ABSTRACT
To the twentieth-century eye, the map of the United States looks neat and finite, with its straight lines, rectangular patterns and clear-cut geographical features. Apart from the minor adjustment of the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, and the purchase of Alaska after the Civil War, the continental United States was now complete, but few people realised this at the time, while the air was full of talk of Cuba and Canada, Nicaragua and the rest of Mexico. The middle-class conscience and middle-class moral fervour were to be no less important than middle-class acquisitiveness or ambition in their impact on the America of the Civil War era. By the eve of the Civil War the South had become a distinct society with a distinct culture – agrarian, aristocratic, inward-looking, conservative, resting on assumptions of racial superiority and confident in its own superiority to the materialist, selfish, turbulent, unstable, harshly competitive society of the North.
