Women workers in northern manufacturing.

In addition to the manpower of free blacks and liberated slaves that joined the US Army or served in the US navy, or worked as pioneers for Sherman's army, there was also a vast labor force available to maintain railroads, unload supplies, grow and maintain the farms.
 
Yes, another neglected topic and not all were employed in manufacturing as a result of the war. Those factories were exploiting, Dickensian nightmares, children worked there, too. Wish I could say the situation didn't survive Victoria's area, child labor laws weren't passed until the 1930's.
 
1578764985683.png


President Lincoln had commissioner Kennedy publish this table in preliminary report on the census in May of 1862. It was his preliminary warning. The static position of the two belligerents is not that different. But the dynamic process at work in the Midwest was unstoppable.
Ohio and Illinois had already moved ahead of Virginia, and Indiana was right behind.
By May of 1862, the US had control of all or some of the top 10 states in priority in terms of population.
There was also a lengthy study of immigration in the preliminary report.
 
By May of 1864, the census commission published this table:
1578765309303.png


Which demonstrated the enormous mismatch in working age men that existed between the two belligerents.
Pages xxxviii and xxxix https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1860/population/1860a-02.pdf?# illustrated one of the reasons for the discrepancy, internal migration was away from slavery towards the free soil regions of the Midwest and west.
 
There was definite increase of population in all the agri- cultural States, as shown by the census and by the school statistics. Illinois, by the United States census in 1860, contained 1,711,915 people, in 1865, by the State census, 2,141,510,-a gain of 430,000.2 The number of scholars of school age rose from 472,000 to 580,000, the number of teachers increased by 2,500. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1883656.pdf See pages 272 and 273. By 1865 it was becoming clear that the Civil War had not changed the course of growth in Illinois or Chicago, except to possibly increase the rate of growth.
 
By 1866 the results of the 1860 census were revisited and republished with respect to manufacturing output:
1578765937806.png


As one considers the political and military significance of this list, decisions such as routing the possible TCRR from Omaha, supported to St. Louis, to San Francisco via Sacramento, begin to make sense. Also the relocation of the Confederate capital to the Richmond/Petersburg area was crucial to the temporary survival of the Confederacy.
 
In what became the final population statistics of the period, summarized in this Technical Paper: https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/tab13.html, Illinois and Missouri had both grown nearly 50% in terms of population during the Civil War decade. The Midwest had increased its population by 3.9M during the Civil War decade. Therefore the final statistics confirmed the brief of Lincoln and Kennedy, the Civil War may cause a lot of disruption, but nothing will change the course of settlement and railroad expansion in the Midwest and Great Plains.
 
Back
Top