FREE ESSAY ON WHY NORHT WON CIVIL WAR

WHY NORHT WON CIVIL WAR

Why the North won the Civil War "You Are Bound to Fail."
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 American antebellum South, though steeped in pride and raised in military tradition,
was to be no match for the burgeoning superiority of the rapidly developing North in the
coming Civil War. The lack of emphasis on manufacturing and commercial interest, stemming
from the Southern desire to preserve their traditional agrarian society, surrendered to
the North their ability to function independently, much less to wage war. It was neither
Northern troops nor generals that won the Civil War, rather Northern guns and industry.
From the onset of war, the Union had obvious advantages. Quite simply, the North had
large amounts of just about everything that the South did not, boasting resources that
the Confederacy had even no means of attaining (See Appendices, Brinkley et al. 415).
Sheer manpower ratios were unbelievably one-sided, with only nine of the nation's 31
million inhabitants residing in the seceding states (Angle 7). The Union also had large
amounts of land available for growing food crops which served the dual purpose of
providing food for its hungry soldiers and money for 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 (Catton, The Coming Fury 38). Raw materials were almost entirely
concentrated in Northern mines and refining industries. Railroads and telegraph lines,
the veritable lifelines of any army, traced paths all across the Northern countryside but
left the South isolated, outdated, and starving (See Appendices). The final death knell
for a modern South developed in the form of economic colonialism. The Confederates were
all too willing to sell what little raw materials they possessed to Northern Industry for
any profit they could get. Little did they know, "King Cotton" could buy them time, but
not the war. The South had bartered something that perhaps it had not intended: its
independence (Catton, Reflections 143). 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 taking the king's ransom (Brinkley et al. 312).
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 bleed into several aspects of the American society. 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. Years earlier,
England's James Watt had developed the first successful steam engine. This invention,
coupled with the birth of James Hargreaves' spinning jenny, completely revolutionized the
British textile industry, and eventually made it the most profitable in the world
("Industrial Revolution"). The British government, parsimonious with its newfound
knowledge of machinery, attempted to protect the nation's manufacturing preeminence by
preventing the export of textile machinery and even the emigration of skilled mechanics.
Despite valiant attempts at deterrence, though, many immigrants managed to make their way
into the United States with the advanced knowledge of English technology, and they were
anxious to acquaint America with the new machines (Furnas 303). And acquaint the
Americans they did: more specifically, New England Americans. 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 emigrated to Pawtucket,
Rhode Island, and there, together with a Quaker merchant by the name of Moses Brown, he
built a spinning jenny from memory (Furnas 303). 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. Although slow to accept
change, 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 (he was
also, ironically, born and raised in New England) and therefore knew the problems of
harvesting cotton (Brinkley et al. 200). Until then, the arduous task of separating the
seeds from the cotton before sale had been done chiefly by slave labor and was,
consequently, very inefficient. Whitney developed a machine which would separate the seed
from the cotton swiftly and effectively, cutting the harvesting time by more than one
half ("Industrial Revolution"). This machine, which became known as the cotton gin, had
profound results on the South, producing the highest uptrend the industry had ever, and
would ever, see. In that decade alone cotton production figures increased by more than
2000 percent (Randall and Donald 36). Enormous amounts of business opportunities opened
up, including, perhaps most importantly, the expansion of the Southern plantations. This
was facilitated by the fact that a single worker could now do the same amount of work in
a few hours that a group of workers had once needed a whole day to do (Brinkley et al.
