Shiloh, 1862 Read Online Free
Author: Winston Groom
soldiers learned to shoot their weapons by firing at things along the banks of the river, including people’s homes or barns, and a sizable number of Rebels were armed only with shotguns or squirrel rifles. It was a mean pity that less than three generations after the creation of the first authentic democracy the world had ever known, such a wretched schism had broken out among nominally peace-loving peoples. It is worth a side trip to understand why.
At the time of the Revolution, the U.S. population had reached 2.5 million, including 500,000 slaves. By the War of 1812 three decades later, it had grown to some 8 million, and just a half century later, on the eve of the Civil War, it had exploded to more than 30 million, including about 4 million slaves.
By the election year of 1860 the United States had grown into a huge but unwieldy economic giant, selling commodities and foodstuffs throughout the world. During the 250 years since the first settlers landed on American shores, their rude paths and huts had given way to homes, many of them substantial. Highly developed roadways and waterways connected great cities north and south. In 40 years, steamboats had advanced from rudimentary vessels to floating palaces while railroads linked all important places, and the invention of the Morse telegraph and code 20 years earlier had spawned a nationwide web of timely communications.
In the Northeast great manufactories arose; New England embraced the shipbuilding, textile, and armaments industries, whilearound the shores of the Great Lakes and in Pittsburgh iron foundries produced railroad engines, cars, and track. Elsewhere plants and shops large and small turned out everything from leather goods to buggies and buggy whips, shoes and tools and rubber goods and all things in between. In the Midwest (then still known as the “West”) was the “breadbasket of America”; farmers in the Great Plains, many of them German and Scandinavian immigrants, raised corn, wheat, and grain for the vast flourmills of Minnesota and Michigan. Farther west were beef cattle and hogs, this last the staple meat of rural life.
The American South, ignoring the advice of some of its wisest citizens, produced few if any of these goods and commodities, but instead purchased what it needed from above the Mason-Dixon Line or from abroad. In the meantime it raised cotton. A visitor to the region in the 1840s made this analysis of southerners’ misapplication of capital: “To raise more cotton, to buy more slaves, to raise more cotton, to buy more slaves—ad infinitum.”
Indeed, until the turn of the 19th century the South grew very little cotton, save for the long-staple variety, which flourished along the Georgia seacoast and had few seeds, pods, or other entanglements to be combed (or ginned) out. The other kind of cotton, short staple, could grow in abundance almost anywhere in the South, but the manpower it took to hand-comb out the detritus wasn’t worth the effort. Then, in 1793, Eli Whitney invented his cotton gin and the entire Southern agricultural dynamic changed dramatically.
Go-getters began farming large upland tracts with short-staple cotton. In a few short years they wore out the soil and soon moved from Georgia and the Carolinas into the wilds of Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, then jumped the river into Louisiana andArkansas; it wasn’t long before the whole sunny South seemed to have turned into an ocean of white cotton bolls waving toward Texas and the promise of the West. That was where some said the trouble started. With all the riches embodied in the American system, one would have thought that an abiding harmony should have existed among the sections of the country, but beneath its great prosperity America seethed.
The trouble in fact had started 250 years earlier, when a Dutch ship’s captain offloaded 62 miserable Africans at Jamestown, Virginia, introducing slavery to North America. They were the first of some
At the time of the Revolution, the U.S. population had reached 2.5 million, including 500,000 slaves. By the War of 1812 three decades later, it had grown to some 8 million, and just a half century later, on the eve of the Civil War, it had exploded to more than 30 million, including about 4 million slaves.
By the election year of 1860 the United States had grown into a huge but unwieldy economic giant, selling commodities and foodstuffs throughout the world. During the 250 years since the first settlers landed on American shores, their rude paths and huts had given way to homes, many of them substantial. Highly developed roadways and waterways connected great cities north and south. In 40 years, steamboats had advanced from rudimentary vessels to floating palaces while railroads linked all important places, and the invention of the Morse telegraph and code 20 years earlier had spawned a nationwide web of timely communications.
In the Northeast great manufactories arose; New England embraced the shipbuilding, textile, and armaments industries, whilearound the shores of the Great Lakes and in Pittsburgh iron foundries produced railroad engines, cars, and track. Elsewhere plants and shops large and small turned out everything from leather goods to buggies and buggy whips, shoes and tools and rubber goods and all things in between. In the Midwest (then still known as the “West”) was the “breadbasket of America”; farmers in the Great Plains, many of them German and Scandinavian immigrants, raised corn, wheat, and grain for the vast flourmills of Minnesota and Michigan. Farther west were beef cattle and hogs, this last the staple meat of rural life.
The American South, ignoring the advice of some of its wisest citizens, produced few if any of these goods and commodities, but instead purchased what it needed from above the Mason-Dixon Line or from abroad. In the meantime it raised cotton. A visitor to the region in the 1840s made this analysis of southerners’ misapplication of capital: “To raise more cotton, to buy more slaves, to raise more cotton, to buy more slaves—ad infinitum.”
Indeed, until the turn of the 19th century the South grew very little cotton, save for the long-staple variety, which flourished along the Georgia seacoast and had few seeds, pods, or other entanglements to be combed (or ginned) out. The other kind of cotton, short staple, could grow in abundance almost anywhere in the South, but the manpower it took to hand-comb out the detritus wasn’t worth the effort. Then, in 1793, Eli Whitney invented his cotton gin and the entire Southern agricultural dynamic changed dramatically.
Go-getters began farming large upland tracts with short-staple cotton. In a few short years they wore out the soil and soon moved from Georgia and the Carolinas into the wilds of Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, then jumped the river into Louisiana andArkansas; it wasn’t long before the whole sunny South seemed to have turned into an ocean of white cotton bolls waving toward Texas and the promise of the West. That was where some said the trouble started. With all the riches embodied in the American system, one would have thought that an abiding harmony should have existed among the sections of the country, but beneath its great prosperity America seethed.
The trouble in fact had started 250 years earlier, when a Dutch ship’s captain offloaded 62 miserable Africans at Jamestown, Virginia, introducing slavery to North America. They were the first of some
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