1865 to 1900 as the “Age of Organization”

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rate than what developed in the North. Skilled labor shortages plagued the South throughout the war, and slave labor, skilled and unskilled, was a major component of the Southern workforce. The war destroyed much of the infrastructure the South had had before the war, and what little was left was well disorganized and more suited to an agrarian export economy rather than a modern industrial one.
The emergence of a strong central government would be a hallmark of the organizational age as well. The southern form of government was a major handicap to their war effort as well as their disparity of industry. They had seceded on the basis of state rights, and consequently the Confederate States had a decentralized government that made coordinating the war effort difficult. The states had difficulty deciding who was to pay for the war effort, and the physical question of where to fight created dissension. The northern government, led by the firm hand of Lincoln, in conjunction with a homogeneous Congress of Republicans, effectively managed a concentrated war effort. The northern government managed to enact an income tax to finance the war effort, and the capital wealth held by the North was used as collateral for bond sales.
The end of the war saw the Southern economy devastated. The emancipation of the slaves had two major effects on the plantation system that was the core of the South’s economy. First, the slaves were not anxious to return to the plantation style of work. Share cropping, which gave the cropper a higher degree of freedom than under the plantation system, seemed to be the answer. Freedman would essentially rent land, paying the planter with a share of the yearly harvest. Initially conceived as a temporary solution, sharecropping would lead to prolonged indebtedness of the landless classes and hold the South in an agrarian economy.
The second major effect of emancipation was the sudden loss of much of the South’s c...