A Nation Forged by Crisis by Jay Sexton

Author:Jay Sexton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2018-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

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The “winning of the West” in the decades after the Civil War was a particularly intense version of a set of trends that could be seen around the late nineteenth-century world: imperial expansion, volatile economic growth, and the contested integration of previously distant peoples and markets. Late nineteenth-century globalization further witnessed a surge in cross-border trade, investment, and migration. New technologies of communication and transportation brought hitherto distant people into contact with one another as never before. In the span of a few short years, for example, world travel was revolutionized by the inauguration in 1867 of the first transpacific steam line (from San Francisco to Yokohama, Shanghai, and Hong Kong), the completion of the American transcontinental railroad in 1869, and the opening of the Suez Canal later that year. “The world has grown smaller,” declared one of the characters in Jules Verne’s 1873 Around the World in Eighty Days, a novel that introduced readers to these new global connections. Upon returning from a world tour in late 1871, William Seward commented that “you can buy your ‘through ticket’ in New York and go from steamer to railway, and railway to steamer, stopping at ports occasionally, where you will find hotels and tourists, merchants and missionaries, people talking English, and dinners and tea parties, like what you see at home.”41

The American Civil War, of course, did not cause this wave of globalization, whose roots can be traced to long-running trends in the world economy and short-term bursts of technological innovation and imperial expansion. Regardless of what happened on the battlefields of America in the 1860s, there was going to be a revolutionary reconfiguration of the world’s demography, economy, and distribution of power in the late nineteenth century. Even if Lee’s army had vanquished McClellan’s at Antietam, there still would have been tens of millions of people pushed out of their homelands in the Old World as a result of the increase in global agricultural production. There still would have been a surplus of capital, particularly in Britain, that searched for opportunity abroad. One can go further. Even if it had been Grant who surrendered to Lee at Appomattox, there still would have been victories elsewhere for advocates of self-government. After all, Mexican liberals received little assistance from their Yankee allies and still managed to kick out Maximillian and his French enablers, and British liberals would have at some point in this period achieved the expansion of the franchise that was secured in the Second Reform Act of 1867.

The Union victory did not save democracy around the world, at least not in the immediate term. But it did achieve something of cardinal international significance. The political stabilization of the United States positioned it to take full advantage of the late nineteenth-century version of what we now call globalization. The United States emerged as the most attractive and profitable developing economy in an age in which there were many, not least Canada and Argentina.

It could have been different. The crisis of the

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