Before the Civil War began, the United States had two distinct economies. Although farming was a staple throughout the United States, from an economic standpoint the Northern and Southern farmers were fundamentally diverse from each other. Unfree labor and staple crops were an essential part of Southern life. While their counterparts to the North comprised of an economy that contained finance, a wide range of industries, and commerce; wage earners and small business owners. The Civil War drastically changed this way of life for both the North and South. The South after the war was left in decimated, while the Northern economy boomed. Southern farmers between 1859-1860 were harvesting a record number of cotton crops. Cotton was America’s most …show more content…
This led Congress to pass the first federal income tax in 1862 along with raising tariffs. In late 1861, specie payments were suspended; payments that were made in silver or gold in place of currency notes. This allowed Congress to create “greenbacks” the United States first fiat currency. From 1862-1863 there was an uptick in business thanks to the expansion in currency and government expenditures. Like the South, as the war dredged on the North to suffered from inflation. With rises in rent, necessities, and goods under inflation, workers demanded higher wages to sustain their way of life. At the same time small businesses were suffering under their new tax burdens. However, in contrast to the South, the North never impressed upon its citizens for food or provisions. Northern factories and farms were able to successfully keep the Union troops supplied and fed. The Confederacy was left in ruins in the wake of the war, with little to no monetary funds to reconstruct the region. With the loss of their slaves, white plantation owners, lost most of their wealth, state governments were also hindered by crippling debts. Enormous plantations were broken up into lesser farms that could be tended to as single-family farms in exchange for a portion of the crop, this gave birth to the term sharecropping. Cotton remained the foremost crop, but the war forever changed how cotton was grown and sold. Once the production of cotton recommenced, Americans found that their cotton crop now competed with new cotton plantations all over
“By 1861, the start of the Civil War, Southern slave plantations supplied more than 80 percent of surging world demand for cotton. Britain alone bought one billion pounds, as did the rest of Europe and the United States.” 3 “The south, able to grow cotton very profitably at much lower price than ever before (or anywhere else), became the natural empire of King Cotton as the demand of the British and New England mills became insatiable.”4 The demand for cotton from England and New England prompted the expansion of cotton farms and plantations that eventually began pushing out the food-crops. Smaller food-crop farmers sold out to larger plantation owners creating a shortage of food growth. The South’s economy began to depend on the cotton crop.
During the early 19th century, especially before the American Revolution and after the War of 1812, American society has changed greatly. The North and the South followed different paths, gradually developing into two distinct and very different regions. And in the 1800s, the disparities between the two regions because of the difference in economic, social and political structure, continued to widen leading up to the Civil War that raged across the nation from 1861 to 1865 which concluded the decades of diverse ideas and culture between the two regions. The South’s economic were known vastly for its agriculture and farming. Its fertile soil and warm climate were ideal for large-scale farms and crops like tobacco and cotton.
The Civil war was the most momentous and crucial period of time in the history of America. Not only did this war bring an end to slavery but also paved way for numerous social and political changes. The country had already been torn by the negative trend in race relations and the numerous cases of slave uprisings were taking their toll on the country 's political and social structure. The country was predominately divided up into 3 sections, the North, the South, and the West. Each of these groups had different fundamental interests. The North wanted economies depending on farming, factories and milltowns, while the West relied on expansion and development of land for farming and new towns. The South mainly relied on agriculture like
The Civil War is over and the South has no other choice but to transforms itself into a new south, even if it means it has to leave behind what it used to relied on- slavery and the King Cotton. As the new South developed, it was expected to bring a more productive agriculture, economic growth, a widespread education, a solid social environment and success. At first, there were huge demands on cotton, cotton mills, tobacco, cigarettes and natural resources such as coal production and lumber. I mean one would think that there was a great economic growth in the South but as the saying goes, “if it seems too good to be true then it probably is” because the entire economy crashed after being affected with a lengthy deflation based on crop prices
Americans most remembered war was Civil War between the North and South. The North was completely dependent on industry, while the South economy was dependent on agriculture, which relied on slavery. So the North wanted to get rid of slavery, which kills the economy in the South. The North didn’t agree with or like southern culture. When Abraham Lincoln was elected to the presidency in 1860, the South had “had enough.”
