Context

"I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course."
― Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing: A Play


My original plan, when I began working on the manuscript that became Four Score and Four, was to write about the year 1860 with the politics and the Civil War left out. Politics and war, after all, are the maintstays of most histories, and those stories about America in the Civil War era have been told repeatedly. The importance of politics and war in the course of history is as undeniable as it is in our daily live, but what those histories merely nod to, however, are the social, cultural and technological contexts in which the political and military events occurred. As we think about events in our daily lives, we do so with reference to Ebola, the internet, health insurance, terrorism, the price of oil and Starbucks. But all those things are irrelevant to the events of 1860, and in their place we need to be conscious of consumption (the disease better known today as tuberculosis), the telegraph, slavery, coal overtaking wood as a primary fuel, and raw cotton as the primary export product of the United States. Politicians in 1860 did not Tweet or orchestrate sound bites for cable news. They made speeches to crowds that they reached by horse and buggy, railroads, and riverboats. The population was largely literate – literacy was more widespread in the United States in 1860 than in the other principal nations of Europe – and people got most of their news by newspapers. Copies of newspapers passed free through the mails to the editors of other newspapers, and by this method (in addition to the telegraph – the Associated Press was in business) news was disseminated across the nation. The newspapers made no pretense of objectivity, and political patronage was given to newspaper editors and writers as though they were party functionaries.