In the middle of the nineteenth century steam power replaced muscle power as the prime mover of civilization, and the Industrial Revolution roared across the world. A new World-Cycle, the Machine Age, was born. But in the Southern United States men took up arms against the imperatives of the machine, and their Lost Cause marked the end of the Age of Agriculture.
By the editing of contemporary diaries, letters, essays, newspaper editorials, memoirs, histories and official records, and the collation of them into a narrative form, this work offers a contemporaneous portrait of the old Republic, the Old South, the storm-tossed Confederacy, and the revolution that swept it all away, transforming an agrarian Union into an industrial Empire.