The four years of the Civil War carried the United States over a period of social and economic transition and left it well started on the new course. They enlarged and expanded the activities of government, hastening that day when there should exist a public conviction that government is a matter of technical expertness and must be run in a scientific manner for the common good. They raised the problems of taxation and currency to a new importance, and impressed their significance upon the men who directed the industries of the country. In their prosperity they made it possible to save the Union; and at their close a Union party, uncertain of its strength and its personnel, faced the problems of a united country which included an industrial North, a desolated South, and a vanishing frontier. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE For further references upon the Civil War period, consult William E. Dodd, _Expansion and Conflict_ (in this series), and F.L. Paxson, _The Civil War_ (1911). The best and most exhaustive narrative is J.F. Rhodes, _History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877_ (7 vols., 1892-1906), and this may be supplemented to advantage by E.D. Fite, _Social and industrial Conditions in the North during the Civil War_ (1910). There is a convenient account of the election of 1864, with platforms and tables of votes, in E. Stanwood, _A History of the Presidency_ (1898) and there are many valuable documents in E. McPherson's annual _Political Manual_. The biographies of W.H. Seward, by F. Bancroft, and Jay Cooke, by E.P. Oberholtzer, are among the best of the period. There are no better summaries of finances than D.R. Dewey's _Financial History of the United States_ (1903, etc.); W.C. Mitchell's _History of the Greenbacks_ (1903); and J.A. Woodburn's _Thaddeus Stevens_ (1913). In the _Annual Cyclopaedia_ (published by D. Appleton & Co., 1861-1902) are useful and accurate accounts of current affairs. E.L. Godkin began to publish the _Nation_ in New York in the summer of 1865, and H.V. Poore issued the first volume of his annual _Manual of the Railroads of the United States_, in 1868. CHAPTER II THE WEST AND THE GREENBACKS The activity of the North and the East between 1861 and 1865 was imitated and magnified among the youthful communities that made up the western border and ranged in age from a few weeks to thirty years. These had been mostly agricultural in 1857. Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Kansas had been the frontier before the Civil War. In place of these, now grown to be populous and more or less sedate, a new group appeared farther west, within what had been believed to be the "American Desert." By 1868 Congress completed the subdivision of the last lands between the Missouri River and the Pacific, since which date only one new political division has appeared in the United States.