Chapter 52: Making Modern War

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Visit Blue Yonder dot com slash cognitive. The so-called Great Peace between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the outbreak of the First World War 99 years later saw huge advancements in military technology, but only a few times when it became necessary to use them. Yet, in the middle of the 19th century, a series of conflicts would foreshadow the industrialization of war. In all of human history, there have been few periods that saw more bloodshed than the two decades between the first and second industrial revolutions.

Today, I'm going to tell you about four wars fought in the 1850s and 60s. Four wars fought in four very different corners of the globe, four wars fought over different issues, but all broadly driven by the forces of globalization and industrialization. The Crimean War, the US Civil War, the Paraguayan War, and the Taiping Rebellion. Not only would these conflicts prove to be shockingly deadly, they would each help reshape the geopolitics of the 19th century, and they would change the nature of warfare forever.

This is the Industrial Revolutions, Chapter 52, Making Modern War. Alright, before we get started, let me cover some administrative notes. First of all, yes, may turned out to be the month without an episode. This was partly because of the home buying process, and partly because this was a challenging episode to write, which I kind of expected I had been both excited for and dreading this chapter for a long time.

The good news is, we've found a house and closed on it, and so from here, the schedule should be returning to normal, knock on wood. Second, let me thank everyone who is supporting this podcast on Patreon, including New Patrons, Hakim Ahmed, Dennis Morgan, Edo Uziel, and Sebastian Stark, as well as Jim Inckenbrandt, John Bartlett, Chris Bradford, Elizabeth Brooking, Yepa Burkhat, Tara Carlson, Amelia Duncan, Michelle Gerstich, Jason Hayes, Jeremy Hoffman, Eric Hoganson, Cara Holm, Brian Long, Mack Loveland, and Mika Okafor, Christian Sybast, Jonathan Smith, Brandon Stansbury, Alex Strings, Ross Templeton, and Walter Torres. Thank you all. Just a reminder, everyone who supports this podcast on Patreon gets access to the ad-free version of it.

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And you can find the link in the episode notes. Finally, yes, this episode is a very, very long episode, which took me two days to record, which is why the sound of my voice might change halfway through. Anyway, let's get started. Part 1, Death Loves a Crowd.

In January 1853, the British ambassador to Russia, the future Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, was granted an audience with Tsar Nicholas I. What Nicholas told him has been translated in different ways, but basically it went like this. Quote, we have a sick man on our hands. A man who is seriously ill.

It will be a great misfortune if one of these days he slips through our hands, especially before the necessary arrangements are made. End quote. This sick man of Europe was the Ottoman Empire. As we discussed back in chapter 32, the power of that great Islamic empire had peaked in the late 1600s and was now viewed as being in rapid decline.

Few successful investments had been made in industrialization or economic expansion there. A number of unsuccessful wars left the Ottomans seating territory to the Russians and the Austrians, and a number of revolutions forced them to recognize an independent Greece and an autonomous Serbia. As for the necessary arrangements, the Russians were seeking tacit approval for war against the Turks. Quote, we must come to some understanding, the Tsar told Russell.

Quote, neither should take any decisive step of which the other is not apprised. On the one hand, a weak Ottoman Empire gave the Russians a great opportunity to expand south. On the other hand, they knew other European powers would want influence in the region, and thus the fall of the Ottomans would disrupt the delicate balance of power achieved by our old friend Medernik at the Congress of Vienna. Still, going back centuries, it was unthinkable that Christian nations would ally with Muslims against other Christians.

Russia understood this and tried to use it to their advantage, but the British hated the idea of Russia's power expanding. The UK enjoyed a dominant role in terms of trade with Asia, and the Pan-Eurasian Russian Empire threatened that domination. So, they wanted to preserve the balance of power more than they wanted some kind of 19th century crusade. No understanding was reached between the UK and Russia.

The Russians decided to act anyway. Under the flimsy pretext of trying to protect Christian sites in the Holy Land, a Russian fleet was sent south across the Black Sea. When they came across a squadron of Turkish ships sheltering in port from bad weather in November 1853, Russian admiral Pavel Ekimov ordered his men to engage. Using a newly invented weapon, exploding shell guns, they obliterated the wooden-hulled Turkish fleet in under two hours.

British admiral, Adultha Slade, unloaned to the Ottoman Navy, sent word back to London, describing this battle of sign-up as a massacre. Soon after, the British joined the Turks in declaring war on Russia. As surprising as it was for a Christian power to ally with Muslims against other Christians, what was perhaps more surprising was the other power that joined this allied effort, France. I mean, the British and French had been enemies since forever, and many British officers were either veterans of, or at least students of, the Napoleonic Wars.

But the newly crowned Napoleon III needed to build some legitimacy for his imperial rule, and what better way to accomplish that with a new war. And as it turned out, the French were vital to this war effort. Their army had, by this point, seen about two decades of fighting in Algeria. French troops were experienced not only in battle, but much more importantly, with the logistics involved in fighting a modern war, doling out medical care to the wounded, sending messages to the front and back, transporting supplies, etc.

Observing the administrative efficiencies of the French camps was a wake-up call to the British. They were clearly behind the times. As the war dragged on, this was especially clear in terms of who was leading the respective armies. French officers were from diverse backgrounds, and promoted by meritocracy.

British officers, by contrast, were largely from the aristocracy, and many of them were able to purchase their commissions. Those British officers made some major errors that came at a staggering cost of lives. But it was the Ottomans, who really disappointed their allies. Upon arriving in Constantinople, in the lead-up to invading the Crimean Peninsula, many British and French soldiers quickly developed rather racist attitudes toward the Turks, driven in part by the United States.

Driven in part by Islamophobia, but also by the low levels of industrialization they witnessed. They interpreted this under development through a moral lens, often referring to the Turks as lazy in their letters home. While they were more technologically advanced than the Turks, the Russians too were behind the times. The economic system there would prove unable to meet the needs of this first modern war.

Russia's calculation for the war was driven, in large part, by the belief that nobody would oppose them. In fact, they figured the Austrians might actually join them, seeing as A, the Tsar recently helped the Austrians put down revolution in Hungary, shout out Chapter 47, and B, the Austrians would likely get territorial gains out of such a war. In the end though, the Austrians stayed neutral. What made the Crimean War so important to world history was the ways new technologies factored in.

This was especially the case with new weapons. Explosive shells, like the ones used to destroy the Turkish fleet at sign-up, had been perfected in the 1840s by French artillery officer Henri Josef-Sevon. He was able to add a delaying mechanism, so a shell could fire straight at the enemy and then explode upon hitting them. Thanks to the steamship advancements made by our old friends like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the British and French navies were able to quickly sail into the Black Sea with ironclad, propeller driven warships.

France built five devastation-class floating batteries to attack Russian naval fortifications. Among those Russian naval fortification efforts were new sea mines, which they laid across the floor of the Gulf of Finland. Along with their heavily fortified base at Kronstadt, these mines helped the Russians prevent an easy allied victory in the Baltic theater of the war. If the British Navy was able to sail up the Gulf and shell the capital of St.

Petersburg, it would be game over. But, despite repeated approaches, they'd never get that far. New rifles, like the French pattern mini and the British and fields pattern, were introduced to the battlefield too. They could be fired accurately at a range of up to 400 meters, 20 times the distance of the rifles used in the Napoleonic Wars.

Sorry, I meant to say 20 times the distance of long guns used in the Napoleonic Wars. Most of those long guns were muskets, not rifles. And the older forms of smooth bore muzzle loading cannons were replaced by breech loading guns. With a twist in the bore, they could fire bullets with much greater accuracy.

These artillery advancements were critical in the careers of industrialist William Armstrong, our old friend Joseph Whitworth, and our future friend, come the Second Industrial Revolution, Henry Bismir. These new weapons made warfare much more deadly. But as it turned out, battle would not be the only deadly condition of this war. It wasn't even the most deadly.

Because for every soldier who died in battle, or from mortal wounds, roughly four died from disease. Waterborne diseases like typhoid, dysentery, and especially cholera, ran rampant in the military camps, hospitals, and transport ships. Remember, these were still the days before germ theory. Even the John Snow investigation, shout out Chapter 50, wouldn't start until after the war was already underway.

