Civil War Telegraph

The American Civil War was not just another battle in world history — it changed the way that wars are fought using new inventions. The Civil War was fought from 1861-1865, in the early 1800’s, the Industrial Revolution was taking place. By the end of the Industrial Revolution, the North and the South had very different economies. In the North, there were many factories, which meant that the North was almost entirely self reliant. On the other hand, the South’s economy was built around the selling of raw materials that slaves produced, which meant that the South depended on other countries. This difference of economies changed the outcome of the Civil War because the North was able to produce necessary supplies to win a war. While many factors
The telegraph was not invented during Civil War, however being made several years before allowed some time for the laying of lines and getting all of the kinks out of the telegraph system. Before the Civil War, the North had already laid many miles of telegraph line, since they saw the importance of the telegraph in every day life. The South, however, did not use the telegraph as much since the farms and plantations were spaced so far apart that so many different lines would have to be laid. At the beginning of the Civil War, the North saw the advantages of having a reliable communications system, and “[i]t was soon apparent that the
Although the railroad was not used for the first time during the Civil War, but a few years earlier in the 1830s, it was still important to transport the Union soldiers and supplies to and from the battlefield. In the middle of the 1800s the railroad was used in the North as a means to expand, trade, and transport factory goods throughout the country. On the contrary, the South just saw the railroad as a way to transport slave produced raw materials such as cotton to the ports to be traded. According to Robert C. Black III, “the relative increase in railroad mileage between 1850 and 1860 was some what greater in the South than in the North” (2). Although the South had many miles laid, “the construction boom had not yet produced in the Southern States a system of iron rails” (Black 8). For lack of this “system,” when a shipment of materials had to be transported long distances by rail in the South, the materials would have to be switched between rail cars to support the difference in track sizes and moving across land where no track existed. In other words, “[e]verywhere through Dixie railroads were stretching iron fingers toward one another, but not yet everywhere had they joined hands” (Black 9). Although the North did not lay down as many rail roads as the South during the few years before the Civil War, the North’s railroads had a and connectivity, which allowed for greater use and cost