The Townsend Acts led the Sons of Liberty to dump British tea into the Boston Harbor, known forevermore as the Boston Tea Party. In retaliation, the British passed a series of acts later known as the Intolerable Acts, all designed to punish and reshape the colonial governance system to make it easier for the British to control the colonies. Ultimately, the economic warfare devolved into a shooting war that led to the existing social and political order being swept away.

The Civil War is commonly seen as a conflict only over slavery, but there was a huge economic component to the war. The industrial revolution in the North, during the first few decades of the 19th century, brought about a machine age urban economy that relied on wage laborers, not slaves. At the same time, the warmer Southern states continued to rely on slaves for their rural farming economy and cotton production. In 1805 there were just over one million slaves worth about $300 million; fifty-five years later there were four million slaves worth close to $3 billion.

In the 11 states that eventually formed the Confederacy, four out of ten people were slaves in 1860, and these people accounted for more than half the agricultural labor in those states. In the cotton regions the importance of slave labor was even greater. The value of capital invested in slaves roughly equaled the total value of all farmland and farm buildings in the South. More than two-thirds of all urban counties were in the Northeast and West; those two regions accounted for nearly 80 percent of the urban population of the country. By contrast, less than 7 percent of people in the 11 Southern states lived in urban counties.

Southerners viewed any attempt by the federal government to limit the rights of slave owners over their property as a potentially calamitous threat to their entire economic system. The South’s economic investment in slavery explains the willingness of Southerners to risk war when faced with what they viewed as a serious threat to their “peculiar institution” after the electoral victories of the Republican Party and President Abraham Lincoln the fall of 1860.

The industrial power of the North virtually insured victory, the longer the conflict extended. This may explain Lee’s aggressiveness in trying to strike a knockout blow during the early years of the war. The clear delineation of states based on their beliefs in 1860 sure resonates today when you view how the country voted in 2016. Will the drastic discrepancy in beliefs about how to govern this country lead to a similar outcome?