The Civil War caught Americans in various stages of a profound economic transformation. Pockets of the nation, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, had begun to industrialize and to lay the foundations for centralized, national market structures. In other regions, rural, local patterns of economic life still prevailed. And of course in the South, an economy built around slave labor and the export of agricultural commodities had taken deep root. Still, above the Mason-Dixon Line the pace of change began accelerating rapidly over the 1850s, driven above all by the railroads, which opened possibilities of enterprise on an unprecedented scale. The war itself checked some aspects of this change temporarily; others it intensified, especially as it destroyed Southern slavery and the economy it had supported. By 1877 it was becoming clear that the entire nation was being drawn into a new, recognizably modern economic system of.....
