Synopsis_of_Civil_War

Mike Brahm H-109 Microtheme Paper The North was able to defeat the South in the Civil war due to their economic and industrial superiority and their sheer population difference over the South. “Union officer William Tecumseh Sherman to a Southern friend: In all history, no nation of mere agriculturists ever made successful war against a nation of mechanics. . . . You are bound to fail.” (Catton, Glory Road 241) The stronger more advanced government always succeeded. It happened in other countries as well. Japan had a civil uprising as did Spain in Latin America (The World, A Brief History). From the onset of war, the Union had obvious advantages. The North had large amounts of just about everything that the South did not. Sheer manpower ratios were unbelievably one-sided, with only nine of the nation's 31 million inhabitants residing in the seceding states (Fargher, Out of Many, vol 1). The North also had large amounts of land available for growing food crops which served the purposes of providing food for its hungry soldiers and funded its ever-growing industries. The South, on the other hand, devoted most of what arable land it had exclusively to its main cash crop: cotton (Faragher, Out of Many, vol 1). Raw materials were almost entirely concentrated in Northern mines and refining industries. Railroads and telegraph lines, the veins of any army, traced paths all across the Northern countryside but left the South isolated, outdated, and starving. The Confederates were all too willing to sell what little raw materials they possessed to Northern Industry for any profit they could get. The South had bartered something that perhaps it had not intended: its independence (Faragher, Out of Many, vol 1). The North's ever-growing industry was an important supplement to its economical dominance of the South. Between the years of 1840 and 1860, American industry saw sharp and steady growth. In 1840 the total value of goods manufactured in the United States stood at $483 million, increasing over fourfold by 1860 to just under $2 billion, with the North dominating the South (Faragher, Out of Many, vol1). The underlying reason behind this dramatic expansion can be traced directly to the American Industrial Revolution. Beginning in the early 1800s, traces of the industrial revolution in England began to pop up. One of the first industries to see quick development was the textile industry, but, thanks to the British government, this development almost never came to pass. It was people like Samuel Slater who can be credited with beginning the revolution of the textile industry in America. A skilled mechanic in England, Slater spent long hours studying the schematics for the spinning jenny until finally he no longer needed them. He immigrated to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and there, together with a Quaker merchant by the name of Moses Brown, he built a spinning jenny from memory (Weisner, American Portraits). This meager mill would later become known as the first modern factory in America. It would also become known as the point at which the North began its economic domination of the Confederacy. The South was not entirely unaffected by the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Another inventor by the name of Eli Whitney set out in 1793 to revolutionize the Southern cotton industry. Whitney was working as a tutor for a plantation owner in Georgia and therefore knew the problems of harvesting cotton. Eli Whitney came to realize that the South would not readily accept change, and decided to take his inventive mind back up to the North, where it could be put to good use. He found his niche in the small arms business. Previously, during two long years of quasi-war with France, Americans had been vexed by the lack of rapidity with which sufficient armaments could be produced. Whitney came to the rescue with the invention of interchangeable parts. His vision of the perfect factory included machines which would produce, from a mold, the various components needed to build a standard infantry rifle, and workers on an assembly line who would construct it. The North, eager to experiment and willing to try anything that smacked of economic progress, decided to test the waters. It did not take the resourceful Northerners very long to actualize Eli Whitney's dream and make mass production a reality. The small arms industry boomed. By the onset of the Civil War, the confederate states were dolefully noting the fact that there were thirty-eight Union arms factories capable of producing a total of 5,000 infantry rifles per day, compared with their own paltry capacity of 100 (Faragher, Out of Many, vol1). During the mid-1800s, the Industrial Revolution dug its spurs deep into the side of the Northern states. The immigration numbers were skyrocketing at this time, and the sudden profusion of factory positions that needed to be filled was not a big problem. The immigrants, who were escaping anything from the Irish Potato Famine to British oppression, were willing to work for almost anything and withstand inhuman factory conditions. Although this exploitation was extremely cruel and unfair to the immigrants, Northern businessmen profited immensely from it (Faragher, Out of Many, vol 2) By the beginning of war in 1860, the Union, from an economical standpoint, stood like a towering giant over the stagnant Southern agrarian society. Of the over 128,000 industrial firms in the nation at this time, the Confederacy held only 18,026. New England alone topped the figure with over 19,000, and so did Pennsylvania 21,000 and New York with 23,000 (Faragher, Out of Many, vol 1). The total value of goods manufactured in the state of New York alone was over four times that of the entire Confederacy. The Northern states produced 96 percent of the locomotives in the country, and, as for firearms, more of them were made in one Connecticut County than in all the Southern factories combined ("Civil War," Encyclopedia Americana). The Confederacy had made one fatal mistake: believing that its thriving cotton industry alone would be enough to sustain itself throughout the war. They were wrong. During the war years, the economical superiority of the Union, which had been so eminent before the war, was cemented. The Civil War gave an even bigger boost to the already growing factories in the North. The troops needed arms and warm clothes on a constant basis, and Northern Industry was glad to provide them. By 1862, the Union could boast of its capacity to manufacture almost all of its own war materials using its own resources (Faragher, Out of Many, vol1). The South, on the other hand, was fatally dependent on outside resources for its war needs. The Civil War was a trying time for both the North and the South, but the question of its outcome was obvious from the start. The North was guaranteed a decisive victory over the ill-equipped South. Bibliography * Faragher, Buhle, Czitrom, Armitage. Out of Many Vol 1. Prentice Hall. 2009 * Faragher, Buhle, Czitrom, Armitage. Out of Many Vol 2. Prentice Hall. 2009 * Fernandez-Armesto. The World: A Brief History, Combined Volume. Pearson 2008 * Weisner, Hartford. Biographies in United States History. McGraw Hill 2008 * Catton. Glory Road. Double Day 1962