The American Civil War
A Military History
Chapter One
North and South Divide
AMERICA IS DIFFERENT. Today, when American "exceptionalism," as it is called,
has become the subject of academic study, the United States, except in wealth
and military power, is less exceptional than it was in the years when it was to
be reached only by sailing ship across the Atlantic. Then, before American
culture had been universalised by Hollywood, the technology of television, and
the international music industry, America really was a different place and
society from the Old World, which had given it birth. Europeans who made the
voyage noted differences of every sort, not only political and economic, but
human and social as well. Americans were bigger than Europeans-even their slaves
were bigger than their African forebears-thanks to the superabundance of food
that American farms produced. American parents allowed their children a freedom
not known in Europe; they shrank from punishing their sons and daughters in the
ways European fathers and mothers did. Ulysses S. Grant, the future general in
chief of the Union armies and p ... read full excerpt from: The American Civil War ebook
