s by wagon (Catton, The Coming Fury 434). As the war progressed, the Confederate railroad system steadily deteriorated, and, by the end of the struggle, it had all but collapsed. Communication, or rather lack thereof, was another impediment to Southern economical growth. The telegraph had burst into American life in 1844, when Samuel Morse first transmitted, from the Supreme Court chamber in the capitol to Alfred Vail in Baltimore, his famous words "What hath God wrought!" (Brinkley et al. 314). The advent of this fresh form of communication greatly facilitated the operation of the railroad lines in the North. Telegraph lines ran along the tracks, connecting one station to the next and aiding the scheduling of the trains. Moreover, the telegraph provided instant communication between distant cities, tying the nation together like never before. Yet, ironically, it also buttressed the growing schism between the two diverging societies (314). The South, unimpressed by this new modern technology and not having the money to experiment, chose not to delve very deeply into its development. Pity, they would learn to regret it. By 1860, the North had laid over 90 percent of the nation"s some 50,000 miles of telegraph wire. Morse"s telegraph had become an ideal answer to the problems of long-distance communication, with its latest triumph of land taking shape in the form of the Pacific telegraph, which ran from New York to San Francisco and used 3,595 miles of wire (Brinkley et al. 315). The North, as with all telegraph lines, embraced its relatively low cost and ease of construction. The Pacific telegraph brought the agricultural Northwest together with the more industrious Northeast and the blossoming West, forming an alliance which would prove to break the back of the ever-weakening South (324-25). The Civil War was a trying time for both the Union and the Confederacy alike, but the question of its outcome was obvious from the start. The North...
