CHAPTER VII
1865—1887.
Period of expansion into the far west.
THE EXPANSION of agricultural production was relatively more rapid after the Civil War than before it. This war did not check the Northern expansion, but did completely disorganize the cotton industry and involve it in temporary ruin. The improved machinery (reapers, threshers, corn planters, cultivators, etc.), enabled the North to increase its production, though a large portion of its labor force was diverted into the army.
Women and children fed the North, their labor being rendered more efficient by the use of the machines. In 1865 there were 250,000 reapers in use in the Northern states. From 1859 to 1863, the wheat crop of Indiana alone increased from 15,000,000 to 20,000,000 bushels, though 10 per cent of her male population was in the army on the latter date.
Part of the drain on the labor force of the North occasioned by the war was made good by immigration, the immigration from 1860 to 1870 being nearly as great as from 1850 to 1860. Practically all these immigrants settled in the Northern states, and 42 per cent of them settled in the group of states which lie north of the Ohio River, west of New York and east
