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Learn how the North's industrial advantage and the South's agricultural dependence shaped the war economy and outcome. Compare the production, transportation, and labor of factories, railroads, and farms in both regions.
- Antebellum Industry
- Powder and Munitions
- Quartermasters and Profiteers
- An End and A Beginning
In the generation preceding the war, enterprising Georgians experimented with a variety of industries in an effort to lessen the state’s dependence on cotton cultivation. Cotton farming dominated Georgia’s antebellum economy, but by the mid-1830s declining prices fueled by overproduction led some to seek alternatives to agriculture’s boom-and-bust ...
In the spring of 1861 men throughout the Confederacy were ready to fight; Southern industry, though, was not ready to supply them. Gunpowder was especially scarce, and the Confederate states held stockpiles barely adequate to outfit their recently raised armies. With no domestic suppliers available, foreign sources offered, at best, only a temporar...
Armaments were essential to waging effective war, but the Confederacy’s soldiers also needed to be clothed and shod. Georgia’s textile mills took up the task of producing cloth for uniforms, blankets, tents, and other uses, while the state’s 125 boot and shoe manufacturers turned out their wares as quickly as possible to keep the Confederate armies...
Still, the lack of resources and manpower was far from the most destructive force facing Georgia industry; that honor goes to the army commanded by Union general William T. Sherman. Sherman’s Atlanta campaign and later march to the seabrought total war to Georgia and with it the destruction of much of the state’s industrial capacity. The railroads ...
Aug 30, 2021 · Fact #1: Before the Civil War, Southern industrialists built a large and varied manufacturing economy. As one historian has put it, the states that would make up the Confederacy “ranked among the industrial nations of the world.”
The Confederate Powderworks (a.k.a. the Augusta Powderworks) was a gunpowder factory during the American Civil War, the only permanent structures completed by the Confederate States of America.
Oct 27, 2021 · The Confederacy produced nearly all of the nation's rice which amounted to 225 million bushels. The Confederacy led tobacco production with 225 million pounds compared to 110 million pounds produced in the Border States and 50 million pounds produced in the Union.
Discover how the North's factories and mills supplied the Union Army with munitions and military supplies during the American Civil War, and the conditions of the workers who made it possible.
In 1941 and 1942, American machine tool shops provided about three hundred thousand machines to the war effort. Incredibly, about thirty thousand of those were made in Springfield. Factories ran through the night to meet their production quotas.
