American South

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Civil War casualties were enormous. Strategy and tactics to prevent this slaughter had not kept pace with the improvement in weaponry. Industrial technology had made it possible to kill people in huge numbers. While the dead and wounded on both sides were approximately the same during the course of the war, Southern casualities were drawn from a much smaller pool of eligible fighters. The white population of the South was 5.5 million. By contrast Northern states had 22 million citizens. Now the South had 4.5 million slaves who were able in many cases to relieve whites to go off to war, but not until the end of the war, after much soul searching, did the Confederate Congress authorize the use of slaves in the Army. With memories of John Brown fresh, Southerners were loath to put a gun in a black man's hand. Howell Cobb of Georgia spoke for many when he warned, "use all the Negroes you can get, as hewers of wood and drawers of water, but don't arm them. If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery will be proved wrong."

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: In the middle of the nineteenth century, the economy of the Southern United States, was in large part a brilliant creation of the Industrial Revolution. The principle of division of labor had established in the South a ready source of raw materials which were then transformed into fabricated products in Northern and European factories. Thus, the South's prosperity was based on its supply of staple crops: cotton, rice, tobacco and sugar to industry elsewhere. For all its cultural and social brilliance, the South before the Civil War was very similar to a developing economy in the twentieth century. In a pre-scientific agricultural era, its increasingly depleted fields supplied raw materials to factories in England and the North. With the coming of disunion the economic inequity became quickly apparent.