Much is written about the influence on the Southern plantations and cotton and tobacco industries. However, the northern industries were also influenced. The Civil War's effect on Northern industry was inconsistent. Many materials from this time report to evidence that the North's industrial capacity was greatly expanded by the conflict. On the other hand, other significant statistical information suggests that the war exercised no major influence on Northern industry and may have even reduced its growth. Several historians have been studying this topic, including Faust (2002).
Faust (2002) states that one considerable economic result of the war was that it helped change the nation from a country with a primarily agricultural society to one reliant on mechanization and a national market system. Prior to the war, only the North had an industrial base, although quite small. During the fiscal year ending in June of 1860, the country possessed some 128,300 industrial establishments. Of these, 110,274 were located in states that remained in the Union. The war made this disparity even greater.
Faust explains that statistics show that even though the loss of the Southern crop led to a steep war-long decline in production of cotton textiles, the North's largest industry, its woolen industry had a 100% production rise during the conflict. The second largest consumer industry in the Union, shoes and leather, also experienced tremendous growth, due to army contracts that more than offset the loss of the Southern market. Other war related industries, especially firearms, gunpowder, and wagon manufacturing, rose quickly, based on the number of military contracts being requested at various times during the battles..
Similarly Northern iron production declined earlier in the war but boomed 1863-64, and...
Meanwhile, the coal industry experienced the same growth, and in 1861-65 enjoyed an expansion rate 21% higher than for the whole country during the four years immediately preceding civil strife.
It was not only the Americans who were influenced by the war, but other countries who were involved as well, including the British (Campbell 2003). When the Civil War came to an end, both the North and South condemned Britain for supposedly sympathizing with the other side. Many have believed that after the conflict, that the British divided their sentiment between the Union progressivism and Confederate conservatism. Campbell says, however, that this belief has been wrong all along.
Instead of being split between the two sides, most of the English were suspicious of both sides in the conflict. Further, even those who did take sides did not consist largely of any one particular social or political group.
War, even one that is not going on a country's soil such as the one presently in
Iraq, has worldwide ramifications on the individuals fighting, the individuals in the support systems,
business and industry, and socio-economic parameters of the country(ies) in the war in addition to those who are in the outskirts looking in..
References Cited
Attie, Jeanie: Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War. Ithaca, NY.
Cornell University Press, 1998.
Campbell, Duncan Andrew. English Public Opinion and the American Civil War.
Rochester, New York: Royal Historical Society, 2003.
Faust, Paula. L. (Ed) Northern Industry in the Civil War. The Historical Times
Encyclopedia of the Civil War. New York: Harper and Rowe, 1986.
Marten, James. The Children's Civil War. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press.
Miller, Randall, Stout, Harry (Eds) and Wilson, Charles Regan. Religion and the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University…
