The Railroad, States’ Rights & The Civil War

Historian Elin Whitney-Smith is publishing a book online, chapter by chapter, titled Winning Information Revolutions: From the Ice Age to the Internet. In it she looks at previous periods of disruption to understand what we are going through today.

She says there have been six information revolutions in human history, each representing a major change in the organizational paradigm — a change in how we organize into groups. The first was from hunter–gatherers to agriculture; second, counting and written language; third, the fall of Rome; fourth, the printing press; fifth, the electric information revolution that accompanied trains, telegraph, and the telephone; and sixth, the digital information revolution that we are now living through.

She’s interviewed by Art Kleiner in Strategy + Business. There she puts states’ rights and the Civil War into this interesting context:

The railroad and telegraph emerged in the 1830s and 1840s. They were bound closely together, since the telegraph signals were needed to coordinate the trains; thus telegraph wires always accompanied the railroad tracks. Before this information revolution, people identified much more with their local context — a village, town, or county — than with a nation. The larger geography wasn’t high in everyday consciousness. If you look at a railroad map of the U.S. before 1860, you’ll see connections throughout the North: The lines go in every direction. But in the South, the rail lines only go north, carrying cotton to the Northern mills. There are very few connections among the Southern cities. When the Civil War broke out, Northern people identified with the Union because they had experienced connection with other states and people, whereas in the South people still identified with their local context, and thus with states’ rights.

More here.