Sick men and wounded men were often cared for in the same cramp, dirty conditions at the hospital in Soutari, a town not that far from Constantinople. This is where the famous Florence Nightingale would arrive in November 1854. Influenced by the ideas of the surgeon there, one at James Berry, she came to appreciate the need for better hygiene and ventilation in the hospital. With her medical staff, she started a PR campaign to get the government to take the hospital's conditions more seriously.

Eventually, a sanitary commission was sent. The toilets, washing facilities, and ventilation were upgraded. They were also able to help reduce overcrowding. Nightingale also introduced strict new rules, including mandatory hand washing at the hospital.

Thanks to these efforts, the mortality rate under Nightingale's tenure there dropped from a shameful 41% to a meager 2%. After the war, Nightingale returned to England where she applied the lessons she learned during the war, to establish the modern study of nursing, writing a book on the subject and founding a nursing school at St. Thomas Hospital in London. Then there was the nurse who went to the front lines, the Jamaican born Mary Seacol.

When the war broke out, she was in Panama, where she practiced the medicine and ran a small hotel. She made her way to England, where she applied to join Nightingale's nurses, treating the war wounded. The war office turned down her application, perhaps because she was black, so she decided to make her own way there. Seacol went to Crimea itself, setting up her so-called British Hotel, outside Allied-controlled Bala-Clava, a refuge for sick and convalescent officers.

She'd treat them not only with her skills as a healer, but also as a cook and an informal quartermaster. The government also recruited Runel, yes is Embard Kingdom Runel again, to design a hospital which could be shipped to Turkey. Renquioi Hospital, as it was called, was constructed by timber merchants on the Gloucester docks, who happened to be working with a local manufacturer of pre-fabricated buildings that could be shipped to prospectors in the Australian Gold Rush. All working together with the British and French governments, they built several buildings, huts as they were called, that could be transported and erected on site.

All in all, the hospital could treat a total of 1,000 patients. They had plans to double that capacity, but the war ended just a few months after it first went into operation. The Russians had their own medical heroes. The surgeon Nikolai Pirokov organized a team of previously untrained female nurses, the Sisters of Mercy, to work alongside him, treating the wounded during the long siege of Sevastopol.

He would introduce new emergency surgeries to war hospitals, including the osteoplastic method of foot amputation, as well as anesthetic and plaster casts. The governments also made use of a new technology to help them manage the war from afar. Telegraph lines were installed to relay messages directly from Paris and London to their army's respective headquarters in Crimea. The Telegraph also allowed war correspondents to send reports of the war's progress back to their newspapers within days, rather than weeks or months.

For the first time in history, journalists would be able to inform their readers from the front lines. This was especially significant in Britain, where press freedoms allowed an unflattering portrayal of the war effort to emerge. Reporters like William Howard Russell, writing for The Times, gave citizens some cause for concern and even emboldened some anti-war voices. The advent of war photography would have a similar effect.

Roger Fenton, first inspired by the new trade when he saw photographs on display at the Great Exhibition, shout out to Chapter 46, went to Crimea in 1854 to document the war. The photographs he took would be put on display in London galleries. Some would be converted into wood blocks so they could be published in the illustrated London news. While most of his photos were of soldiers or officers at camp, he also managed to get a few landscapes and interiors to show viewers the sights of Crimea.

But by far his most famous work was his Valley of the Shadow of Death, a staged photograph of a hillside covered in cannonballs. After a few months of fighting the Russians in what is now Bulgaria, the Allies sailed for the Crimean Peninsula. There they would seek to take the Russian naval base of Sevastopol and, by extension, take control of the Black Sea. In July 1854, a sloop carrying British and French commanders went looking for a place on the peninsula to land.

As they sailed by Sevastopol, they raised their hats to the Russians, a kind of old-school demonstration of courtesy seldom seen in more time since. They chose a site north of Sevastopol and landed over 50,000 troops there in September. From there, they marched down to the Alma River, where they encountered nearly 40,000 Russians. The subsequent chaotic battle saw over 9,000 casualties.

As one soldier described it, quote, Our men were falling now very fast. Into the river we dashed, nearly up to our armpits, with our ammunition and rifles on the top of our heads to keep them dry. Scrambled out the best way we could. From east to west, the enemy's batteries were served with great rapidity.

Hence, we were enveloped in smoke on what may be called the glaces and could not see much. We were only about 600 yards from the mouths of the guns. The thunderbolts of war were therefore not far apart, and death loves a crowd. Still, nothing but death could stop that renowned infantry.

End quote. Thanks to the superior rifles of the British, and the French soldiers scaling a cliff wall thought to be unscalable, the Russians were pushed back. From there, they marched not on Sevastopol, but further south to the harbour town of Balaklava, which the British would use to ship in weapons and supplies. The battle of Balaklava would see far fewer casualties, most of which on the Allied side came thanks to the disastrous charge of the light brigade when a misunderstood orders and 600 British troops in the wrong direction to take on heavy Russian fire.

From there, the Allies were able to envelop Sevastopol, but they were not yet able to take it. In a harbinger of what would come in the First World War, the Russians built a sophisticated system of trenches around the city. It would end up being a long siege, lasting nearly a full year. To help break the siege, civilian engineers in the UK decided to join the effort by planning a railway from Balaklava to Sevastopol.

The Ottomans provided labourers from Croatia and Montenegro to clear the path. They were followed by about 500 skilled navies from Britain who laid the track. Operated as it was being built, this 14-mile railway helped transport ammunition to the frontlines and wounded soldiers back so they could be shipped to the military hospitals in Turkey. It may have brought the war to a much sooner end.

And while they made their own supply line move faster, the Allies also cut off that of the Russians, taking the Strait of Kirch and the Azasi, leaving Sevastopol under resourced. On top of all this, the Russian arsenals just could not keep pace with those of the Allies. Early on in the war, the UK's war ministry realised the old network of suppliers, in places like Birmingham, would never keep pace with the army's orders. And so they introduced the so-called American system of manufacture.

Shoutout, Chapter 33. With new management and a new plant with modern machinery set up at Enfield in London, the British arsenal was able to mass produce guns and ammunition faster and with a higher degree of precision. The largely pre-industrial Russian Empire simply could not match it. To regain the upper hand, the Russians tried attacking the French and Ottoman positions on the Chernaya River.

Despite a numerical advantage, it was a disaster for Russia, which may have seen some 7,000 casualties there. As one French soldier remembered that day, quote, I once praised the grace of this valley. Now it is covered with corpses, which the nurses are fighting the vultures for, end quote. After the Battle of Chernaya, an Allied victory was basically inevitable.

In September 1855, the British and French greatly ramped up their bombardment of Sevastopol. Over 300 cannons fired some 150,000 rounds at the naval fortress, killing between 2,000 and 3,000 Russians per day, and basically demolishing the city. After four days, the Russians finally abandoned post. The war had taken a staggering toll.

In only two and a half years, the Allies suffered nearly a quarter million casualties, about half of which were French, while the Russians suffered well over half a million casualties. The effects of the war were perhaps equally staggering. It stunted Russia's economic development and international prestige for an entire generation. But it would also mark a turning point for the Eastern Empire.

Many Russian elites, including the news are Alexander II, embraced modernization as the best means of preventing such catastrophes in the future, including the long overdue abolition of serfdom and various industrial investments, and will dive more into those stories further down the road. It also served as a wake-up call to the British, whose rigid bureaucratic approach to the war led by an old and generally incompetent aristocracy, significantly hindered their efforts and left their soldiers with a lot of misery. Among other things, the officers had not prepared the army for winter, so while they got to go home during the cold season, the rank and file were left in their trenches in Russia without proper clothing, leading to many cases of frostbite. By extension, a lot of amputations became necessary when they really shouldn't have.

When the Liberals eventually took power under Prime Minister William Gladstone, War Minister Edward Cardwell, led a series of reforms to further professionalize the military, including, critically, the abolition of commissions for sale. But with the Russians defeated, the UK was secure in its position as Hejemon again, dominating trade and imperial aspirations in Asia, critically in China, but more on that later. The French Empire also sprang back to the prestige of a great power in Europe, although their coming rivalry with the Prussians would soon put that to an end. And for the Ottomans, it would be only a temporary victory, which cost them about 100,000 lives in the process.

