Glory Road (40 page)

In the West the wagon trains rolled across the frontier without a halt. The same Eastern newspapers that printed news from the fighting fronts announced that interested parties could obtain maps of the Western regions at the front office, and much was printed about the best routes to the new mining fields of Nevada and Colorado, of Idaho and Montana—great names now, as important in their way as names like Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Every day from twenty-five to one hundred wagons were ferried across the Missouri at Council Bluffs, and on the Iowa side the road was usually packed for half a mile or more with wagons waiting their turn. One man noted a solid string of twelve hundred wagons on the road leading west from Omaha, and a traveler in Kansas reported that he met five hundred wagons every day bound for Colorado and California. Some of the men who made this westward migration were frankly anxious to get beyond the reach of the army draft, yet the army lost little. The country had men and riches to spare; it could fight a great war and at the same time open a wilderness to settlement, and the government was actually encouraging the move by giving away, free, 160-acre farms to anyone who would take the trouble to occupy and improve the land. (It gave away two and one half million acres to homesteaders during the war years.)
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The farm belt had been drained of men of military age. In one Wisconsin village which contained 250 men of voting age, 111 had gone into the army, and in an Illinois rural township 117 of 147 men liable to the draft had volunteered. Yet the farm states were far more populous than when the war began, and farm production had increased beyond imagination. In the cities there were new factories building reapers, mowers, revolving horse rakes, two-horse cultivators, rotary spaders, grain drillers, and other appliances, and between the immigrants and the new machinery the lost labor of the volunteers simply did-not matter. Like the Pennsylvania editor, men who took time to look about them were impressed with the sense that a prodigious change was taking place. The president of the Illinois Agricultural Society wrote ecstatically:

"Look over these prairies and observe everywhere the life and activity prevailing. See the railroads pressed beyond their capacity with the freights of our people; the metropolis of the state rearing its stately blocks with a rapidity almost fabulous, and whitening the northern lakes with the sails of its commerce; every smaller city, town, village, and hamlet within our borders all astir with improvement; every factory, mill, and machine shop running with its full complement of hands; the hum of industry in every household; more acres of fertile land under culture, fuller granaries and more prolific crops than ever before; in short, observe that this state and this people of Illinois are making more rapid progress in population, development, wealth, education, and in all the arts of peace than in any former period, and then realize, if you can, that all this has occurred and is occurring in the midst of a war the most stupendous ever prosecuted among men."
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Traffic on the Great Lakes was booming. Passenger travel had declined, and many of the passenger boats had been dismantled so that their engines could be installed in freighters, but these freighters were carrying a huge trade. The same Civil War which saw naval warfare revolutionized by the introduction of ironclads saw also a revolution in Great Lakes traffic. Iron steamers were coming in, the canal at the Soo had been opened, and the iron mines of upper Michigan were sending more and more ore down to the lower lakes. The first year's shipment of ore, shortly before the war, had amounted to a mere 132 tons; by the middle of the war ore was coming down to Cleveland at 235,000 tons a year, to be smelted there or to be sent on by rail to Pittsburgh, which was creating its characteristic pillar of smoke against the sky.
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For the transportation industry, 1863 was the most prosperous year in history. Hundreds of locomotives and thousands of freight cars had been built since the war began. The Pittsburgh foundries that turned out guns and armor and mortars for the military were also busy with castings for the locomotive manufacturers, with machinery for iron mines and gold mines, with equipment for the oil refineries, with the production of railroad rails, with countless other items needed by an industrialized nation.

At Washington the Patent Office was active. Americans were inventing things in these war years at a greater rate than ever before, and while some of these had to do with war goods, most of them had nothing to do with the war but were aimed strictly at civilian wants. There were new patents for passenger elevators, steam fans for restaurants, milk-condensing machinery, steam printing presses, flypaper, fountain pens, roller skates, dredges, washing machines, and heaven knew what else.
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With so many men gone in the army, there was naturally an emphasis on labor-saving equipment, but a heavy flood of immigration from Europe was coming in without ceasing, so that the population increased steadily month by month despite the losses in camps and on battlefields. No fewer than 800,000 immigrants arrived during the war years, bringing with them something like $400,000,000 in cash, and if the war was costing the unheard-of sum of two millions a day, there would be no trouble about paying for it.

The export trade was thriving. New York merchants had been panicky when the war began, remembering that two thirds of the export trade normally was in cotton and wondering how this deficit would ever be met. With the war in full stride they forgot their worries. Manufactured goods went overseas. One New York exporter, in the first three years of the war, sent $800,000 worth of sewing machines to Liverpool, and a New York merchant exulted that Yankee clocks "are ticking all over England." Most important of all, there was wheat. England and Europe had had drought, and crops were down. Civil War America was raising wheat, corn, and hogs as never before, and England's purchases of American wheat and flour increased prodigiously over the pre-war level. English factory hands were idle because Southern cotton could not be imported, and in Richmond men still believed that eventually this pressure would bring England in on the side of the Confederacy. What they overlooked was that while England could get along somehow without American cotton, it could not under any circumstances get along now without American wheat. Back of the export figures lay that solid fact which in the end was to make British intervention impossible—a fact which the South could not even see but which was a force as mighty for the Union as an army with banners.
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(In Richmond, Vice-President Stephens was starting off under a flag of truce, hoping to get to Washington to present proposals for peace. It was believed that he would reach Washington while Lee reached Pennsylvania, and that the irresistible pressure of the Army of Northern Virginia on a North undermined by Copperheads would compel the Lincoln government to talk to him and to offer acceptable terms. One-legged Dick Ewell, perkily riding his horse with a peg leg sticking out at an angle, was leading Confederate troops on the road of invasion, and the only man in his outfit who had ever heard of a rocky Pennsylvania knoll named Culp's Hill was a young fellow who used to five there.)
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Railroads and shipping, iron ore and wheat, patents and immigrants—the North was exploding with new strength and energy. A sober man of business in New York reviewed the war boom a few months later and found it unlike anything that had ever happened before.

