Chicago became the great Western shipping center, and though the
river boats lingered for a time on the Ohio and the Mississippi
they grew fewer year by year. Prosperity, greater than the
country had ever known, prevailed everywhere in the North
throughout the last two years of the War.

So, too, feeding and supplying an army of millions of men laid
the foundation of many of our greatest industries. The Northern
soldiers in the early days of the war were clothed in garments so
variegated that they sometimes had trouble in telling friend from
foe, and not infrequently they shot at one another; so
inadequately were our woolen mills prepared to supply their
uniforms! But larger government contracts enabled the proprietors
to reconstruct their mills, install modern machines, and build up
an organization and a prosperous business that still endures.
Making boots and shoes for Northern soldiers laid the foundation
of America's great shoe industry. Machinery had already been
applied to shoe manufacture, but only to a limited extent; under
the pressure of war conditions, however, American inventive skill
found ways of performing mechanically almost all the operations
that had formerly been done by hand. The McKay sewing machine,
one of the greatest of our inventions, which was perfected in the
second year of the war, did as much perhaps as any single device
to keep our soldiers well shod and comfortable. The necessity of
feeding these same armies created our great packing plants.
Though McCormick had invented his reaper several years before the
war, the new agricultural machinery had made no great headway.
Without this machinery, however, our Western farmers could never
have harvested the gigantic crops which not only fed our soldiers
but laid the basis of our economic prosperity. Thus the War