By the 1870s, they would lose control of their territories in the Balkans anyway, as Slavic nationalists would rise up with the support of their resurgent ally, Russia. Meanwhile, as the British and French returned to peacetime and industrial development in the late 1850s and 1860s, they suddenly saw a major disruption to their textile industries, because suddenly their supply of cotton was cut off, due to a civil war halfway around the world. Part 2, appeal against the thunderstorm. In the heart of Manchester, England, about a block away from the city council building, is a statue of an American president, the one and only, Abraham Lincoln.

Erected during the First World War, it was gifted by later US President William Howard Taft's son as a symbol of the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. It was significant because, at the time, Lincoln was guiding the effort to preserve the American Union, many Manchester cotton barons were supporting its dissolution. The US Civil War had cut Greater Manchester off from the cotton plantations of the American south. Unemployment skyrocketed in what became known as the Lancashire Cotton Famine, as 60% of the textile workers in the region were let go.

Some mills went so far as the fly the Confederate flag. But in an 1862 meeting at the Free Trade Hall, affected workers rose up to support the Union cause over their own economic interests. They knew that, without that Union, slavery in the American south would continue indefinitely. Their resolution blunted the pressure being put on the British government to intervene on behalf of the Confederacy.

Lincoln wrote to the workers the next year, quote, The attempt to overthrow this government, which was built upon the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which addressed exclusively on the basis of human slavery, was likely to obtain the favor of Europe. Through the actions of our disloyal citizens, the working men of Europe have been subjected to a severe trial for the purpose of forcing their sanctions to that attempt. Under these circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterance upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism, which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country. It is indeed an energetic and re-inspiring assurance of the inherent power of truth and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom.

End quote. No war has ever cost as many American lives as the US Civil War, and the history of that war is entirely inseparable from the history of the Industrial Revolution. By 1861, raw cotton made up 61% of the value of all American exports. The vast majority of cotton processed in Europe was originally planted and picked in the southern US, and the vast majority of the labor, planting and picking that cotton, was done by enslaved African Americans.

To meet the growing cotton demand, Southerners sought the westward expansion of slavery into new states like Arkansas, Texas, and, quite notably, Kansas, where violence between pro-slavery and anti-slavery Americans broke out in the 1850s, which isn't to say slavery was an especially effective system of producing rock cotton. As a reporter for the New York Times, our old friend, Frigicala Olmsted, noted how inefficient it was, and how the slave plantations were surprisingly poor. Like Adam Smith had decades earlier, Olmsted speculated that paid labor would be more economically advantageous, but that the slave owners were stuck in a futile mindset. They believed it was more gentlemanly, to be served by and to rule over others.

Of course, this mindset would have been contrary to the democratic values of the young republic had it not been for white supremacy. In the northern states, by contrast, productive capacities were accelerating at an explosive pace. There, the industrial cities used the latest technologies, the power of steam, and proto-assembly line processes to churn out not only textiles, but clocks and pocketwatches, soaps and chemicals, food staples, tools, and critically, arms and ammunition. The manufactured goods from among all the Confederate states amounted to a quarter of the value of the goods manufactured in New York state alone.

For every mile of railroad in the south, the north had three. Great waves of immigration from places like Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia were driving the population boom in the northern cities. For every free man in the south, the north had four. In retrospect, it's doubtful the south could have ever defeated the north in war, given the north's overwhelming industrial advantage.

Industrialization might have been driving demand for slave-picked cotton, but it was also driving a movement to abolish the practice of slavery. Mass printing led to a dissemination of abolitionist newsletters, transcribed speeches, and books, most notably the 1852 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which depicted slavery in such awful and graphic detail that it made Queen Victoria weep. There's a legend that Lincoln credited Stowe as, quote, the little lady who started this great war. Another arguable catalyst for the war was an eccentric nobody from Connecticut, whose failures in life would take him all over the U.S., including to Kansas, where he fought in the bleeding Kansas skirmishes of the 1850s.

John Brown. In 1859, Brown recruited 21 followers to take the U.S. arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, shout out Chapter 33. He hoped it would inspire slaves in the surrounding area to rise up and together they would make war on the country until it abolished slavery.

After initial success, the armory was quickly retaken by U.S. Marines. There was no slave uprising. Brown and six of his comrades were hanged.

Although Brown failed, his bold raid inspired awe among other radical abolitionists, and tremendous fear among slaveholders, who had always dreaded the prospect of a slave uprising. Then came the presidential election of 1860. That November, Americans elected the first ever president from the Republican Party, a lawyer with fairly unremarkable political credentials, Abraham Lincoln. Among the Republican Party's principles was abolition.

Not Lincoln himself merely hoped slavery would someday be abolished. In the meantime, he pledged to prevent its expansion west. But it was enough to set the slaveholders of the south into a knee jerk panic. As they saw it, Lincoln's election, along with Brown's raid, demonstrated that Northerners were avowedly hostile to their institution.

The South Carolina legislature voted to secede from the Union on December 20, 1860. By May, 1861, ten more states followed and subsequently formed a Confederacy. Despite the fact that nearly three out of four free Southerners did not own slaves, the state legislatures themselves were dominated by slaveholder interests. Four states issued declarations explaining their secession, and slavery was key in each.

As Georgia Senator and future Confederate Vice President Alexander Stevenson famously put it in 1861, quote, Our New Government is founded upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man. That slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. End quote. Slavery was the primary reason for the southern states to leave the Union.

But it was decisively not the primary reason the northern states fought to keep them in. At least not at first. Northern textile mills enjoyed advantageous access to southern cotton. Whereas Europeans faced tariffs on American cotton, Americans had internal free trade.

Without access to tariff-free cotton, it's plausible the British could have dumped cheap finished textiles on the US market and crippled the domestic industry. It happened elsewhere in the Americas, after all. Additionally, the US had recently started cultivating the prairies of the Midwest, thanks to new farming equipment like the McCormick Reaper and John Deere Plough, shout out Chapter 33 again. But the Mississippi River and its steamboats were critical to bringing those agricultural goods to market, and the Mississippi River ran southward through the Confederacy.

And there was no constitutional basis for states leaving the Union. Whereas the European Union today gives member states a path to exit, like famously breaks it, the US has no such mechanism. The North rightfully argued that secession was unconstitutional. A handful of slave states remained in the Union, but President-elect Lincoln would watch helplessly for months as state after state left, necessitating an inevitable conflict.

War finally broke out in April 1861, as Confederate soldiers blasted away at a Union garrison stationed at Fort Sumter, off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, with exploding shells. The garrison shortly surrendered. Militurization then went into full effect on both sides, and great armies were mobilized. They finally clashed in northern Virginia that July, at the Battle of Bull Run.

New industrial technologies would play a prominent role in the war. Like they did in Crimea, mini-valls, hollow-based bullets which spun as they left the chamber of a mini-rifle, helped drive up the casualty rate. Originally invented by French artillery officer Claude Etiné Mini, the improved designs would help the army's respective soldiers kill from up to half a mile away. Telescopic sights on guns were introduced for the new tactic of sharpshooting.

And yet, commanders were still relying on tactics from the bygone days of the musket. They inet charges would be ordered with no realistic chance of success. The casualty rates were staggering. Also like in Crimea, heavy field guns were a common sight.

Smoothbore breech loading guns, such as the howitzer, helped draw the enemy away from hiding positions. Heavy artillery would also shell towns and cities under siege, leading to destruction not seen in America ever before, nor since. Some 240 patents were filed for military inventions in 1862 alone. Among them was a new rapid fire gun invented by the American Richard Gatling.

Cranked by a hand wheel, its several barrels rotated clockwise as they fired, reloaded, fired, reloaded, in constant succession. Adopted that same year by the US Navy, it was the first machine gun. The Civil War would also feature the first railroad artillery in war. Railroads would become a vital means of moving supplies to the front lines.