"There is a mania abroad," he wrote. "There are thousands of new schemes, and new companies, forming almost every day; and although many of them prove failures, yet there is one remarkable fact connected with them, differing entirely from those speculations in years gone by. . . . Men are not now going to banks and getting notes discounted that have been endorsed by neighbors. The fact is the people have got the money and they are looking about to see what to do with it. These companies are organizing for the very purpose, and most of them are honestly intending to develop the material interests of the country, and to this end hundreds of millions of dollars in the last four years have been devoted."
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There was money to be made, and a young officer in the Army of the Potomac was writing in wonder about "my country, hardly feeling this draft upon its resources, and growing richer every day."
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It was noteworthy that the richest fields for money-making were no longer, as in the past, merchandising, shipping, and real estate speculation. The big money now was in manufacturing, in mining, and— as an inescapable by-product—in the manipulation of stocks. The factory system had arrived full blast. The sewing machine, coming in just in time to make it possible to meet enormous army orders for uniforms, had created a vast new ready-made-clothing business, and 100,000 people were employed by this trade in New York alone. Textile factories were consuming, among other things, 200,000,000 pounds of wool annually and were making fabulous profits. One manufacturer reported that he was making $2,000 a day. A new stitching machine for joining soles to uppers had revolutionized the boot-and-shoe industry, and big factories were going up in New York and Philadelphia, in Lynn and Danvers and Haverhill. The distilling trade enjoyed a delirious boom, and profits for one fat war year were estimated at $50,000,000. St. Louis (which as a distilling center got a generous slice of that profit) boasted of its new Lindell Hotel, built at a cost of a million and a half, with twenty-seven acres of plastering and thirty-two miles of bell wire. Chicago built eight large packing houses and sixteen smaller ones in a single year. In 1863 alone, Philadelphia put up fifty-seven new factories. A party of 230 Western businessmen was taken on a promotional junket to Portland, Maine, by aggressive city boosters. War-torn America displayed a great new fondness for horse racing, the new tracks in Boston, Chicago, and Washington drawing enormous crowds. Twenty-seven cities built street railways, there was an unprecedented rise in the sale of school textbooks, and fifteen colleges and universities were founded, including such institutions as Vassar, Swarthmore, and Cornell.
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In Richmond the Confederacy's chief of ordnance was dolefully noting that the North had thirty-eight arms factories able to turn out nearly 5,000 infantry rifles every day. This, he said, "exhibits a most marked contrast to our own condition," as the South was making only 100 a day. Theoretically, he added, Southern capacity was nearly 300, but skilled workmen were lacking.
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What nobody was able to see at the moment was that this volume production of weapons with interchangeable parts was teaching Northern industrialists one of the great secrets of mass production.

The New York merchant who had exulted in the prosperity born of the war declared that "the mind staggers as we begin to contemplate the future," and concluded that there was corning to the nation a greatness "which no other country in the
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world has ever seen." He had reason to talk that way. There had never been anything like this before. Whole generations of growth and development seemed to be crammed into a few years. Here was eternal Yankeeism triumphant, grinning because it was possible to grow rich out of a ruinous war, but here also was ever so much more than that—a dazzling expansion of strength, a welling up of vitality and energy that could create faster than any possible destruction, a tapping of powers so profound that the whole get-rich-quick tribe could not
quite reduce them to a mere matter of dollars and cents.

Perhaps it is time to ask what was really going on here, anyway. Had the war already been won, with a doom from beyond the stars pronounced in advance on a rash Confederacy which never really had a chance?

William Tecumseh Sherman saw it so. That grim soldier with the ultra-modern viewpoint had called the turn before the war even began when he warned a Southern friend: "In all history no nation of mere agriculturists ever made successful war against a nation of mechanics. . . . You are bound to fail." Apparently his prophecy was being borne out. This war which was bleeding the Confederacy to absolute exhaustion was making the North stronger than ever before, stronger than men had dreamed possible, stimulating a growth which in a few generations would create the mightiest power in history. A Northern victory, it might seem, was inevitable.

But the war was not over and the war had not yet been won. The war, on the contrary, could very easily be lost, and Robert E. Lee had with him seventy thousand lean and hungry men who would quickly arrange it that way if something were not done about them.
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destiny had arrived at a verdict, it was a verdict which could still be reversed. All of the weight of power might lie on one side, yet in actual contemporary fact Northern victory was not in the least certain. The spreading factories and the burdened busy trains and the limitless fields of wheat were not going to appear on the firing line, and it was on the firing line that this affair must finally be settled. Up there, under the muzzles of the guns, there would be living men, as self-centered and as shortsighted and as careless of historical imperatives as any men that ever lived, and in the end it was all going to be up to them. If a general lost his nerve or a brigade lost its head, or if the thousands of obscure young men in dirty, sweat-stained uniforms failed by whatever justifiable margin to come up to the mark, then the riches and the power and the might were phantoms to drift away with the battle smoke as the flags came tumbling down.