374 Chapter 14 The War to Save the Union
do that.” He added, however, “I intend no modifica-
tion of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men,
everywhere, could be free.”
The Blue and the Gray
In any test between the United States and the
Confederacy, the former possessed tremendous
advantages. There were more than 20 million people
in the northern states (excluding Kentucky and
Missouri, where opinion was divided) but only
9 million in the South, including 3.5 million slaves
whom the whites hesitated to trust with arms. The
North’s economic capacity to wage war was even
more preponderant. It was manufacturing nine
times as much as the Confederacy (including 97 per-
cent of the nation’s firearms) and had a far larger
and more efficient railroad system than the South.
Northern control of the merchant marine and the
navy made possible a blockade of the Confederacy, a
particularly potent threat to a region so dependent
on foreign markets.
The Confederates discounted these advantages.
Many doubted that public opinion in the North
would sustain Lincoln if he attempted to meet seces-
sion with force. Northern manufacturers needed
southern markets, and merchants depended heavily
on southern business. Many western farmers still sent
their produce down the Mississippi. War would
threaten the prosperity of all these groups,
Southerners maintained. Should the North try to cut
Europe off from southern cotton, the European pow-
ers, particularly Great Britain, would descend on the
land in their might, force open southern ports, and
provide the Confederacy with the means of defending
itself forever. Moreover, the South provided nearly
three-fourths of the world’s cotton, essential for most
textile mills. “You do not dare to make war on cot-
ton,” Senator Hammond of South Carolina had
taunted his northern colleagues in 1858. “No power
on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.”
The Confederacy also counted on certain military
advantages. The new nation need only hold what it
had; it could fight a defensive war, less costly in men
and material and of great importance in maintaining
morale and winning outside sympathy. Southerners
would be defending not only their social institutions
but also their homes and families.
Luck played a part too; the Confederacy quickly
found a great commander, while many of the northern
generals in the early stages of the war proved either
bungling or indecisive. In battle after battle UnionWhy did these young volunteers of the First Virginia Militia join the
Confederate army in 1861? “It is better to spend our all in defending
our country than to be subjugated and have it taken away from us,”
one explained, a sentiment that appeared often in the letters of
Confederate soldiers. Soldiers on both sides believed that their
cause was righteous.
In his inaugural address in February 1861, Jefferson Davis, president
of the Confederacy, declared that secession was consistent with “the
American idea that government rests upon the consent of the
governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish a
government whenever it becomes destructive of the ends for which
it was established.”