Land mines were used for the first time. As they were by the Russians in the Gulf of Finland, sea mines were employed as well. Americans referred to them as torpedoes, although they were not the kind of moving torpedoes we know today. Hence the expression, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, allegedly ordered by a Union Admiral in the Battle of Mobile Bay.

The telegraph became a key weapon in the north's arsenal. President Lincoln seized northern telegraph offices for the war effort. The military's telegraph network carried some 3,300 messages per day along 15,000 miles of electric wire. A telegraph room was installed in the war office across the street from the White House.

By 1862, Lincoln was practically living in that office, sending and reading a flurry of telegraph messages for hours on end. It was a precursor to today's White House Situation Room. In his position as Commander-in-Chief, Lincoln could send orders to his generals far away. The telegraph also helped Americans follow the news of their civil war.

Journalists could send cables, which would then be written up and mass-printed in the daily newspapers. Photographers followed the armies everywhere to make portraits of soldiers which they could proudly send home, capturing their heroism for posterity. These photographers also captured what they could of the battlefields, leading to the first ever harrowing images of fallen American soldiers. Unlike in Crimea, where photography was relatively limited, over a million photos of the civil war were produced.

Many were destroyed, though, due to the sharp drop in demand for them after the war ended. Many glass negatives were instead sold for greenhouses, where the sun slowly burned the images of bloodshed away. But many others we still have, as an invaluable visible record of the conflict. And it wasn't just images of the soldiers being sent back home.

For the first time, the corpses of the slain were being transported back as well. The modern practice of embalming had existed for several decades, but it was seldom used before the 1860s. Now, the Army Medical Corps decided to return the slain to their families, and so they commissioned a doctor named Thomas Holmes to embalm the corpses so they could make the journey without decaying. So it is thanks to the civil war that embalming is widely used today.

Indeed, there were a great many to send home. The casualty rate of the civil war was way beyond what most folks imagined it would be. And, like in Crimea, many of these casualties weren't happening on the battlefield. Disease killed twice as many soldiers as fighting did.

Farmboys, camped in close quarters with other men for the first time in their lives, were especially susceptible to dying from contagious illnesses. But inspired by Nightingale's success in the previous decade, the Americans took decisive action to limit such deaths. A United States Sanitary Commission, led in part by Executive Secretary, Frederick Olmsted, cut the North's disease rate in half, reforming hospital conditions and improving food. Serving and supplying the Commission was a massive network of women volunteers who raised money, knit blankets, staffed hospital ships and camp kitchens, collected care packages, and more.

One of these women, Clara Barton, also known as the Nightingale of America, was inspired by her services in the war to found the American Red Cross. The South had no such sanitary commission. They had fewer rail and telegraph lines to make such an effort possible. They also had an economic situation spiraling out of control, but we'll get to that.

Still, many homes across the South had to be quickly converted into makeshift field hospitals, where southern women cared for the injured. Of course, that was far from sufficient. The Union and Confederacy had more than 500 military hospitals between them. On both sides, these hospitals reached industrial-scale care for the wounded.

Chimbarazzo Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, alone, contained some 8,000 beds. It was supplied by five soup kitchens, a 400-kig brewery, icehouses, fairy cattle and goats, and a bakery that churned out 10,000 loaves of bread per day. Disease spread through contagion, but it also spread through infection. It was only during the war that Louis Pasteur would first pasteurize wine.

Germ theory had not yet come to fruition. But doctors still knew that open wounds from the battlefield could easily kill a patient if infected. Surgeons would spend hours upon hours sawing through men's limbs as they cried out an agony. The only thing they could give them was a new pain relief medicine, an opioid solution, called morphine.

As it turned out, morphine was, like all opioids, incredibly addictive. And that disease of addiction would stay with many veterans long after the war was over. It came to be known as the Soldier's Disease. And in the second half of the 19th century, the United States would have the worst opioid addiction rates in the western world.

The Civil War was fought all over the place, but there are really three general places worth noting. Virginia, Appalachia, and the Mississippi River. And yes, I know this is a gross oversimplification, don't at me, Civil War fans. The Virginia Front was the bloodiest, in which the Union's army of the Potomac fought a long, drawn-out campaign against the Confederacy's army of the Potomac.

And Federalist Army of Northern Virginia, under the famous Robert E. Lee. This front was especially contentious because it was fought in the neighborhood of the two capitals, Richmond and Washington, D.C. While most of the fighting took place in, yes, Virginia.

It also included a forays into Union States, as far north, as Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in July 1863, before they were turned back. But overall, the Virginia Front was essentially a stalemate until 1865. Again, sorry for the oversimplification. The Appalachian Front was pretty blocked up by the Confederacy, but it came to fruition later in the war when Union General William T.

comes to Sherman broke through the Confederate forces at Chattanooga before marching onto Atlanta. It was on the Mississippi, the Union would make its first important wins, first by winning some key battles on the eastern edge of the Mississippi River Basin. Among them was the Battle of Shiloh, where nearly 24,000 Americans died and another 16,000 were wounded. As the Union Army pushed south along the River Basin, the Union Navy captured New Orleans at the other end of the river.

They moved north, taking other cities, including critically Memphis, Tennessee. Finally, Union General Ulysses S. Grant took Vicksburg, Mississippi on the 4th of July 1863, after a long siege that saw some 22,000 shells fired into the city. This, along with the Union's victory at Gettysburg the day before, was a major turning point in the war.

With control of the Mississippi, the Confederacy was split in two, unable to make use of a critical water route. And by this point, the Confederacy was already seeing major problems. Thanks to their industrial prowess, the Union's steam-driven warships were able to impose a successful naval blockade of the southern ports, preventing the Confederacy from trading with the wider world. At first, the blockade looked precarious.

In the early days of the war, Union sailors set one of their frigates ablaze when Confederate forces seized their naval yard in Virginia. The Confederates decided to salvage the ship, and converted it into an ironclad steamer, which would be almost entirely submerged in the water, and driven by a twin-blade screw propeller. The CSS Virginia became a terrifying vision of the future, able to withstand enemy fire while issuing devastating blows to wood-hulled ships. The Union responded with its own ironclad, the USS Monitor.

Built by our old friend, the Swedish-born John Erickson, it was a masterpiece of 19th-century engineering. Driven by a single steam engine and using two smaller engines to turn the turret gun, it launched in March 1862 and headed for Virginia. The two ironclads came head-to-head at the Battle of Hampton Roads shortly thereafter. The Virginia obliterated two wood-hulled, sail-driven Union ships the day before.

The first, the USS Cumberland, tried firing on the Virginia with little success, until the Virginia rammed it, smashing the wood-hulled pieces, and sinking the vessel. Then she shot heated cannonballs at the USS Congress, blowing it to smithereens. But the Virginia could not do the same to the Monitor. The two ships engaged in heated battle, but to no conclusion.

After a multi-week standoff, the Confederate Navy gave up and destroyed the Virginia, the odds of breaking the entire blockade were just too long. The great powers of the world all took notice of this very modern naval battle. Britain and France quickly opted to cease construction of wood-hulled naval ships. From now on, naval powers would invest in iron and steel.

Among them was Brazil, but more on that later. Britain and France also took note of the economic consequences of the blockade. As the North caught southern cotton off from global trade, it created an immediate and devastating economic crisis in Europe. Cotton prices quadrupled.

It was most devastating in Northern England, where about half a million lost their jobs, and came to depend on public assistance. Unemployed workers rioted in the streets in several towns in 1863. Nearly a quarter million workers were let go in Northern France, which soon saw posters reading bread or death go up. The nascent textile industry of Russia was hit especially hard, as Moscow mills limited themselves to a quarter of their former capacity.

Europeans began turning to other cotton-producing regions. Suddenly, farmers in India, Brazil, and Egypt found themselves in quite the seller's market. Peru's cotton exports quadrupled. China started selling cotton to Russia.

The crisis led the British government to invest in rail construction for India, so cotton grown there could make it to the ports quicker. British textile manufacturers, meanwhile, began mounting greater and greater pressure on their government to intervene in the American conflict. They believed a Confederate victory was inevitable anyway. The UK's ambassador in Washington pressed the Lincoln administration to revive shipments from the Mississippi.

