shipping, the North in 1860 built about 800 vessels to the
seceding states' 200. In 1860, in the eleven most important
industries for war, Chadwick estimates that the Union states
produced $735,500,000; the seceding states $75,250,000, "a
manufacturing productivity eleven times as great for the North as
for the South".[110] In general, during the decade, the census
figures for 1860 show that since 1850 the North had increased its
man-power, transportation, and economic production from two to
fifty times as fast as the South, and that in 1860 the Union
states were from two to twelve times as powerful as the seceding
states.

[110] Preliminary Report, Eighth Census, 1860; Chadwick, Causes
of the Civil War, p. 28.


Possibly Southern secessionists and Northern abolitionists had
some basis for thinking that the North would let the "erring
sisters depart in peace" in 1850. Within the next ten years,
however, there came a decisive change. The North, exasperated by
the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the high-handed acts of
Southerners in Kansas in 1856, and the Dred Scott dictum of the
Supreme Court in 1857, felt that these things amounted to a
repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the opening up of the
territory to slavery. In 1860 Northern conviction, backed by an
effective, thorough party platform on a Union basis, swept the
free states. In 1850, it was a "Constitutional Union" party that
accepted the Compromise and arrested secession in the South; and
Webster, foreseeing a "remodelling of parties", hadprophesied
that "there must be a Union party".[111] Webster's spirit