The Industrial Revolution and the American Civil War

The Industrial Revolution was one of the largest, most impactful revolutions in our entire history. It shook up entire agricultural economies, changed the world of labor, and re-designed social classes. The urban centers increased their pull on the countryside.

The modern-day demographic maps of population-dense urban centers, spreading out into the suburbs and then the rural areas, were set. More than that, it increased speed of cloth production, of food production, and incentivized new inventions and innovations. Both the European and the American Industrial Revolutions had an impact on the American Civil War.

The Industrial Revolution in Europe

The Industrial Revolution in Europe took place from 1760 to 1850, just in time for the American Civil War (1861-1864). The changes took place first in the textile industry. Textile businesses were previously run by ‘outsourcing’ to ‘work-from-home’ spinners and weavers.

The invention of the ‘flying shuttle,’ the ‘roller spinner,’ and the ‘jenny,’ all allowed cloth to be made in one place by a number of workers. A factory that used water for power--much like a mill--put all these together, and created the first textile mills. The idea spread swiftly, and soon factories called workers from the fields, undermining the entire agricultural sectors.

The Industrial Revolution in the United States

The 1790 American census puts 90% of its workers in the agricultural sector. In 1793, Samuel Slater established what is known as the first industrial mill in the United States, a water-powered textile mill. Mills might not have become such good investments in the long run, with the high price of labor in the North, if it were not for the European Industrial Revolution.

The agricultural sector of Europe was losing both workers and land to the factories. As food and textile production sped up, economic dependence on farmers dropped. As their jobs were now unsustainable, farmers ended up part of a bloated unemployed labor force. Their sights turned to the next part of the industrializing world: the United States.

In ten years, from 1845 to 1855 alone, 3 million immigrants made their way to the United States. Only 1 out of 10 made their way to the South, where wage labor was cheap because of the slavery alternative. The Irish famines from 1845 to 1852 added to the immigration flow. Wage labor in the North became incredibly cheap, and industrialization began in earnest.

The Impact on the American Civil War

The impact on the American Civil War was partly economic and partly moral. For the Northerners, they discovered the effectiveness of cheap wage labor as a strong economic driver. At the same time, it turned into a stand against the treatment of labor as a commodity.

Abolitionist voices were strong against the ownership of one race by another, (while not necessarily admitting them equal). The Southerners, while grappling with the everyday problems of lazy, malingering, dangerous, or runaway slaves, still held to their claim that the institution was “benevolent.”

Part of this ‘blindness’ of the South was probably deliberate blindness, but it cannot be denied that much of it was economic. If cheap wage labor was the mainstay of the industrializing North, slavery was the backbone of the agricultural South. Therefore, slavery became one of the main pivot points of the Civil War, and we determined that the Civil War was not inevitable.