The administration, meanwhile, understood the implicit threat that the British, French, and other powers could always come to the South's rescue. Instead, Lincoln changed the war's objective. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all the slaves in the states in rebellion. It bolstered the North's resolve by giving a renewed sense of purpose to the abolitionists.

It helped recruit nearly 180,000 black troops to the cause. When the Union approved black enlistment, it saw its ranks swell dramatically. By the war's end, roughly 10% of Union forces were African Americans. The Emancipation Proclamation also put moral pressure on the Europeans to back the f*** off, unless they wanted to be remembered for fighting for slavery after they had abolished it in their own empires, they had better look elsewhere for cotton for the time being.

As our old friend, John Stuart Mill, explained it, quote, the struggle was destined to be a turning point for good or evil. As bad as it was for Europeans, even to northern US manufacturers to a lesser extent, it was nothing compared to the economic devastation done to the American South. Cotton production in the South fell approximately 90%. Two and a half million bales of the white gold were destroyed.

Some burned, some left to rot on the warbs. Plantations tried different crops like hemp and opium instead. But without cotton, the South had no collateral, with which to sell bonds for the war effort. With so many of their free men off fighting, production of other goods in the South stalled out.

Prices across the Confederacy skyrocketed. As they did, the Confederate government found it more and more expensive to supply their army. The Treasury turned to printing more and more money to make up for it. And you can guess what that did.

That's right, it accelerated the inflation. The Civil War would actually mark an interesting turning point in the history of American money. Before the war, paper currency was issued by individual banks. These banknotes were backed by gold, so theoretically you could exchange a dollar from the bank of such-and-such at the bank of such-and-such and get a dollar's worth of gold.

Mostly though, you could give people the banknotes you were holding and that was sufficient. But the further away you were from the bank of such-and-such, the less that banknote was worth. If it was a note from a bank in Ohio, and you found yourself in Louisiana, you could still use it to pay for lunch, but it had better be a 50 cent lunch because that's all your dollar would trade for there. With the Civil War moving people all over the country.

The treasuries of the two sides had to change that. Now the British had long given the Bank of England monopoly status for printing banknotes. The Americans were about to do something similar. Banks would still issue their own banknotes, but they'd be printing on the fronts of paper issued by the treasury.

The back of the note would include language about how the note was backed by the treasury. In the south they were printed on gray paper, gray backs, and the north they were printed on green paper, green backs. And we still use green backs, albeit in a modernized version today. The gray backs became practically worthless.

A floating currency from the beginning, i.e. not backed by gold, they rapidly fell in value throughout the war. Counterfeits contributed to the problem, as the printing industry in the south was so primitive. In fact, some counterfeiters got caught because their work was too good.

As the economy collapsed, many Southerners lost faith in their new government. Bread riots broke out, many refused to pay taxes. The north, meanwhile, turned their industrial power toward the war effort, and saw a boom. New industries went into operation across the Midwest.

In Cleveland, Ohio, for example, there wasn't a single forge or foundry before the war, and by the end of it, 21 were in operation. It set the north up for a great gilded age to come, but now I'm getting ahead of myself. The Lincoln administration expanded executive authority during the war, as well as the scope of the federal government. For the first time, there would be a national draft, and a national income tax.

As the war dragged on into 1864, grants took control of the army in the east, going head-to-head with Lee. The casualty rate only increased. Confederates were forced to take refuge in the prosperous town of Petersburg, Virginia, where they, like the Russians had at Sebastopol, dug in and built a trench system. The Union shelled the city on and off for months.

The siege of Petersburg foreshadowed not only trench warfare, but the concept of total war. For most of history, when two armies fought a war against each other, part of the effort was directed at devastating the enemy's lands. They'd pillage homes, burn fields of crops, and in many cases commit atrocities like rape. But after the Middle Ages, the enlightened despots of Europe more and more kept battles away from civilian populations.

Warfare became more refined, more professional, and in a certain sense, more humane. But with industrialization, these niceties started to be abandoned. The devastations of civilian populations swung back into practice, and on a large destructive scale. This brings us back to William Tecumseh Sherman.

With a team of engineers that could build bridges and install rail lines in just a few hours, Sherman brought a truly modern approach to warfare. After taking Chattanooga, Sherman's army made its way to Atlanta, the railroad hub of the south, where it fought the Confederates in a number of battles before taking the great city in September 1864. Then he issued an order for citizens to vacate the city and for his soldiers to destroy anything that would give aid to the southern cause. Atlanta went up in flames, as the Union systematically destroyed the industrial district and beyond.

Responding to the protests of the Atlantic City Council, Sherman wrote, quote, They were not designed to meet the humanities of the case, but to prepare for the future struggles. The use of Atlanta for war-like purposes is inconsistent with its character as a home for families. There will be no manufacturers, commerce, or agriculture here for the maintenance of families, and sooner or later, want will compel the inhabitants to go. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it, and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maladdictions that people can pour out.

I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace. You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable, and the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home is to stop the war, which can only be done by admitting that it began in error and is perpetuated in pride, end quote. With no Confederate army in the area to fight back, his forces went on a scorched earth campaign to destroy the south's means to make war.

Headed from Atlanta to Savannah, it went down in history as Sherman's march to the sea. They set houses and barns ablaze, leaving little besides chimneys. Rail tracks were targeted to destroy the Confederacy's supply chains. They'd heat the tracks and then twist them into loops, known as Sherman's neckties.

After taking Savannah, they headed up north and created even more destruction in the Carolinas. In all, more than $100 million of property was destroyed, and everywhere they went, they freed the slaves. In a series of field orders, Sherman promised the land his army confiscated to be redistributed to the liberated African Americans. Meanwhile, in Virginia, Lee was on the run again.

The Confederate government was forced to flee Richmond. Civilians set fire to the city rather than let it fall into union hands. When that fire reached the arsenal, it more or less blew the city up. Glass shattered miles away.

The images of the ruined city, captured in photographs shortly thereafter, show a uniquely industrial site of destruction. I'll share some of those images on social media this month. From there, 125,000 union soldiers chased Lee's 25,000 around Virginia. A Confederate general finally told Lee, quote, There is no country.

Lee surrendered shortly thereafter in the town of Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, effectively ending the war. For some, it was too much to handle. Six days later, an actor with Confederate sympathies named John Wilkes Booth entered the President's box at Ford's Theatre, and, with a pocket pistol invented and manufactured thanks to the advanced American firearms industry, shot Lincoln through the back of the head. It was the first time an American President was murdered.

News of the assassination hit the telegraph wires. The entire country learned about it within a day. Lincoln was embalmed, so he could be mourned with a massive national funeral parade. After lying in state under the Capitol dome, a project which was completed during the war, his body was transported by rail to stops in several major American cities until it made its way back to his hometown.

By the time it was over, the U.S. Civil War produced as many as 1.5 million casualties. It took the lives of 2.5% of the population, the equivalent of roughly 8 million deaths if it happened today. Over the course of just two days, more Americans died at the Battle of Shiloh than in all previous American wars combined.

At Cold Harbor, an astonishing 7,000 perished in a devastating 20 minutes. It was often ruinous at a local level. Many regiments were made up of young men from the same towns. When those regiments were defeated in especially bloody battles, those towns lost much of their young male populations.

The war had preserved the American Union. Thanks to the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution ratified in the months after the war, it had ended the practice of chattel slavery in the United States. But while African Americans had been freed, the effort to ensure black liberation and equality was a failure. As Lincoln's Vice President, Andrew Johnson, took over the administration, he sought a speedy reunification of the country.

The reconstruction efforts to ensure black citizenship rights, as well as new schools, hospitals, infrastructure and other aid, meant to provide opportunity to black and white southerners alike were largely abandoned in the years to come. Reparation efforts, including Sherman's field orders, were reversed by the new president. Thus, lands promised to freed black farmers were returned to the plantation owners who encouraged secession in the first place. In our need to address the sins of our past, the long-American tradition of kicking the can down the road had begun.

