T he Economist watched with alarm as America descended into civil war in 1861. That April militiamen from South Carolina, which had seceded, bombarded Fort Sumter, a Union stronghold just off the state’s coast. Nobody was killed in the fighting, though two Union soldiers died by accident during the 100-gun salute that marked the fort’s surrender. The battle signalled the beginning of the civil war. “No one can think of it without dismay; no one can even venture to predict what may be its results and where it will end,” we wrote on May 4th that year. We had little doubt who was to blame for the war:
“The Southern leaders have unquestionably the whole responsibility of this fatal step. The blood which has at length begun to flow must be upon them and on their children. They originated the quarrel by their passionate desire to extend the shameful institution of which they are so proud. At every fresh turn of the dispute they have been the aggressors.”
Nor, despite our warning against prediction, did we doubt it would end badly for the South. The North had factories and manpower on its side. Even if the South scored some early wins, we reckoned the North would keep fighting: “And in the long run no doubt wealth and numbers must decide this fatal strife.” Victory, though, might take many forms. We found it hard to believe that the South would ever be brought back under the federal government’s control:
“Those states may be conquered, may be held in military possession, but they can scarcely again be expected to take a voluntary part in the political institutions of the United States. Unless the issue of civil war were a Slave insurrection which should put an end to the institution of Slavery altogether as a result of a train of events which it is utterly impossible to measure or foreshadow,—the Gulf States can never again be reasonably expected to act in political concert with the North.”
The North and South, we predicted, would govern themselves separately and co-exist in an unhappy state of mutual suspicion. (The first part proved wrong.) Such an outcome would be a grim disappointment. “Surely nothing”, we wrote, “can well be blacker than a prospect of a war at once vindictive, bloody and fruitless.” We were at least hopeful about the future of the North:
“…the main consideration appears to us to be that the war will draw together the Northern States as they have never been drawn together yet,—will teach them the all-important character of the Slavery issue,—will sweep the political horizon of those petty political controversies which have long frittered away the attention of Statesmen and diverted them from the really great issues which were slowly maturing beneath the surface of society,—and finally will impress them with the absolute necessity of a closer union, a stronger central power, a suppression of those repulsive forces which keep State and State jealous and apart,—in one word, with the duty of turning the Federal Government into a really supreme power.”
As for the South, we believed that fighting a war in defence of slavery would make it a pariah. We thought most countries would support the North (in fact, most countries stayed neutral, while European elites often leaned Southern). And we wrote that the South had brought disaster upon itself:
“To rouse by gratuitous insult the mettle of a nation three times as numerous and far more than three times as powerful, to force them by aggressive steps into a struggle in which the sympathy of every free and civilised nation will be with the North, seems like the madness of men whose eyes are blinded and hearts hardened by the evil cause they defend. Had they been wise, they would have trusted all to delay and their own obstinate purpose. As it is, they rush on a war which, whether it end in their mere exhaustion or in the horrors of a servile insurrection, cannot but end in humiliating disasters, which will excite no pity, because they have been positively courted by the Southern leaders.
When the fighting stopped, the states were re-united under one government. In other ways, though, the country remained divided. “The North will beat the South in the end,” we wrote in 1861, “but when it has done so, we do not see what the Government can do, except leave the South to follow its own devices at the last as it might do at this moment.” Indeed, much of the peace unfolded as we feared, with reunion proving easier than reconciliation. ■ As America turns 250, we trace the triumphs, contradictions and arguments that have shaped the world’s first liberal republic