The American Civil War

The impact of industrialization upon the Civil War, it has been argued, was far more crucial on the logistic and strategic levels than in weapons deployed on the field of battle. Put in brief, the Civil War has been widely understood as a war between an industrial power--the North--and a largely pre-industrial society, that of the South. The contrast in their industrial capabilities showed most directly in the scale and conditions of their respective railroad networks.

We are interested in two aspects of this familiar analysis. First, was it true? Second, and more subtly, to what degree were contemporaries aware of it? To the first point we must return at the end of this essay; we will only pause here to note that the Union's industrial superiority has become, along with the Confederacy's structural internal weaknesses, the standard explanation for the outcome of the war. The second question is an interesting and important one in its own right; moreover, it bears upon the first. We have become accustomed to

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level of all, industrial capacity determined the degree to which manpower could be released for military service. At the beginning of the Civil War, the North was already a relatively urban society, in which a minority of the population (primarily the farmers of the West) were able to provide the necessities of life to the rest. A great deal of manpower could therefore be mobilized, year-round, without cutting critically into the North's ability to survive. In contrast, the South was an agrarian society. It is true that much of the South's prewar agriculture was cash-cropping, not subsistance, but this did not alter the fundamental issue. Once the South's cash-crop market was denied it, it was thrown back upon its own resources to feed itself, and a substantial fraction of the healthy male population was required, at least at some times of the year, to be available to work the land. Desertions, particularly around harvest and planting times, were a perennial problem for the South. Above all, the industrial capacity of the North allowed the Union to put a much larger army in the field, ultimately twice the size of the Confederate army, approximately 600,000 as against 300,000. Finally, in speaking of the South's wartim
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Approximate Word count = 3344
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)