The aim of this project is to analyze the importance of the infrastructural boom experienced during the antebellum period of American history (particularly the growth in the railroad industry) in creating the conditions that eventually lead to the Civil War. To this end, the three books investigated in this historiographical essay are linked by their focus on the railway industry and the problems its growth caused. However, each author takes a slightly different approach to the issue. Railroads: The Great American Adventure<\/em> alludes to the surge in infrastructure (starting with canals and going through to the railroad) as being a catalyst for economic specialization in the South, leading them to focus on a more agrarian economic model which benefitted far more from the institution of slavery which in turn cascaded into heated disagreements between the North and the South that lead to the outbreak of Civil War in 1961. Richards’ book, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil <\/em>War, whilst being focused on California and the gold rush, devotes a great deal of time to the attempts to make California a slave state and the heated battle between North and South to build a transcontinental railway on their own terms. Finally, Gordon takes a more all-inclusive angle in his book, Passage to Union<\/em>, arguing that much like Senator William Henry Seward said in 1858, the railroad moved the Union to a greater sense of social unity as populations grew both in size and interconnectivity. This process pressed the conflicting mindsets of the North and South against one another closer than ever before, leading to a breaking point at which point the United States of America was forced to become an entirely free nation or an entirely slave-owning one[1]<\/a>.<\/p>\n The transcontinental railroad is a central theme in both Richards’ and Gordon’s books, as the gold mines were seen as an ideal location for slave labour, but there remained the issues of firstly, how best to traverse the country, and secondly, how to persuade the state to allow slaves and Southern influence into it (this would be especially difficult because there was a popular movement to allow no black people into the state at all)[2]<\/a>. However, the Southern economy was not the only one standing to gain tremendously from the construction of the transcontinental railroad. The railroad boom was largely made possible by the federal tendencies of the Northern states, as their acceptance of national standardization of railway tracks allowed railway lines to be consolidated across state boarders, removing the tedious necessity of having to switch lines for every new state entered[3]<\/a>. This stubborn support of States’ rights to legislate independently from one another held up the railroad boom and brought it almost to a halt. These staunchly held fundamental differences between the North and South should lead us to believe that the two halves of the Union had deep seeded rivalries and disagreements with one another, something more than simply an issue about railway expansion or about one state in particular. The virgin land of Texas was also a hot topic for debate regarding slavery and it is important to see the bigger picture when investigating the causes for war.<\/p>\n Whilst the notion of specialization may have been spearheaded by the railway industry as suggested in Ogburn’s book, it is imperative that we remember that by 1861 the specialization had gotten so polarizing that the two factions of the same country were driven to war. Whilst Railroads: The Great American Adventure<\/em> is a good starting point, further reading suggests that one cannot simply study one factor in the complex matrix of circumstances that make up the conditions for war in order to understand why it happened. The political and economic advantages of constructing the transatlantic railroad were crucial towards fostering a bad relationship amongst Southern states and Northern ones as they fought their tiring legal battle to gain permission to lay the track through their preferred states with their own preferred materials. But again, specializations and divisions between North and South tended to have a snowballing effect wherein they would begin as harmlessly as one state specializing in industry and another in agriculture, and end with a heated debate over where slave owners should be allowed to own slaves and whether or not they can retrieve ex-slaves from free states.<\/p>\n In this argument, whilst Ogburn is useful to the discussion in terms of outlining the original driving force behind such a polarizing economic dichotomy, and Richards’ approach is an interesting case study in how the West (and new territories in general) caused such a rift between the federalist North and the confederate South, the only fair and logical method is Gordon’s. This is because it is the only one that really allows for a balance of economic, sociological, and political differences to all play their part in creating the conditions for the Civil War without devaluing the fact that although the railroad (or something else) could have acted as a catalyst, there was a vast (and growing) array of reasons as to why the North and South went to war in 1861.<\/p>\n Ogburn, Charlton, and James A. Sugar. 1977. Railroads: the great American adventure. Washington: The Society.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Gordon, Sarah. 1996. Passage to Union: how the railroads transformed American life, 1829-1929. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Richards, Leonard L. 2007. The California Gold Rush and the coming of the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Seward, William Henry, and Charles O’Connor. 1859. The irrepressible conflict a speech by William H. Seward : delivered at Rochester, Monday, Oct. 25, 1858. Albany: Evening journal.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Richards, p. 37<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Gordon, p. 105<\/p>\n By admin The aim of this project is to analyze the importance of the infrastructural boom experienced during the antebellum period of American history (particularly the growth in the railroad industry) in creating the conditions that eventually lead to the Civil War. To this end, the three books investigated in this historiographical essay are linked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-public","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1508\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Bibliography<\/h1>\n
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