The Economic Effects of the Civil War

6 Key excerpts on "The Economic Effects of the Civil War"

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  Writing the Civil War

  The Quest to Understand

  • James M. McPherson, William J. Cooper, James M. McPherson, William J. Cooper, Jr.(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • University of South Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  But few Civil War histori-ans today ignore Charles Ramsdell's injunction to remember the home front. The economic history of the Civil War era has emerged in recent years as a particularly robust field. This vital scholarship, however, is often framed in ways that limit its usefulness for understanding the Confeder-ate economy. One subfield, for example, asks broad questions about the war's overall economic consequences, particularly its impact on the speed and direction of the nation's development. Although this literature pro-fesses to be national in scope, it usually focuses on the North and industrial capitalism. 6 Even economic studies that concentrate on the South give short shrift to the war years. One such body of work seeks to measure the results of the war by comparing and contrasting the antebellum and postbellum southern economies. Within this debate, economists tend to seek the roots of the South's economic backwardness, while historians probe continuity and change, asking whether there really was an Old and a New South. 7 A fine example of a longitudinal study is Robert Tracy McKenzie's One South or Many?, an analysis of Tennessee agriculture that exploits the 203 JAMES L. ROARK decennial censuses for 1850 through 1880 to explore a broad range of topics, including geographic and economic mobility, wealth distribution, patterns of landholding and tenure, and farm size and income. 8 Works like this are invaluable for understanding change and persistence over time, but subsuming the war years in larger chronologies obscures the Confederate economic experience. That vast and often brilliant recent literature that hones in on the South's transformation from slavery to free-labor agriculture also offers less leverage on the Confederate economy than one might expect. These studies often begin where the Confederacy ended, with emancipation.

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  The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 4, AD 1804–AD 2016

  • David Eltis, Stanley L. Engerman, Seymour Drescher, David Richardson(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  To be sure, there have been numerous challenges to the Chandlerian narrative in recent decades, but no one gainsays the fact that accelerated market expansion and market the american civil war and its aftermath 517 integration powerfully influenced the course of American economic and business history beginning in the 1830s and 1840s. Many of the economic and business developments in the South in the postbellum period – developments that historians have traditionally attributed to “the war” or to “its aftermath” – are more accurately seen as the result of largely autonomous forces associated with long-term market expansion and inte- gration. Who knew? At least some economic and business historians, for starters. 2 None of the comments above is intended to suggest that conventional questions relating to the Civil War and its aftermath have passed their “sell-by” dates, merely that it’s not as easy to feel confident in our approaches or answers to them. Viewed in this way, Churchill’s famous 1939 observation about the difficulty of forecasting Soviet Russia’s behav- ior – behavior that he saw as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” – seems relevant to our interpretive task here. One of the principal takeaways from the discussion above is that the Civil War, emancipation, and the economic and political reconstruction/ reconstitution of the South/nation are inexplicable without grounding these developments in the history of American capitalism. Without the expansion, diffusion, deeper penetration, and ever-increasing elaboration of capitalism in North America and other parts of the Atlantic World, tensions between the ideologies of free labor and slave labor in the Atlantic World would not have arisen. As historians of antislavery have long pointed out, the movement against, first, the slave trade, then slavery itself was at least in part a concomitant of the capitalist project.

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  The Civil War Era

  An Anthology of Sources

  • Lyde Cullen-Sizer, Jim Cullen, Lyde Cullen-Sizer, Jim Cullen(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Wars expand and collapse economies, create and spread new forms of technology, hasten the rise and fall of private fortunes, and subject citizens to economic shocks (like rapidly rising prices) that are beyond anyone’s control. The outcome of battles on remote fields often shape the destinies of nations, but the reality of wars for ordinary citizens is often felt in shops and homes not even singed by gunfire. It is generally agreed that the American Civil War was a major turning point in American economic history. Instead of a nation based on agriculture, whether feudal, capitalistic, or both, the die was cast – to use a fitting metaphor – for a nation built on industrial capitalism. Factories and free labor, not farms and slaves, would represent the future. For the South, this change would mark the end of a way of life; for the North, it would intensify trends (particularly the importance of financial institutions) whose outlines were already clearly established. Yet the term ‘‘free labor,’’ coined to identify the alternative to slave labor, did not seem entirely accurate for the millions of American workers, many of them immigrants, who labored in Union factories during the Civil War. Often paid subsistence wages at best, and regarded with disdain or worse by nativists, these people struggled with multiple kinds of adversity, even as they made crucial contributions (sometimes reluctantly or even with hostility) to the war effort. They also made efforts to organize themselves by occupation, a quest that proved quite difficult during the war and after, and yet one that would persist, with real success, in the coming century. In this excerpt from his 1988 book ‘‘ A People’s Contest’’: The Union and Civil War , Phillip Shaw Paludan explores the challenges facing industrial workers during the conflict. The war, Paludan argues, was a crucible for a labor movement not yet ready for prime time.