ship the cotton but this meant that the South had to pay the North to
In the past farming was a way to provide food to the family, but in a growing market economy it was becoming more important in the 1860s and 1870s to have money in order to purchase food, clothing, and supplies for the family. That money could also be used to keep the farm running and producing more goods and making more money. However, farming was as competitive as ever. During the Civil War the demand for crops like cotton was high so farmers started producing even more cotton. After the war, the supply of cotton stayed the same but the demand for it lowered, dropping the prices and putting many farmers in debt. The invention of railroads connected many states together making bigger, interstate markets instead of simple local markets; making it even more difficult
Before the civil war the industry only needed workers in factories. This leaves many agrarian without jobs, because they were farmers. “Both the industrialist and the southern planters backed politicians in the fight over western territories” (XenForo, Ltd.). They wanted their own rules and land. The industrialist wanted to rid
War always has a major impact on the economy of a country. The Civil War threw the South into poverty. America had been divided by the Civil War and needed to find a way to heal the rift. The way to do this seemed to be for the South to shift to industry, like the North. During the 1880s, Henry W. Grady promoted the concept of the New South that would be modeled on the industry of the North. He and his supporters promoted education and industrialization as the way to rebuild the South. The southern states would grow tobacco and cotton, and expand their textile industry. Yet the South was still was not prospering.
Because of The War of 1812, the United States had no choice but to produce its own cotton, so the demand for cotton stayed high. The great importance of cotton fueled a new textile industry, along with new kinds of transportation to move crops from place to place. Later, land and slaves became more expensive and were not for sale as often because so many people had bought them already and the supply was running out. But still, the demand for cotton was high and farmers continued profiting from growing cotton on their land. At that point, Georgia relied heavily on slavery, the ownership of slaves being one of the reasons for the Civil War.
As political tensions led up to the outbreak of the Civil War, much of the profit of the southern states depended on their agrarian life. They prospered on cotton export to Great Britain and other areas of Europe, and were quite stable in their food production. However, as the conflict arose and actual fighting commenced, the southern Confederacy was at a large disadvantage to
Key economic impacts of the American Civil War were devastation of the south and industrialization of the north. The South lost 1/3 of the black labor force participation due to emancipation (Hughes & Cain 2011, p. 273-274) and attempts were made to set minimum wages. The southern infrastructure was in ruins and a large portion of the population was illiterate- During the Burning of Columbia, SC, General Sherman saved college library books and asserted, if there were more books the conflict may not have occurred (Royster 1993, p31). Of the 600,000 lives were lost, the north lost 364,000 lives including a President. Many technologies came out of the war, from prosthetic limbs to military weaponry and the north became much stronger that prior
The Civil War, had a huge impact on the United States, especially Texas. Texas was a state that supported slavery, and a majority of Texas’ slaves managed their masters’ lands. When, slavery ended it was a struggle for Texas to get its self-back on track. Farming and ranching was what made Texas its money, and therefore, Texas knew it needed to shape up on their lands. “The cattle range was about the only place a young farm boy could secure employment” (Haynes, 278). Soon, everyone was settling in Texas, and working on some form of a ranch or farm. For that reason, there were hundreds of different job opportunities for everyone. Farms and ranges were the main income for a majority of Texans, so if you did not work on a farm you probably weren’t
One cause of the American Civil War can be argued to be the economy, this is due to the division between the North and South in economic capital, labour and expansion. The southern states’ income was based on the earnings of agricultural work, from plantations and such which focused on the production of tobacco, initially in Virginia, rice and later cotton. For such work, slaves were the preferred method of labour as they held important knowledge of how to herd cattle and the cultivation of products such as rice. The demand for slaves increased in 1793 with Eli Whitney’s invention of the Cotton Gin, which separated the seeds and fibre of the cotton more
Following the Civil War, the south struggled to find its path into the future. Gone were the days of the slavery-based plantation system and the agrarian cotton-based economy of the antebellum period. In the war’s wake, the southern economy was left devastated. The republican lead, Reconstruction period brought the hope of opportunity and equality to the newly freed negro. For blacks, and poor whites, however, tenant farming was the best Reconstruction had to offer, leaving the chains of bondage only shifting from slavery to sharecropping. (reconstruction) While Georgia remained agrarian, the north experienced a boom in technological advancement and industrialization that broadly eluded the south (cite?).