1860 reported an
increase of 36 per cent in total population in ten years, somewhat
unevenly divided, since the Confederate area had increased but 25 per
cent, as compared with 39 per cent in the North and West, yet large
enough everywhere to keep up the traditions of a growing population. The
growth continued in the next decade, despite the Civil War. It is not to
be expected that it should have touched the record of the fifties, for
2,500,000 men were drawn from production for at least three years--the
three years in which most of them would have grown to manhood and
married, had there been no war. The South, desolated by war, and with
nearly every able-bodied white man in the ranks, stood still, with under
9 per cent increase. But the whole country grew in population from
31,443,321 to 38,558,371 (22 per cent), while the North and West, in
spite of war, grew 27 per cent,--more than the South had done in its
most brilliant decade.

How far the North and West would have gone had they not been hampered by
the depression after 1857 cannot be stated. These regions had suffered
most from the panic, since in them railroads and banks, factories and
cities, and all the agents of a complex industrial organization had been
most active. The industrial disturbance had disarranged for the time the
elaborate Northern system. The simpler South, with its staple crops, its
rural population, and its few railways, had suffered less. Southerners
before the war had seen in their immunity from the effects of panic a
proof of their superiority over other social orders; they had misread
the times and prophesied the disintegration of the industrial
organization of the North.

The South seceded before the rest of the United States emerged from the
panic period. In the next four years the treasury receipts show the
resources of the loyal States. Industry, recovered from its depression,
went ahead unnoticed in the noise of war, yet little impeded by the fact
of war.

Communication by rail brought the most significant of the single changes
into the Northern States. Before the panic of 1857 the trunk-line
railways had completed their net of tracks between the Mississippi and
tidewater. Nearly ten thousand miles had been built in the Old Northwest
alone in the ten preceding years. But the effect of this on business,
certain to come in any event, was not seen until secession closed the
Mississippi to the agricultural exports of the Northwest. Fo