Unfortunately, the Southern soldiers felt they were fighting for a way of life too, though a different one in a vital respect. By Northern standards they were comparatively poor, and 20 per cent were illiterate, compared with only five per cent in the North. As Keegan says, "They were almost without exception small-town boys, or the sons of small farmers." Only a minority were slave-owners. The total white population of the South was only five million and of these only 48,000 could be described as planters who owned over 20 slaves. Only 3,000 owned more than 100 slaves and just 11 more than 500. Those 11 were, of course, very wealthy, for a healthy young field-hand cost $1,000 or more. But as these figures show, the tip of the Southern pyramid of economic power was tiny. Most whites owned very little or nothing at all. There were four million slaves in the South, but half belonged to farmers who owned fewer than 20. Most owned only one or two and used them to work farms barely above the subsistence level. 

However, an enormous gulf separated the poor Southern white and the negro slave. The poor whites formed a superior class, a ruling caste, simply because they were white. It gave a kind of dignity to their otherwise unimpressive existence and it was essential to their sense of well-being. As whites, they felt they could not be happy without slavery, and therefore they fought for it as hard as they could and for as long as they were able. It is difficult to say which provided the stronger motivation for ordinary soldiers — preserving the Union or preserving slavery. Both were very strong and that is why the war lasted and so many battles were fought. 

There was a further factor, entirely military, which Keegan identifies. As he says, the Civil war battles were numerous, but "strangely inconclusive". What made them so was "the proliferation of entrenchment, thrown up on the battlefield at high speed and in the face of the enemy". They first appeared in 1862 and by 1863 hasty entrenchment "was an automatic response to enemy fire, and a very effective one". It had, says Keegan, "a stalemating effect". By 1864, the trenches had imposed a universal stalemate, though it did not reduce the number of casualties. Indeed, if anything, it increased them. And this was achieved without the use of barbed wire and machine-guns, the two factors which, in the First World War, made the trench so indestructible. 

Thus the American Civil War, in its last two years, anticipated the terrible mud-conflict of Flanders, 1914-18. It is curious, then, that the Franco-Prussian War, fought a few years later, was a war of rapid movement and therefore of short duration. This may have been because the French army was totally unmotivated, unlike the "rebs", and was commanded by a pasteboard emperor who was a Napoleon only in the name, whereas the Prussians were a highly professional army at all levels. It is a fact, as Keegan points out, that though the English took a certain amount of interest in the military side of the American conflict, the Continental nations showed none, thinking they had nothing to learn from America, a view which is still widespread on the other side of the Channel. Thus Europe made no use of the transatlantic lessons, and plunged into the slaughter of the Great War, a catastrophe from which the Continent has never really recovered.