ABSTRACT

The Civil War did more for and to the United States than to abolish chattel slavery. It changed Americans transportation system, acting as a kind of hothouse forcing process on railroads. The necessity of carrying hundreds of thousands of troops and their supplies called for swift expansion of rails in the North. This was done so well and quickly that many historians of the four-year struggle have credited railroads with playing a major part in settling the issue. The demands of war did other things, such as hastening transformation of the North from a country of fanners and small manufacturers to a highly organized industrial region. With the war, too, came what moral philosophers have said was moral decay in wholesale volume, an apparently illimitable increase in man's natural cupidity. The ethics by which men conduct business appear to be no more constant than individual honesty.