ABSTRACT

Without doubt the Civil War stands as the severest political crisis, the primary single event in the history of the American Republic. Of equal importance, nevertheless, was a long and slow process which was occurring over the entire nineteenth century: the growth of the American economy to a position of world leadership. The frail and internationally insignificant economy of 1800 had by 1900 become the greatest economic power the world had yet seen. In the midst of this process, however, the United States had been convulsed by sectional agitation, the secession of the Southern states, war on an unprecedented scale, and the emancipation of 3 million slaves-a sequence of events that occurred with bewildering rapidity. An obvious question thus arises: What was the relationship between the process and the events, between the economic transformation and the political cataclysms, in short between American capitalism and the Civil War?1