The Civil War

            The out break of the Civil war were the products of immediate political events, social events, and religious events in 1860 and 1861. The conflicts between the North and South which divided them got to its dangerously high level within America as part of the social change and political controversy in the nineteenth century. The initially plentiful supply of land encouraged a high degree of social mobility. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the rapid take up of good farming land had produced an increasingly stratified social hierarchy. In some ways the society which emerged was similar to the country squirearchy which could be found in contemporary England. In the Southern colonies, however, a number of factors strengthened the particularism and independent temperament of this new American gentry. The nature of the rural economy meant that few towns were established and life remained centred around the large scale farms or plantations which resembled small villages in size. The aristocratic owners of these plantations dealt directly with trade, exporting on to the world market from riverside wharfs. The self-contained nature of their world increased the localism and coherence of the ruling class. .
             The importance of hierarchy to this society was further bolstered by the increasing importance of black slaves in the southern economy. The first negro slaves had been come into Virginia in 1619, but the importation of slaves accelerated rapidly in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the first nine years of the eighteenth century 6000 slaves were imported, a total which probably equalled the entire importation of the previous century. The existence of large numbers of slaves created a permanent under- caste which secured the status of the white population. When these southern planter aristocrats rebelled against the British government they saw themselves as following a conservative agenda.