Chapter XXII

The North after the Civil War

While there was desolation in the South, there was prosperity in the North. During the war, new laws were passed that helped the capitalist system. Three new laws greatly increased the tariff. At the end of the war, tariffs were two and a half times higher. On every dollar's worth of goods that came into the United States from another country, there was a tariff of forty-eight cents. Imported goods were so expensive that people began to buy goods made in America. Therefore, American factories had very much work, and new, better factories were built. Many people who had lived on farms came to the cities to work. The Northern cities grew rapidly.

In 1863, Congress passed the National Bank Act. This was a law that established a system in which the central government gave charters to banks. Before the war, each state gave charters to its banks, and each state had a different system of laws supervising banks. The national banks were much stronger than the state banks.

During the war, the government bought many things from the new factories. The government bought shoes and clothing for the soldiers. The government bought weapons and military supplies. A lot of iron was used in making weapons. New iron mills were built to make the iron. They needed a lot of coal to make the iron; consequently, many new coal mines were opened in Pennsylvania. The rapid growth of industry continued after the war.

Before the war, most people had baked their own bread. During and after the war, many bakeries opened. People began going to bakeries to buy bread.

Also, during the war, Congress voted to give money to some railroads so that a railroad could be built that ran from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. This railroad was built after the war. Work on the railroad began at both ends, both in the East and in California. Building a railroad is hard work. In the East, men from Ireland did the work. The Irish came to America as family units. The women and children came with the men. In the west, workers from China built the railroads. At that time, the Chinese did not plan to stay in the United States. They did not bring women and children. The Chinese who came were poor men that had no land in China. They came to earn money. The Chinese came to work for seven years. They lived cheaply. They saved their money and after seven years, they exchanged it for gold at a bank. They took the gold back to China and bought farmland in China. By working for seven years, most Chinese could earn enough gold to buy the farmland in China that they wanted. The railroad was completed in 1869 when the two groups of workers met in Utah.

After the war, many new railroads were built in the East. By 1893, 320,000 kilometers of railroad tracks had been laid. That is enough to circle the earth at the equator eight times.

Before the war, steel had been very expensive. Just before the Civil War, a new process for making steel was discovered. In this process, air was blown through the molten iron to burn out the impurities. But this process was not put into use until after the war. The new process made steel much cheaper. Steel became cheap enough so that rails for railroads could be made of steel. Before that, the rails had been made of iron. Iron is poor material for rails because it often cracks and has to be replaced. Also, engines and boxcars could be made of steel. They began to produce much larger quantities of steel. Steel mills were built in the same places where there had been iron mills in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. They began to bring iron ore on ships from Northern Michigan. In the 1890's, the Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota was opened up. This was one of the largest deposits of iron ore on earth, and for the next one hundred years, most of the iron ore in America came from the Mesabi Range. The ore could easily be transported in ships on the Great Lakes to cities such as Lorain, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana that were not far from coal fields. Before the war, most iron mills were small, employing twelve to twenty workers. It was not long before huge steel mills employing thousands of workers were built.

Between the end of the war and 1900, the quality of American goods improved enormously. By 1900, American goods were of the same quality as British goods. The volume of production increased rapidly. For example, in 1860, twenty million tons of coal were mined. By 1900, the annual output of coal was 270 million tons. In 1860, America was far behind England in the quantity of goods produced. By 1900, America was far ahead of England.

During the Civil War, everything changed. America was not the same country it had been before the war.