Freed African Americans would elect the first black members of the Congress, but they were soon replaced by white supremacists, including former Confederate Vice President Stevenson who got his old Senate seat back. The Ku Klux Klan was established, and it wreaked a violent terrorist campaign against blacks across the south. By the end of the century, Jim Crow was going into full effect. Meanwhile, the union looked westward.

While the army forcibly removed Native Americans from their ancestral lands in middle America, Congress passed the Homestead Act, allowing American citizens to claim almost any tract of land they wanted for a few small fees. About 10% of the landmass of the modern United States was settled thanks to this act. And the moral act established land grants to finance state colleges for agriculture and industrial studies. It was the dawn of America's state university systems.

For the first time in world history, the public would fund higher education to train ordinary farmers and mechanics, building an economy of the future. And new railways were planned, including a transcontinental railroad to link the reunified country with the great wealth to be found in California and the Pacific coast. More than anything, the Civil War changed the character of the U.S. from an agglomeration of states to a nation, in the sense we think of nationhood today.

The millions of soldiers mobilized for war intermixed in their camps. They learned each other's songs, like John Brown's Body, the tune of which was adapted for the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Bonnie Blue Flag, Dixie, and Lorena. The years creeped slowly by Lorena. The snow is on the ground again.

The sun's blown down the sky, Lorena. The frost gleams where the flowers have been. These, along with the many written by the prolific Stephen Foster, became the foundations of American music. And the soldiers played each other's games, card games, dice games, and a new ballgame out of New York City known simply as base, what we now call baseball.

It's often said that before the Civil War, the U and S in the United States were sometimes left lowercase. That oftentimes the actions of the U.S. were described in the plural tense. The United States are increasing a tariff.

The United States are holding an election. Whereas today we say the United States is signing a treaty. The U.S. is putting a rover on Mars.

The United States became a singularity. Now this is not strictly true. The Civil War alone did not accomplish this grammatical shift. It happened gradually over the course of the 19th century.

But the conclusion of the war certainly helped it along. And that grammatical shift reflected a broader truth about how we came to view our national identity. That this country wasn't just a collection of Virginians and New Yorkers and Texans and Illini and so on. It's a collection of Americans.

And as these Americans were getting ready for the second Industrial Revolution, peoples from a different part of the Americas were mobilizing for their own brutal conflict. Part 3. Overcome or die. Back in Chapter 32, we talked about how the newly independent countries of Latin America attempted industrialization, but ultimately struggled to compete with cheap British imports.

How they instead built their economies around mining and cash crop exports that fueled industrialization elsewhere in the world. To the extent that Latin American countries industrialized it was usually by building railroads and modern ports to accommodate steamships, helping get those exports out to the global market. As a result, these new countries found themselves competing with one another for the single most important resource you could have in this economic system. Land.

War became a good way to settle these disputes since the borders of these countries roughly corresponded to the vague political boundaries of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial systems which weren't very helpful. So from 1820 to 1900 there was almost always a war being fought in South America. Often these were territorial wars and often they were being fought around the Rio de la Plata. To grossly oversimplify the play time situation, Brazil and Argentina were playing a decades long political tug of war over Uruguay.

But also in the mix was the smaller landlocked country of Paraguay. Now Paraguay was a bit different from all of its neighbors. It had been colonized by the Spanish in the 1500s but almost from the start the Spanish decided it wasn't all that important to them. So the conquistadors who became the ruling class in Paraguay assimilated with the native peoples of the country.

They'd have Spanish surnames but mostly they spoke the indigenous language of Guarane. They adapted to indigenous culture, observed a syncretic version of Catholicism and generally remained isolated from the outside world. After achieving independence from Spain, Paraguay came under the rule of the dictator and yes that was his title, dictator, Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia. An enlightenment lawyer who held a doctorate in theology, Francia sought to make Paraguay into a utopia using the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to guide him.

Among other things he outlawed Spaniard intermarriage, thereby forcing racial intermixing to ensure race wouldn't be a problem in Paraguay the way it seemed to be everywhere else in the world. Francia cut Paraguay off from the rest of the world, enforcing strict borders with Paraguay's neighbors as they descended into violence. He nationalized the Catholic Church, nationalized half the country's land, and not only legalized prostitution but also insisted it was an honorable profession. Francia also brutally enforced his rule and, critically, began building up Paraguay's military.

Before we continue, I need to point out that everything I'm about to say is based on limited historical records. Paraguayan history is difficult to study because record keeping there was not great in the 19th century. After Francia died in 1840, a short power struggle ensued until when Carlos Antonio Lopez took over as Paraguay's first president. Together with his son, Francisco Solano Lopez, he continued Paraguay's tradition of centralized authoritarian government.

The Lopez's also sought to expand Paraguay's influence and power while maintaining its isolation from outside threats. Foreign loans were rarely taken out, but exports increased significantly, notably Yerba Mate and tobacco, and to some extent hardwood and untanned leather from the country's cattle ranches. There was also some gold and silver mining. Manufacturing was limited mostly to cigars.

Now, these industries in Paraguay were often monopolized by the state, or they took the form of privileges given to the Lopez family and their allies. In fact, in foreign dealings, agents in London and Buenos Aires found it difficult to distinguish between Paraguayan state business and the personal business of the Lopez family. For all intents and purposes, the Lopez's were the state. Paraguay was their fiefdom.

Although Paraguay is landlocked, it has access to global shipping via the mighty Parana River, which runs through Argentina. After years of demands from the elder Lopez, Argentina finally opened traffic on the Parana to and from Paraguay in 1852. However, Paraguay refused to make a similar concession to Brazil, which needed access to a Parana tributary, the Paraguay River, to access its state of Mato Grosso. This is all going to become very important down the road.

While his father was president, Francisco Solano Lopez was sent abroad as a sort of grand ambassador. He traveled all over Europe. During this time, he wound up in Crimea, where he served as a French military attaché. Seeing this modern industrial war must have been something of a wake-up call to him.

If Paraguay wanted to expand its power, it would need to modernize technologically. In London, he purchased the country's first steam-driven warship, and the latest in arms and ammunition. He also hired some engineers to come back to Paraguay with him to industrialize. Among them was John William K.

Whitehead, who seems to have promised more than he could deliver. Paraguay did not have a lot of capital for industrialization, but Solano Lopez directed some of the states, slash his family's, resources, toward the modernization effort. He also started taking out foreign loans and increasing the money supply to find the cash they needed. With this money, Whitehead would build Paraguay's first iron foundry, and, from there, a new arsenal, the country's first railroad, an expanded port on the Parna at Assumcyon, New Steemers, and South America's first electric telegraph.

So it seems there were probably two motivations for all this. One, improve transport systems to move exports out more easily, cash crops and other natural resources, and two, build a modern military to compete with their neighbors, who they viewed as predatory to those economic interests. After the elder Lopez died in 1862, Solano Lopez succeeded him as Paraguay's second president. The country was modernizing.

The army had grown to an estimated 28,000 men, more than 5% of the country's population. And Solano Lopez must have felt like he was in a position to throw Paraguay's weight around, because then came the Uruguayan War. Now, we really don't have time for me to go into it too deeply, but, basically, Uruguay was divided between a red faction, the Colorado's, and a white faction, the Blanco's, which had previously fought each other in a civil war. In that civil war, Brazil supported the Colorado's, and Argentina supported the Blanco's.

By the 1860s, though, the fragile peace that had been accomplished was fracturing, and the Blanco government was under the attack of the Colorado's. Also by this point, there had been a change in the leadership in Argentina, and the new government was not going to support the Blanco's. In fact, they were covertly supporting the Colorado's. And so, Brazil decided it was a good time to invade Uruguay.

This left Uruguay's Blanco government with only one regional ally, Solano Lopez's Paraguay. You see, Solano Lopez was a big believer in Medernix's approach to international relations, maintaining a balance of power so nobody got too powerful and conquered the whole damn continent. And that was his fear with Brazil and Argentina, that one or the other might become too powerful, putting Paraguay's sovereignty, and, yeah, his personal fiefdom, in jeopardy. So, when Uruguay found itself under attack in 1864, Solano Lopez stepped up on their behalf.

