ns of the United States had crafted compromise legislation intended to patch up the lengthening philosophical rifts between the two sides, but by the 1850s many people on both sides felt that their differences on such issues as slavery could not be reconciled. The election of Abraham Lincoln to the country's presidency in 1860 struck Southerners as a direct threat to their way of life, and they quickly embarked on a course of secession. Lincoln, though, was determined to preserve the Union by any means necessary. The result was war. "Entirely unimaginable before it began," wrote Ric Burns and Ken Burns in The Civil War, "the war was the most defining and shaping event in American history-so much so that it is now impossible to imagine what we would have been like without it." By the middle of the nineteenth century, slavery was entrenched in the agriculture-based Southern economy (cotton, the South's single biggest crop, accounted for three-quarters of all U.S. exports in 1850). Bondage had long been an institution in the South, but with the explosion of cotton production following the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, slavery became even more important. In addition, capital investment in slaves was acentral part of the South's economic structure by the mid-1800s. Many slaves were held on giant plantations, and some wealthy slave-holders owned hundreds of blacks. These families were able to lead lives of leisure up in the plantation house while their slaves toiled in the surrounding cotton fields. This dynamic spurred the birth of an aristocratic sort of lifestyle for rich whites. "The plantation ideal more than ever dominated the South," wrote Arthur Charles Cole in The Irrepressible Conflict. "To become a large planter was the aspiration of every ambitious youth.... The planter-aristocrat on his broad acres represented a leisure class that was genial, picturesqueand patriarchal." Blacks, of course, viewed the practice of slavery q...
