William Marvel: Media in 3-D

Around 2004, after a quarter-century of focused research into various aspects of our Civil War, I was surprised to discover that a debilitating economic crisis had immediately followed the election of Abraham Lincoln. Southerners stopped buying goods from Northern manufacturers and stopped making payments to their Northern creditors. Southern bonds that secured the currency issued by Western banks were suddenly worthless, which sharply devalued paper money from Pittsburgh to the Plains. Mills and factories in the Northeast started slowing down or shutting down for lack of demand and uncertainty about payment. Newspapers reported massive layoffs and commercial stagnation.

The Panics of 1857 and 1873 are notorious, but for a century and a half historians largely missed a similar crisis from 1860-1861. That recession drove hundreds of thousands of unemployed men into the Union army whose enlistments have largely been ascribed to pure patriotism. The rediscovery of their economic distress will require a wholesale reevaluation of Union soldiers’ motivation for going to war.