The Business of Civil War
The Business of Civil War

Author: Mark R. Wilson

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2006-07-15

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0801888832

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This wide-ranging, original account of the politics and economics of the giant military supply project in the North reconstructs an important but little-known part of Civil War history. Drawing on new and extensive research in army and business archives, Mark R. Wilson offers a fresh view of the wartime North and the ways in which its economy worked when the Lincoln administration, with unprecedented military effort, moved to suppress the rebellion. This task of equipping and sustaining Union forces fell to career army procurement officers. Largely free from political partisanship or any formal free-market ideology, they created a mixed military economy with a complex contracting system that they pieced together to meet the experience of civil war. Wilson argues that the North owed its victory to these professional military men and their finely tuned relationships with contractors, public officials, and war workers. Wilson also examines the obstacles military bureaucrats faced, many of which illuminated basic problems of modern political economy: the balance between efficiency and equity, the promotion of competition, and the protection of workers' welfare. The struggle over these problems determined the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars; it also redirected American political and economic development by forcing citizens to grapple with difficult questions about the proper relationships among government, business, and labor. Students of the American Civil War will welcome this fresh study of military-industrial production and procurement on the home front—long an obscure topic.

Modernizing a Slave Economy
Modernizing a Slave Economy

Author: John Majewski

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2011-04-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0807882372

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What would separate Union and Confederate countries look like if the South had won the Civil War? In fact, this was something that southern secessionists actively debated. Imagining themselves as nation builders, they understood the importance of a plan for the economic structure of the Confederacy. The traditional view assumes that Confederate slave-based agrarianism went hand in hand with a natural hostility toward industry and commerce. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, John Majewski's analysis finds that secessionists strongly believed in industrial development and state-led modernization. They blamed the South's lack of development on Union policies of discriminatory taxes on southern commerce and unfair subsidies for northern industry. Majewski argues that Confederates' opposition to a strong central government was politically tied to their struggle against northern legislative dominance. Once the Confederacy was formed, those who had advocated states' rights in the national legislature in order to defend against northern political dominance quickly came to support centralized power and a strong executive for war making and nation building.

Bonds of War
Bonds of War

Author: David K. Thomson

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2022-02-16

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1469666626

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How does one package and sell confidence in the stability of a nation riven by civil strife? This was the question that loomed before the Philadelphia financial house of Jay Cooke & Company,&8239;entrusted&8239;by the US government with an unprecedented sale of bonds to finance the Union war effort in the early days of the American Civil War.&8239;How the government and its agents marketed these bonds revealed a version of the war the public was willing to buy and buy into, based not just in the full faith and credit of the United States but also in the success of its armies and its long-term vision for open markets. From Maine to California, and in foreign halls of power and economic influence,&8239;thousands of agents were deployed to&8239;sell&8239;a clear message: Union victory was unleashing the American economy itself. This fascinating work of&8239;financial and political history&8239;during&8239;the Civil War&8239;era&8239;shows&8239;how the marketing and sale of bonds crossed the Atlantic to Europe and beyond, helping ensure foreign countries' vested interest in the Union's success. Indeed, David K. Thomson demonstrates how Europe, and ultimately all corners of the globe, grew deeply interdependent on American finance during, and in the immediate aftermath of, the American Civil War.&8239;

American Economic Growth and Standards of Living before the Civil War
American Economic Growth and Standards of Living before the Civil War

Author: Robert E. Gallman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 0226279472

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This benchmark volume addresses the debate over the effects of early industrialization on standards of living during the decades before the Civil War. Its contributors demonstrate that the aggregate antebellum economy was growing faster than any other large economy had grown before. Despite the dramatic economic growth and rise in income levels, questions remain as to the general quality of life during this era. Was the improvement in income widely shared? How did economic growth affect the nature of work? Did higher levels of income lead to improved health and longevity? The authors address these questions by analyzing new estimates of labor force participation, real wages, and productivity, as well as of the distribution of income, height, and nutrition.

Clash of Extremes
Clash of Extremes

Author: Marc Egnal

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2010-01-05

Total Pages: 574

ISBN-13: 1429943890

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Clash of Extremes takes on the reigning orthodoxy that the American Civil War was waged over high moral principles. Marc Egnal contends that economics, more than any other factor, moved the country to war in 1861. Drawing on a wealth of primary and secondary sources, Egnal shows that between 1820 and 1850, patterns of trade and production drew the North and South together and allowed sectional leaders to broker a series of compromises. After midcentury, however, all that changed as the rise of the Great Lakes economy reoriented Northern trade along east-west lines. Meanwhile, in the South, soil exhaustion, concerns about the country's westward expansion, and growing ties between the Upper South and the free states led many cotton planters to contemplate secession. The war that ensued was truly a "clash of extremes." Sweeping from the 1820s through Reconstruction and filled with colorful portraits of leading individuals, Clash of Extremes emphasizes economics while giving careful consideration to social conflicts, ideology, and the rise of the antislavery movement. The result is a bold reinterpretation that will challenge the way we think about the Civil War.

The Causes of the Civil War
The Causes of the Civil War

Author: Paul Calore

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-10-16

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0786482346

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While South Carolina's preemptive strike on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's subsequent call to arms started the Civil War, South Carolina's secession and Lincoln's military actions were simply the last in a chain of events stretching as far back as the early 1750s. Increasing moral conflicts and political debates over slavery--exacerbated by the inequities inherent between an established agricultural society and a growing industrial one--led to a fierce sectionalism which manifested itself through cultural, economic, political and territorial disputes. This historical study reduces sectionalism to its most fundamental form, examining the underlying source of this antagonistic climate. From protective tariffs to the expansionist agenda, it illustrates the ways in which the foremost issues of the time influenced relations between the North and the South.

