ish an excess of food
that could be sold abroad to obtain money with which to help support the
war. It seemed as if the sun, the rain, and the soil had entered into a
conspiracy to support the North and liberty. The largest crop of wheat
and corn ever garnered before the war was in 1859. At that time, men
thought the harvest would never be surpassed. But strangely enough, that
bumper crop of 1859 was surpassed four times in succession during the
Civil War. Meanwhile the herds of cattle and the flocks of sheep more
than doubled during the conflict, and all of the land that was not
yellow with grain became a rich pasture and meadow, covered with cattle,
sheep and horses.

Even the losses of sugar and cotton usually purchased from the South
were made up to the North. Threatened with the loss of the Southern
sugar, sorghum cane was imported from China, and the people scarcely
missed the Southern sugar. When the cotton failed, the unwonted increase
of the flocks furnished wool for raiment. It stirs wonder to reflect
that one poor crop of wheat and corn might have changed the issue, and
defeated the North. Singularly enough also, the failure of crops in
Europe not only offered a market for the unexpected Northern surplus,
but yielded the highest price ever known, thus bringing in a golden
river to enrich the Northern people. Jefferson Davis had said at the
beginning of the war that "grass would soon be growing not simply in the
streets of the villages of the North, but in Broadway and Wall Street."
Davis believed that the withdrawal of every fourth man would make our
problem of food and clothing impossible of solution. But at that moment
the invention of the reaper enabled one harvester to do the work of ten
men, and the new tools actually more than took the place of the Northern
soldiers who were at the front.

Furthermore, the spirit of patriotism and self-sacrifice descended upon
the Northern women. On the little farms where the farmer's wife was too
poor to buy a reaper, the mother and the daughters went into the field
to plough the corn and thrash the wheat and milk the cows. In many
counties in Iowa and Kansas one-half of the men were at the front, and
in harvest time it is said that there were more women working in the
wheat and corn fields than men.

One other element fought for liberty and the North. A strange unrest
fell upon Europe. Foreign peoples became discontented and began to
migrate. In the summer of 1862