Their goods crisscrossed the country on the North’s growing railroad network. Along with the textile mills, shoe factories, and iron foundries, the firms that produced McCormick’s wheat harvesters and Colt’s firearms displayed the technical advances of northern manufacturers. Farther west, mining and agriculture were the mainstays of life. The Midwest produced seas of grain that fed the country, with enough left over for export to Europe. By 1860, northerners could buy clothing made in a New England factory, or light their homes with kerosene oil from Pennsylvania. It was also home to a robust market economy. In contrast to the slave South, northerners praised their region as a land of free labor, populated by farmers, merchants, and wage laborers. 36 Yet this wealth obscured the gains in infrastructure, industrial production, and financial markets that occurred north of the Mason-Dixon Line, a fact that the war would unmask for all to see. To their masters, slaves constituted their most valuable assets, worth roughly $3 billion. On the eve of war, the American South enjoyed more per capita wealth than any other slave economy in the New World. Cotton fed the textile mills of America and Europe and brought great wealth to the region. Southern prosperity relied on over four million African American slaves to grow cotton, along with a number of other staple crops across the region. ![]() In 18, wealthy southern planters were flush after producing record cotton crops. The Civil War destroyed and then transformed the American economy.
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