This was a really, really bad move. For one thing, Paraguay had not industrialized to anywhere near where they hoped. After three years of construction, the railroad was only about 35 miles long. The arsenal was using modern machinery and producing an enormous amount of ammunition, including both solid and hollow bullets, as well as grenades, and landed naval gun carriages, but not the best guns.

The army would need to rely on smoothbore cannons and carbines, far less accurate than the new breach loaders and rifles. And little did Solano Lopez realize just how much his enemy's forces had industrialized during the same years. The foundry, they hoped, would serve as a foundation for a new Paraguayan iron industry that could compete with the UK's. But it failed, in large part because they couldn't find coal deposits in Paraguay to fuel the blast furnaces.

Paraguay does have good coal reserves, they just couldn't be located in the 1860s. And it was this failure at the foundry that put all the other efforts to industrialize behind. For another thing, Paraguay was taking on the most powerful country in South America, Brazil. And if that wasn't enough, the Colorado's would soon take control of Uruguay, and together, Brazil and Uruguay would join Argentina to form what became known as the Triple Alliance.

Paraguay's ambitions would be undiminished. They decided to fight them all. When Brazil sent a ship up the Paraguay River to Matagroso in November 1864, carrying the province's new executive onboard, Paraguay used the moment to declare war. They seized the ship and, about a month later, invaded Matagroso, taking several towns.

From there, they headed south to relieve the Blanco's in Uruguay. When Argentina refused Paraguay access to the Parana for this fight, Paraguay declared war on Argentina too. By May, a secret treaty of the Triple Alliance was signed, agreeing to keep up the fight until Paraguay was defeated and Solano Lopez was removed from power. Then the Allies launched raids on the Paraguayan border, forcing Paraguay into a more defensive position.

Despite the overwhelming odds against them, the Paraguayans were able to hold out, thanks in part to their warships on the Parana and Uruguay rivers, thanks in part to the trenches they dug, and thanks in part to the difficulties the Allies had organizing their coalition forces. For nearly a year, the two sides were in a sort of stalemate. Then, in April 1866, the Allies decided to make a major push into Paraguayan territory. After repelling this invasion at the Battle of Ostero-Belico, Paraguay decided to make its own push into allied territory.

The subsequent Battle of Tuuti would be the bloodiest in South American history, with nearly 4,000 allied casualties, and an estimated 13,000 casualties for Paraguay. As one English onlooker described it, quote, the Allies had the advantage of fighting 2-1, and their firearms were rifled. The Paraguayans had hardly any rifles, and most of their muskets were flintlocks, like they were attacking the Allies from 60 years in the past, end quote. Despite this crippling defeat, Paraguay fought on.

Diplomatic efforts were made, but the Allies' insistence that Solano Lopez be removed from power made a truce impossible. Then came a catastrophe for the Allies. That September, coming up the Paraguay River with some of the most advanced ships and gunboats of the Brazilian navy, they attacked Paraguayan trenches at Crúpayi T, except most of the Paraguayan forces were not behind the trenches. They were hidden in other positions, blasting away at the Allies with just 49 cannons.

This surprising, but overwhelming, Paraguayan victory was followed by an outbreak of our old friend, Calera, among allied forces. It would be nearly a year before they could resume the fight. They would regroup under the leadership of a Brazilian general, the Duke of Cascis, who said about modernizing the Allied War effort. He equipped the armies with newer, more accurate firearms, and retrained the troops with them.

He upgraded the healthcare of the field hospitals, insisting on better hygienic practices, and thereby eliminated the spread of Calera. He even employed hot air balloons to fly over the Paraguayan positions, gaining critical insights for new offensive. And by this point, Paraguay was in really, really bad shape. Nearly all their professional armed forces had been killed or critically injured by this point.

To keep up the fight, Solano Lopez turned to conscripting women for behind-the-scenes operations and children for battle on the front lines. Perhaps the boldest move came in March, 1868, when he sent a fleet of canoes to take on a pair of Brazilian-ired clads. Under the cover of Night End camouflage, 1500 Paraguayans, armed with machetes and swords, attacked the Cabral and Lima Barros. By morning, four more Brazilian ships joined the battle, blasting away at the Paraguayans until they surrendered.

Finally, the Allies successfully invaded Paraguay. In January, 1869, they took control of the capital of Asuncion, sending Solano Lopez on the run. Thousands more Paraguayans would die in battle throughout the year to come, as the Allies hunted him down. In March 1870, they finally found him in a camp in the forests of northeast Paraguay.

In the subsequent battle of Sero Cara, Solano Lopez was shot, but managed to briefly get away. When the Allies caught up with him, he made one final, personal charge. Drawing his sword, he shouted, I die with my country, and ran at a Brazilian general. He was shot dead before he could reach him.

There's an expression in Spanish. It's a bit like the English expression, do or die. It basically means win or die, or, more accurately, overcome or die. And that's exactly what the Paraguayans had to do in this war.

They had to overcome insurmountable odds. Or die trying. Perhaps had it not been for Paraguay's history of isolation, they might have better understood just how impossible the task of winning this war would be. Perhaps had its executive leadership not been so centrally tied to the Paraguayan identity, they might have given up Solano Lopez before it was too late.

Perhaps had it not been for so many officers dying at Tuyi T, they could have stopped their leader from continuing his suicide mission. Perhaps had they found their coal deposits in time, Paraguay could have industrialized further and gone into the war in a better technological position. But none of these things happened. The result was a total war that left the Paraguayan state in ruins.

Estimates for the total damage done to Paraguay are all over the place. There are some estimates that Paraguay lost 7% of its population in this war against the Triple Alliance. And that 7% is by far, and I mean by far, the lowest estimate there is. According to the most common estimates, as many as two out of every three Paraguayans died as a result, two out of three citizens dead gone.

Furthermore, most of the dead were men. As of 1870, women outnumbered men in Paraguay four or five to one. Paraguay was also stripped of about 40% of its territory, which was split between Argentina and Brazil. Economic development in Paraguay was stunted for decades, which has had a lasting impact on the country up to the present day.

And while their populations were much larger than Paraguay, the Allies lost heavy numbers too, perhaps as many as 200,000 casualties. It was by far the deadliest war in South American history, and one of the deadliest in all of modernity. But it was by no means the deadliest war of these two decades. The longest and deadliest of them all was taking place 12,000 miles away in China.

Part four, the cries of the people shake the earth. In March 1850, the 19-year-old Isun Jiro Yiju ascended to the Chinese throne as the Xingfeng emperor. One Robert Samuel McClay, an American missionary based in Fuzhou, wrote about it in his diary days earlier. Quote, who knows the surprising changes which may mark his reign?

Would it not be well for the whole church to pray that the reign of this emperor may be marked in the world's history as the era of Christianity's complete triumph in China? Little could McClay know how unsettling this prophecy truly was. For over 200 years, China had been ruled by the Qing dynasty, a line of Manchu emperors that oversaw some of the highest highs and lowest lows of Chinese history. The Manchus were a minority ethnic group from Manchuria, a region north of China proper.

The Han Chinese majority had long viewed them as foreigners and barbarians. But they conquered China proper in 1644, overthrowing the Ming dynasty and claiming the mandate of heaven for themselves. From there, they pushed into the mountains of southern China, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia, effectively doubling the size of the Chinese empire in their conquests. To legitimize their rule, the Qing invested heavily in the promotion of Chinese tradition, including Confucian ideology and state administration by exam-promoted bureaucrats.

To maintain power, of course, it was usually Manchus getting the best positions within that bureaucracy, but from the mid-1600s to the mid-1700s, it all went pretty well. The economy flourished, as trade with the west brought in an abundance of silver. In fact, things were going so well that the population expanded significantly, nearly tripling by the turn of the 19th century, and continuing to rise from there. But, just like in England, this boom in population had drawbacks.

There wouldn't be enough land to go around for everyone to farm the way that was traditional in Chinese society. Peasants found themselves struggling. On top of this, the imperial government struggled to control inflation with all the western silver pouring in. They had trouble collecting taxes.

