The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 1 (of 2): A Narrative and Critical HistoryEggleston, George Cary
History
The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 1 (of 2): A Narrative and Critical History
Eggleston, George Cary
United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865
Thus the old staple industry has doubled and trebled its productiveness
under the influence of the new industrial conditions created by the war
and by the social and economic revolution which the war wrought.
But this is a small part of the matter. Greatly as the yield of cotton
has been multiplied under the new conditions, cotton has ceased to be
king even in the land over which it once exercised undisputed sway.
Other and humbler agricultural products--never thought of in the old
planting days as money crops--have come, in their value to rival cotton
itself as a source of enrichment to Southern agriculture.
More important still, the new conditions that were created in the
South as a result of the war have led to the development there of
resources of inestimable value which were wholly neglected under the
old system. The little, local, loitering railroad lines of the older
time have been combined and extended and upbuilt into great arteries
of travel and traffic. Prairies that were scratched over for the sake
of meager cotton crops of half a bale to the acre have been delved
under for coal and iron. Industrial cities of importance have arisen
where cabins remotely stood. Blast furnaces have replaced the breezes
that once alone disturbed the broom-straw grass. Iron foundries, steel
mills, machine shops, coke ovens, rolling mills and the like employ men
by tens of thousands where before only a few hundreds compelled the
reluctant soil to yield them a precarious living. The still unsubdued
pine lands are dotted all over with cotton mills which give work and
wages to a multitude and the magnitude of their dividends strongly
tempts capital to a like investment elsewhere in the country that was
once abundantly content to produce a raw material and to buy back the
finished products of it from factories hundreds or thousands of miles
away.
The harbors of the South, once mere ports of call or refuge for a
shipping that belonged elsewhere, have become the seats of great
shipbuilding and ship-owning enterprises the productiveness of which is
loosely reckoned by imperfectly counted millions.
Still again, under the new conditions resulting from the war, great
industries have sprung up in the South which find both their profit
and their reason for being in the utilization of things that were sheer
waste under the old system. The manufacture of cotton seed oil and its
rich by-products is the best illustrative example of this. It employs
thousands of well paid workmen and millions of well remunerated capital
in converting into very valuable products the cotton seed that was once
utilized only as a fertilizer for half-exhausted soils.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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