201). This allowed slaves to pick much more cotton per day and therefore led most
plantation owners to expand their land base. The monetary gains of the cash crop quickly
took precedence over the basic necessity of the food crop, which could be gotten
elsewhere. In 1791 cotton production amounted to only 4000 bales, but by 1860, production
levels had skyrocketed to just under five million bales (Randall and Donald 36). Cotton
was now bringing in nearly $200 million a year, which constituted almost two-thirds of
the total export trade (Brinkley et al. 329). "King Cotton" was born, and it soon became
a fundamental motive in Southern diplomacy. However, during this short burst of economic
prowess, the South failed to realize that it would never be sustained by "King Cotton"
alone. What it needed was the guiding hand of "Queen Industry." Eli Whitney soon 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 preshaped
mold, the various components needed to build a standard infantry rifle, and workers on an
assembly line who would construct it ("Industrial Revolution"). The North, eager to
experiment and willing to try anything that smacked of economic progress, decided to test
the waters of this inviting new method of manufacture. 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, and kept on booming. 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 (Catton, Glory Road 241). During the
mid-1800s, the Industrial Revolution dug its spurs deep into the side of the Northern
states. Luckily, immigration numbers were skyrocketing at this time, and the sudden
profusion of factory positions that needed to be filled was not a big problem (See
Appendices and Randall and Donald 1-2). 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 (Jones). Although this exploitation was
extremely cruel and unfair to the immigrants, Northern businessmen profited immensely
from it (Brinkley et al. 264) 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 (Paludan 105). 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. Southerners saw no need to venture into the
uncharted industrial territories when good money could be made with cotton. What they
failed to realize was that the cotton boom had done more for the North than it had done
for the South. Southerners could grow vast amounts of cotton, but due to the lack of
mills, they could do nothing with it. Consequently, the cotton was sold to the
Northerners who would use it in their factories to produce wools and linens, which were
in turn sold back to the South. This cycle stimulated industrial growth in the Union and
stagnated it in the Confederate states (Catton, Reflections 144). Southern plantation
owners erred in believing that the growing textile industries of England and France were
highly dependent on their cotton, and that, in the event of war, those countries would
come to their rescue ("Civil War," World Book). They believed that the North would then
be forced to acquiesce to the "perfect" Southern society. 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 (Brinkley et al.
415). The South, on the other hand, was fatally dependent on outside resources for its
war needs. Dixie was not only lagging far behind in the factories. It had also chosen to
disregard two other all-important areas in which the North had chosen to thrive:
transportation and communication. . . . the Railroad, the Locomotive, and the Telegraph-
-iron, steam, and lightning-these three mighty genii of civilization . . . will know no
lasting pause until the whole vast line of railway shall completed from the Atlantic to
the Pacific. (Furnas 357) During the antebellum years, the North American populace
especially had shown a great desire for an effective mode of transportation. For a long
time, canals had been used to transport people and goods across large amounts of land
which were accessible by water, but, with continuing growth and expansion, these canals
were becoming obsolete and a symbol of frustration to many Northerners. They simply
needed a way to transport freight and passengers across terrains where waterways did not
exist (Brinkley et al. 256-59). The first glimmer of hope came as America's first
primitive locomotive, powered by a vertical wood-fired boiler, puffed out of Charleston
hauling a cannon and gun crew firing salutes (Catton, Glory Road 237). Ironically enough,
this revolution had begun in the South, but there it would not prosper. The Railroading
industry quickly blossomed in the North, where it provided a much needed alternative to
canals, but could never quite get a foothold in the South. Much of this can be accredited
to the fact that Northern engineers were experienced in the field of ironworking and had
no problem constructing vast amounts of intricate rail lines, while Southerners, still
fledglings in the field, simply hobbled. This hobbling was quite unmistakable at the
outbreak of the Civil War. The Union, with its some 22,000 miles of track, was able to
transport weaponry, clothes, food, soldiers, and whatever supplies were needed to almost
any location in the entire theater. Overall, this greatly aided the Northern war effort
and worked to increase the morale of the troops. The South, on the other hand, could not
boast such logistical prowess. With its meager production of only four percent of the
nation"s locomotives and its scant 9,000 miles of track, the Confederacy stood in painful
awareness of its inferiority (Randall and Donald 8). Trackage figures alone, though, do
not tell the entire story of the weakness of the South"s railroad"s system. Another
obstacle arose in the problem of track gauge. The gauge, or width of track, frequently
varied from rail to rail in the South. Therefore, goods would often have to be taken off
one train and transferred to another before moving on to their final destination. Any
perishable goods had to be stored in warehouses if there were any delays, and this was
not an uncommon occurrence. There also existed a problem in the fact that there were
large gaps between many crucial parts of the South, which required suppliers to make
detours over long distances or to carry goods between rails by wagon (Catton, The Coming
Fury 434). As the war progressed, the Confederate railroad system steadily deteriorated,
and, by the end of the struggle, it had all but collapsed. Communication, or rather lack
thereof, was another impediment to Southern economical growth. The telegraph had burst
into American life in 1844, when Samuel Morse first transmitted, from the Supreme Court
chamber in the capitol to Alfred Vail in Baltimore, his famous words "What hath God
wrought!" (Brinkley et al. 314). The advent of this fresh form of communication greatly
facilitated the operation of the railroad lines in the North. Telegraph lines ran along
the tracks, connecting one station to the next and aiding the scheduling of the trains.