Banditry became a common, virtually constant problem. Certain, secret societies were organized, at first to support Ming restoration against the Qing, but eventually turning to organized crime, the first triads. The government was also slow to respond to famines and natural disasters, and for many Chinese, it was easy to blame all these problems on the Manchu outsiders who now ruled their kingdom, and then came the British. The UK brought two imports at this time that are important for our story today, Protestant missionaries and opium.

As we talked about back in chapter 32, British traders were selling thousands of tons of opium to the Chinese by the 1830s. The British East India Company and the British government were happy to support this illegal trade, as it was the only way to ensure a trade balance with self-sufficient China, which the UK needed to support its growing manufacturing base. So, when Chinese officials began destroying opium shipments, the British declared war. Exerting the pressures of their industrialized navy, the British overwhelmed the Chinese.

Finally, in August 1842, representatives of the United Kingdom and the Qing Emperor signed a treaty aboard a British warship anchored at Nanjing. Known in China as the first unequal treaty, it gave Britain control of Hong Kong, preferred trade status with China, and access to ports across the country, including critically Shanghai. China, meanwhile, was forced to pay massive reparations to the British. And it would be here in Nanjing, where a massive rebel movement would take over in the next decade, and it was from this city they set up a fanatical new government, led by the self-proclaimed younger brother of Jesus Christ.

Hong Zuchen was born outside Guangzhou, then known to Westerners as Canton, in 1814 to a prominent farming family from the minority ethnic Hakka community. Their clan had been high officials and imperial advisors during the Song Dynasty, but by now they were reduced to poverty. Still, they had high hopes for Zuchen, and so they encouraged his education so he could pass the civil service exams and become a state official. He was a highly gifted student, memorizing the histories and the teachings of Confucius so important for imperial service.

By this point, the examination system had become notoriously difficult. As pretty much the only path one had to achieve upward mobility, the exams attracted lots of brilliant students, and fewer than one out of a hundred would actually pass. And if you failed at a provincial level, it would be years before you'd get another opportunity. Hong took the exams and failed.

Took the exams again, and failed again. After his third failed exams in 1837, Hong suffered a total mental breakdown. He had to be carried home, where he apologized to his family, that his life was over. Then, over the next forty days, he lay in bed, experiencing a series of visions, including one in which an old man, wearing a golden beard and a black robe adorned with dragons, told Hong, the people of the world, quote, take of my gifts and they're with worshiped demons.

The man then gave Hong a sword for slaying demons. In other visions, he watched the old man berating Confucius. In another, Hong went demon hunting with an older brother he dreamed he had. His family watched him in these trances as he screamed, kill the demons, and swung his sword in the air.

At one point, he woke up and proclaimed himself the emperor of China. In time, he recovered, and in 1843, he took the civil service exams once again and failed a fourth time. But that same year, a cousin of his found a piece of Christian literature Hong had lying around. One of those Protestant missionaries had given it to him years earlier, but Hong never bothered reading it.

Now, in the wake of his visions, as well as his repeated failures to advance through the traditional channels of Chinese society, Hong had a revelation. He interpreted his visions through a Christian lens and told his cousin what it meant. Hong was the second son of the Christian god, the younger brother of Jesus, and he was being called by his father to slay the demons who brought misery to the Chinese people, the Confucius and the Buddhists. He then baptized himself and made his cousins, Hong Rangan and Feng Yuchen, his first converts.

Together, they destroyed Confucius and Buddhist iconography in texts, gathered Christian literature, and began preaching to their family and neighbors. They met with various Protestant missionaries, including Scandinavian Lutherans, British Presbyterians, and American Baptists. In 1847, they moved to Fissil Mountain and Guangxi Province, where they established the Society of Godworshippers. They published a Chinese-language Bible.

Feng began teaching the locals how to read. And Hong started holding ministries that looked an awful lot like the Baptist's tent revivals of the contemporary United States, Shoutout, Chapter 45. By now, their converts were beginning to establish their own churches, recognizing Hong as the Son of God and the leader of their faith. In his travels throughout southern China, Hong also became more and more political.

It wasn't just Confucius he took issue with now. It was the Manchu leaders who had failed China, bringing shame and poverty to their kingdom. As he noted from the book of Isaiah, quote, "...your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire, your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers." End quote. He explained to his cousin, Fenggan, that the Manchus were the quote usurpers of China, who quote, rob their brothers of their estate.

By 1850, Hong had a couple of thousand followers around southern China. But when a blight reduced crop yields that year, words spread that you could prevent hunger by praying to Hong's God. Additionally, disputes over the region's limited water resources broke out into acts of violence against the Hakkas, who took refuge with the Society of God-worshippers. Soon, their numbers swelled to 10 or 20, maybe 30,000.

It had gotten to the point that the authorities decided this sect posed a danger to social stability. A magistrate was sent with a small force of imperial soldiers to arrest Hong and his leaders. Hong and the others got away and regrouped in the town of Jinchan. When the imperial troops came to arrest them at Jinchan, 10,000 of their supporters armed with spears ambushed the soldiers and beheaded the Manchu commander.

This Jinchan uprising kickstarted one of the deadliest wars in all of history. Ten days later, on January 8, 1851, Hong announced the foundation of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Taiping Meaning Great Peace, with himself as the Heavenly King of China. Additionally, under the Heavenly King would be a flank king and four kings of the four directions, including Feng, who was appointed as South King. An army was organized and was given five rules.

Follow orders, men and women should be kept separate while moving, do not make any mistakes, be fair and harmonious, and perhaps most important of all, do not retreat from battle. The Taiping army, soon numbering over 100,000 in strength, moved north, fighting Qing troops and recruiting from among the poor peasantry of China as they went. Over the next two years, the captured towns across the south and built their numbers. Also as they went, they massacred ethnic Manchu's, reciting Christian chants as they exterminated Manchu men, women and children by the thousands, sometimes by the tens of thousands.

By early 1853, the size of the army was estimated at over a million, and that when they crossed the Yangtze River and took the biggest prize yet, the ancient city of Nanjing. Not only was it the place where China suffered the humiliation of signing the unequal treaty with the British, Nanjing had been the southern capital of China, under the Ming Dynasty, before the Manchu's overthrew them and made Beijing the sole capital of the empire. With this symbolism in mind, Hong declared it the capital of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. He also established a fiercely theocratic framework for the new kingdom.

Instead of studying Confucius, those who wanted to become leaders had to study the Bible. Men and women were given equal rights, and many women were given high offices of civilian and military responsibilities. Footbinding was banned, as it would make it more difficult for women to work. However, the sexes were separated, and sexual intercourse was strictly forbidden, even among married couples, until all of China was conquered.

Many other vices were prohibited, including opium, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and prostitution. You cannot have slaves or concubines. But it was a gospel of social and economic justice that attracted so many to the cause. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was established as a classless society.

Private property was abolished. Land was to be held by the state and distributed fairly. This also helped their militarization. Every household had to register with the Heavenly Kingdom to get land, and every household had to supply at least one male for the Taiping army.

Meanwhile, this wasn't the only crisis facing the Qing dynasty. Other rebellions broke out across the empire. In the north, hundreds of thousands of poor rebels launched a guerrilla campaign to kill rich landowners, and topple the Qing government. Out west, in Xinjiang province, Chinese Muslims rose up against Manchu rule as well.

Other ethnic minorities in far south China did the same. And if that wasn't bad enough, guess who's coming back onto the scene. That's right, the British. Despite the favorable terms they got out of the Nanjing Treaty, they wanted still greater access to Chinese trade.

Plus, China was too beset by internal problems to deal with all the piracy happening in their waters, and Britain was sick of it. Most importantly, though, the UK wanted opium to be legalized in China. So, when a British smuggling ship, Gokke Guangzhou, was briefly seized by Chinese officials in 1856, it gave the UK all the reason it needed to start the second opium war. With the conflict in Crimea, all wrapped up now, the Royal Navy sailed a warship up the Pearl River and blasted away at Guangzhou.

Soon after, they captured and imprisoned the local governor. Britain made their new demands, now even more unreasonable than in 42, and suddenly, other colonial powers jumped in to get a piece of the action. France demanded trading rights with China, as did the United States, as did Russia. The imperial government gave in, but later backtracked, and the UK, the US, and France pounced.