Stephen Fry in America. Stephen Fry

      Although America was consecrated, if that is the right word (and you will soon see why I chose it ) on July 4th, 1776 in Philadelphia when John Hancock became the first to append his name (one’s ‘John Hancock’ in America is to this day one’s signature) to the Declaration of Independence, for me and for many the moment America grew up was when it was re-consecrated ‘four score and seven’ years later on a battlefield 140 miles to the west of Philadelphia, towards which I am now driving, under heavy clouds and through torrential rain.

      Gettysburg

      The weather improves with dramatic suddenness the moment I pass the sign that tells me I have arrived in Gettysburg. The clouds depart, a clear autumnal sun lights the still bright leaves of the trees around the cemetery and makes the puddles glint and flash as I pass.

      I am welcomed by Abraham Lincoln. Well, by an actor, historian and lookalike called Jim. Jim conducts me around the cemetery, contriving to stay in character in a way that is not irritating or twee.

      It might seem something of a puzzle that a nation born out of such high ideals, such humanitarian vision and such intellectual clarity and rational enlightenment as America should have descended, by the 1860s, into the bloodiest war that humanity had ever recorded. Man for man, no conflict has ever been more attritional and deadly than the American Civil War of 1861–65.

      Jim offers the view that it is perhaps only in the clear light of history that one can argue the war had to happen. America’s written constitution, with its lofty air of permanence and marmoreal splendour, had not addressed what America might be in the modern world. To us all now the Civil War was, or should have been, about the evils of slavery and that is how most will think of it. But many of the Northerners who fought so bitterly, and with such ample funding, were fighting because their paymasters and political leaders looked across the Atlantic at the Industrial Revolution that was propelling Britain to unimagined heights of prosperity and they saw that their own country, with its two economies, one powered by slavery and the other not, was at a huge disadvantage. Slavery was outlawed across Europe, whose countries would not trade with America – not so much out of moral repugnance as annoyance at the unfair advantage a labour bill of zero gave the plantation owners. The North wanted to create conditions for a modern industrial state, an enterprise economy, and to do that it had to bid an enforced goodbye to the plantations. It was no good having two Americas: a neighbour with a slave economy was never going to allow the kind of commercial equity the North demanded. So it was, au fond