Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Not-Quite-Science Forum Deaths from science versus religion

The war may also have exerted a negative influence on Northern industry in more generalized ways. The state of the wartime economy, which inspired the issuance of paper currency throughout the Union, produced a steady inflation, a general rise in commodity prices, and a decrease in purchasing power. It also gave rise to trade unions, work strikes, and other conditions considered injurious to industrial growth. By discouraging immigration, the war reduced a source of cheap labor. The conflict also helped unsettle business conditions by drawing off capital and labor from North and South alike, a trend whose impact on the economy lasted well into the 1870s. Predictions early in the war of a quick Union victory hindered industrial growth by making entrepreneurs wary of over expanding. As late as Aug. 1 862, the New York Tribune complained about "our paralyzed industry."

But wartime statistics, positive or negative, fail to tell the full story of the Civil Wars impact on Northern industrialism. Perhaps the primary economic effect of this period of upheaval was to prepare the U.S. for an intense industrialization in the decades following 1865. The conflict helped do away with industry-stifling government regulation; nationalized the regional market system of antebellum years; created a generation of war-weary young men motivated by the acquisitive ethic; reduced the energy-sapping political strife that had adversely affected industrialism prior to 1861; and brought to long-term power a political party that favored business growth. Thus, regardless of the immediacy of its effects, the war contributed much to the long-term economic climate that made a reunited America the industrial giant of the 20th century.