Moreover, the telegraph provided instant communication between distant cities, tying the
nation together like never before. Yet, ironically, it also buttressed the growing schism
between the two diverging societies (314). The South, unimpressed by this new modern
technology and not having the money to experiment, chose not to delve very deeply into
its development. Pity, they would learn to regret it. By 1860, the North had laid over 90
percent of the nation"s some 50,000 miles of telegraph wire. Morse"s telegraph had become
an ideal answer to the problems of long-distance communication, with its latest triumph
of land taking shape in the form of the Pacific telegraph, which ran from New York to San
Francisco and used 3,595 miles of wire (Brinkley et al. 315). The North, as with all
telegraph lines, embraced its relatively low cost and ease of construction. The Pacific
telegraph brought the agricultural Northwest together with the more industrious Northeast
and the blossoming West, forming an alliance which would prove to break the back of the
ever-weakening South (324-25). The Civil War was a trying time for both the Union and the
Confederacy alike, but the question of its outcome was obvious from the start. The North
was guaranteed a decisive victory over the ill-equipped South. Northerners, prepared to
endure the deprivation of war, were startled to find that they were experiencing an
enormous industrial boom even after the first year of war. Indeed, the only Northern
industry that suffered from the war was the carrying trade (Catton, Reflections 144). To
the South, however, the war was a draining and debilitating leech, sucking the land dry
of any semblance of economical formidability. No financial staple was left untouched; all
were subject to diminishment and exhaustion. This agrarian South, with its traditional
values and beliefs, decided not to cultivate two crops which would prove quite crucial in
the outcome of the Civil War. Those crops were industry and progress, and without them
the South was doomed to defeat. A wise man he was, that Union General William Tecumseh
Sherman. A wise man indeed. 
Appendices (Note: appendices taken from Brinkley et al. 315-17, 415) 
Works Cited 
Angle, Paul M. A Pictorial History of the Civil War Years. Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, 1967.
Brinkley, Alan, et al. American History: A Survey. New York: McGraw, 1991. 
Catton, Bruce. The Army of the Potomac: Glory Road. Garden City, New York: Doubleday,
1952. 
---. The Coming Fury. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1961. Vol 2 of The Centennial
History of the Civil War. 3 vols. n.d. 
---. Reflections on the Civil War. Ed. John Leekley. 1st ed. Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, 1981. 
Civil War. Encyclopedia Americana. 1987 ed. Civil War. World Book Encyclopedia. 1981 ed.

Cotton. World Book Encyclopedia. 1981 ed. 
Furnas, J.C.. The Americans: A Social History of the United States 1587-1914. New York:
Putnam, 1969.
Jones, Donald C. Telephone Interview. 28 Feb. 1993. 
Industrial Revolution. World Book Encyclopedia. 1981 ed. 
Paludan, Philip Shaw. A Peoples Contest. New York: Harper, 1988. 
Randall, J.G., and David Herbert Donald. The Civil War and Reconstruction. Lexington,
Massachusetts: Heath, 1969.