American Civil War. (Books about Antiques).

Like the Underground Railroad for the salvation of slaves, the American Civil War itself has assumed mythic proportions in the century and a half since the last man fell. The railroad was, in fact, a haphazard affair, not the Twentieth-Century Limited that it became in reputation, and the war was hardly the clash of passionate men fighting to the death for their convictions. Neither side was the least enthusiastic about having a war.

When Abraham Lincoln promised to limit the spread of slavery upon his election to the presidency in 1860, southern slave owners feared this would give nonslave owners (three-quarters of the population of the South), the uppity idea of abolishing slavery themselves. Already in 1861 it was difficult to get volunteers to fight, and the following year the Confederacy ruled that those who could afford it could hire a substitute to fight for them. Moreover, anyone owning a minimum of twenty slaves was exempt from the draft entirely For the man who had neither slaves nor a bank account, this was a rich man's war. Indeed, only a few days before the collapse of the Confederacy the Georgia Early County News wrote: "This has been a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. It is true there a few wealthy men in the army, but nine tenths of them...get out of the way when they think a fight is coming on, and treat the privates like dogs....there seems to be no chance to get this class to carry muskets."

On the Union side, the enthusiasm for war came primarily from businessmen who were afraid to lose southern markets for their products and the cheap cotton that came north in return. The working man cared very little about the existence of slavery far away from home, just as today the reality of Iraq pales as you move inland from the coastal United States. Moreover, in the North as in the South, a man with money could hire a substitute to go to war for him. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 allowed Lincoln to accept black volunteers, but that was no more popular in the North than in the South. The Union feared a wave of black migration from the South, claiming their jobs at lower wages. Again, in the North as in the South, this was considered a rich man's war--a contention that was one of the foundations of the widely scattered draft riots in the North in 1863.

There is no jingoism in the omnium-gatherum from which this measured view of a chaotic war is drawn. As impartial as the judgment of Solomon, the Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History contains 2,733 pages of alphabetical entries from Abbot, Henry Larcom to Zouaves as ...