they have already read does not contribute.]

[troll]

[troll]

Gah! Bullets are much more interesting than watching someone headhunt.

Oversimplified, memorable treatments of subject-matter are more or less indispensable to the effective teaching of 100-level lecture courses. To extrapolate a lecturer's knowledge of a subject from the notes of such a lecture is, well.... I'll let anyone who reads this fill in the blank.

This kind of thing makes me reluctant to start a blog.

[troll]

Dan-

Tone and intent.

[troll]

Apologies, everyone...