A House Dividing

CHAPTER 1 · 1850–1860 · The American Civil War, 1861–1865

Before a shot is fired, study the map’s geography of money. The charcoal South is the world’s cotton engine: by 1860 cotton is about 60% of all American exports, and the four million people enslaved to grow it are, by market price, the South’s largest capital asset — worth more than all the nation’s railroads and factories combined. That is the brutal arithmetic under every compromise: the South is not defending an aberration, it is defending the foundation of its wealth, and every western territory (the pale expanse at the map’s left) is a fight over whether that system spreads or is fenced i

The turn: 6 November 1860 — the election.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.