Trading with the Enemy
Trading with the Enemy

Author: Philip Leigh

Publisher:

Published: 2022-05-30

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9781594163876

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The Impact of Illicit Trade Between the North and South During the Civil War While Confederate blockade runners famously carried the seaborne trade for the South during the American Civil War, the amount of Southern cotton exported to Europe was only half of that shipped illicitly to the North. Most went to New England textile mills where business "was better than ever," according to textile mogul Amos Lawrence. Rhode Island senator William Sprague, a mill owner and son-in-law to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, was a member of a partnership supplying weapons to the Confederacy in exchange for cotton. The trade in contraband was not confined to New England. Union General William T. Sherman claimed Confederates were supplied with weapons from Cincinnati, while General Ulysses S. Grant captured Rebel cavalry armed with carbines purchased in Union-occupied Memphis. During the last months of the war, supplies entering the Union-controlled port of Norfolk, Virginia, were one of the principal factors enabling Robert E. Lee's Confederate army to avoid starvation. Indeed, many of the supplies that passed through the Union blockade into the Confederacy originated in Northern states, instead of Europe as is commonly supposed. Merchants were not the only ones who profited; Union officers General Benjamin Butler and Admiral David Dixon Porter benefited from this black market. President Lincoln admitted that numerous military leaders and public officials were involved, but refused to stop the trade. In Trading with the Enemy: The Covert Economy During the American Civil War, New York Times Disunion contributor Philip Leigh recounts the little-known story of clandestine commerce between the North and South. Cotton was so important to the Northern economy that Yankees began growing it on the captured Sea Islands of South Carolina. Soon the neutral port of Matamoras, Mexico, became a major trading center, where nearly all the munitions shipped to the port--much of it from Northern armories--went to the Confederacy. After the fall of New Orleans and Vicksburg, a frenzy of contraband-for-cotton swept across the vast trans-Mississippi Confederacy, with Northerners sometimes buying the cotton directly from the Confederate government. A fascinating study, Trading with the Enemy adds another layer to our understanding of the Civil War.

Confederate Industry
Confederate Industry

Author: Harold S. Wilson

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2014-05-27

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 1604730722

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By 1860 the South ranked high among the developed countries of the world in per capita income and life expectancy and in the number of railroad miles, telegraph lines, and institutions of higher learning. Only the major European powers and the North had more cotton and woolen spindles. This book examines the Confederate military's program to govern this prosperous industrial base by a quartermaster system. By commandeering more than half the South's produced goods for the military, the quartermaster general, in a drift toward socialism, appropriated hundreds of mills and controlled the flow of southern factory commodities. The most controversial of the quartermasters general was Colonel Abraham Charles Myers. His iron hand set the controls of southern manufacturing throughout the war. His capable successor, Brigadier General Alexander R. Lawton, conducted the first census of Confederate resources, established the plan of production and distribution, and organized the Bureau of Foreign Supplies in a strategy for importing parts, machinery, goods, and military uniforms. While the Confederacy mobilized its mills for military purposes, the Union systematically planned their destruction. The Union blockade ended the effectiveness of importing goods, and under the Union army's General Order 100 Confederate industry was crushed. The great antebellum manufacturing boom was over. Scarcity and impoverishment in the postbellum South brought manufacturers to the forefront of southern political and ideological leadership. Allied for the cause of southern development were former Confederate generals, newspaper editors, educators, and President Andrew Johnson himself, an investor in a southern cotton mill. Against this postwar mania to rebuild, this book tests old assumptions about southern industrial re-emergence. It discloses, even before the beginnings of Radical Reconstruction, that plans for a New South with an urban, industrialized society had been established on the old foundations and on an ideology asserting that only science, technology, and engineering could restore the region. Within this philosophical mold, Henry Grady, one of the New South's great reformers, led the way for southern manufacturing. By the beginning of the First World War half the nation's spindles lay within the former Confed-eracy, home of a new boom in manufacturing and the land of America's staple crop, cotton. Harold S. Wilson is an associate professor of history at Old Dominion University. He is the author of McClure's Magazine and the Muckrakers and of articles published in African American Studies, The Historian, the Journal of Confederate History, and Alabama Review. Learn more about the author at http: //members.cox.net/haroldwilson/

The Political Economy of Civil War and UN Peace Operations
The Political Economy of Civil War and UN Peace Operations

Author: Mats Berdal

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-03-31

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 100084692X

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This book examines the operational and political challenges facing UN peace operations deployed in countries where civil war and protracted violence have given rise to the complex and distinctive political economies of conflict. The volume explores the nature and impact of such political economies – informal systems of power and influence formed by the interaction of local, national, and region-wide war economies with the political agendas of conflict actors – on the course of UN peace operations. It focuses in detail on the UN’s long-running peace operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Mali, and Somalia. The book is centrally concerned with the interaction of UN missions with the power structures and local conflict dynamics that shape individual mission settings, and the challenges these pose for mediation, protection of civilians, and other tasks. It also offers a critical assessment of the various ways in which the UN ‘system’, from its headquarters in New York to the field, has confronted the policy challenges posed by political economies of conflict-affected states, societies, and regions. It advances a pragmatic set of policy recommendations aimed at improving the UN’s ability to confront predatory and exploitative war economies. At the same time, the volume makes it clear that political and institutional obstacles to more effective UN action are certain to remain profound and are unlikely ever to be fully overcome let alone eradicated. Despite making some progress since the 1990s to better understand the political economy of civil wars, the UN has struggled with how to tackle informal networks of power and their consequences for efforts to end wars. The book will be of special interest to students of war and conflict studies, statebuilding, political economy of conflict, UN interventionism and peacebuilding, and IR/Security in general.