Civil War: A Nation Divided

From the time that immigrants began to settle America, there were differences easily seen between the North and the South.

The lay of the land was vastly different. From the northern most part of Virginia and points North, the land was rocky, hilly, mostly unfit for large scale agricultural endeavors, close to the Atlantic Ocean, giving rise quickly to several large cities built around the ports that made for growing commerce, while the region South, rolling from mountains to gentle hill country and then onto Delta plains, was perfect for agriculture, and due to its vast scape, scarcely populated.

Those who settled the North and the South were likewise different. While the North quickly saw an influx of a wide range of immigrants, from religious groups like the Quakers and the Puritans to skilled tradesmen, indentured servants and opportunists, those who settled in the Southern part of the nation were, at least at first, either convicts, such as those who were dropped into the debtors colony of Georgia, lesser sons of English nobility, such as those who settled in the Tidewater region of Virginia, or disenchanted Irish and Scots who embedded themselves in the Appalachian Mountains to live in relative seclusion.

Differences in terrain and background are more easily overcome, however, than the one Constitutionally granted difference that eventually led the U.S. to war – the right to own slaves.

It was inevitable that a nation so clearly divided on such a glaringly obvious discrepancy – the right to make human beings property separated by only by a border drawn on a map – would eventually have to come to a reckoning.

It was just as inevitable that the reckoning would not come in the nation’s capitol, decided by officials elected by those who had chosen not to own slaves and those who were slave holders. It would be decided by the very people who lived in what were increasingly two different worlds – the urban, industrial North and the rural, agricultural South.

The entire nation was divided by the time that the long simmering differences between the North and South boiled over with the chain of events beginning with Lincoln’s election; however, for those caught in the middle, the divide was more reality than philosophy. For border states like Kentucky and Maryland, who never seceded but had large slave populations living alongside those with abolitionist beliefs, the division was as close as one’s nearest neighbor at times. For Virginia, the difference was even more visceral; the state was sliced in half to become Virginia and West Virginia when those in the western part of the state refused to secede. In the nation’s capital, there were still slaveholders during the thick of the war.

That a nation cannot stand divided is obvious; that factory workers from Massachusetts and New York would have little in common with planters from the South is even more so. Yet, what is largely ignored in the history of the Civil War is the fact that many of those who fought, both for the North and the South, were more similar than different. They’d all descended from people who came to a land with a promise of freedom and opportunity, or in many cases, had only recently come here with those same promises in mind themselves. Whether they worked in factories or owned plantations, they chose to live in America for many of the same reasons.

In the end, the differences between the North and the South were little changed by the war; the North remained more urban and industrial, while the South continued to be mainly agricultural and rural up until the late 20th century. The result of the war was not a homogenizing of the land, just a promise of equality to all who lived there.