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  American Educational History

  School, Society, and the Common Good

  • William H. Jeynes(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER     7

  The Effects of Events During and Between the Civil War and World War I

  D uring the period from 1861 to 1918, from the Civil War to World War I, the United States matured into a primary economic world power. By 1900, the United States maintained the highest standard of living of any nation in the world, a position it would hold until 1973 (U.S. Department of Labor, 2005). Educators believe that the ascending American education system of the 19th and early 20th centuries contributed measurably to the puissant economy that Americans would enjoy in the 20th century (Hungerford & Wassmer, 2004). Undoubtedly, the period from 1861 to 1918 was an important one in the history of American education. Urbanization, industrialization, and immigration would all have a prominent impact. In addition, schools assumed new social roles that produced some controversy. Educators also debated about what should be the appropriate nature of education for African Americans in the post–Civil War era. This chapter of American educational history also yielded a more well-defined American education system, which in most respects resembled that which the nation’s citizenry is familiar with today.

  IMPACT OF THE CIVIL WAR

  Many historians claim that America did not become a full-fledged nation until the conclusion of the Civil War (Johnson, 1997). There are a number of reasons historians make this assertion.

  First, slavery had divided the nation prior to the Civil War. In a very real sense, as the slave trade grew, the nation became two nations under one roof (Johnson, 1997). On the basis of this reality, Abraham Lincoln (1858) made a famous speech in which he declared, paraphrasing Jesus in the New Testament, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Certainly with such a division tearing the country apart, the United States really could not function as one nation.

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  Anvil of Victory

  The Communist Revolution in Manchuria 1945–1948

  • Steven I. Levine(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER FIVE THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CIVIL WAR W A R mobilization extended beyond conscription of soldiers and laborers to the economy of the Com-munist Northeast as a whole. For only by putting their territories on a total war footing were the leaders of the CCP able to wage a successful revolutionary civil war. However, the requirements of war often conflicted with those of revolution and no permanent resolution of the resulting tension was possible during the civil war period itself. Since the war effort rested in large measure on a peasantry mobilized through revolution, it was not possible simply to suspend the revolution until military victory in the civil war was assured. Yet such byproducts of the revolution as disor-der, destruction of property, excessive consumption, and, above all, a decline in agricultural and industrial production could not be permitted to go unchecked because of their negative impact on the war effort. Party leaders as well as propagandists attempted to portray the two objectives of fighting the civil war and carrying out the revolution not only as compatible but as mutually reen-forcing, but this was true only in the abstract. During the course of the war, one can trace an increasing preoccupation on the part of the regional party high command with economic problems and policy issues. A history of the civil war in the Communist areas of 176 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CIVIL WAR the Northeast is in part a study of the problems of running a wartime economy under the enormously complicating condition of a highly disruptive revolution. This chapter examines the prob-lems of grain production, taxation, and urban grain supply as well as labor supply, labor mobilization, and urban resettlement schemes. A more detailed and complete examination of the eco-nomic history of the civil war in the Northeast is a task for an economic historian.

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  21st Century Economics: A Reference Handbook

  • Rhona C. Free(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  79 THE ECONOMICS OF CIVIL WAR MARTA REYNAL-QUEROL Pompeu Fabra University D ifferent social sciences have adopted different perspectives in the study of conflict. Most econo-mists have approached this issue using a theoretical perspective and the tools of game theory. During the past two decades, some economists have constructed theoretical mod-els to explain why individuals and groups become involved in a conflictive situation. For an outstanding review on the theoretical literature of the economics of conflict, I strongly recommend reading Garfinkel and Skaperdas (2007). However, the empirical approach to this topic is still in its early stages. Recently, some researchers have stressed the importance of economic factors in the study of civil war. This chapter will provide a brief overview of the most relevant empirical papers that address this topic from an empirical point of view. This is not an overview of the main empirical literature on civil war but a summary of the most important papers, as well as the evolution and state of the art on this topic, for undergraduate readers. Introduction to the Empirical Analysis of Civil Wars Civil wars have only recently been recognized as one of the main impediments for economic development. Their effects are not only related to the destruction of infra-structure or human life but also to the elimination of the rule of law, the generation of an uncertain environment for future foreign investment, and the destruction of insti-tutions. Empirical research has used different approaches to deal with the explanation of the basic elements of civil wars. Researchers have analyzed the onset of civil wars, the incidence of civil wars, and the duration of civil wars. These indicators are related but measure different concepts. The probability of onset is the conditional probability of being in state A (war) at time t given that it was in state Β (peace) at time t -1.

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