 Hi, Professor Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And we're going to be talking about the economic impact of the Civil War. Some of you may have read Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. When I was in elementary school, we were supposed to memorize it. It's only 190 words or something, so it wasn't that hard. And you may remember early on, Lincoln says, forescore seven years ago, our forefathers created on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, a new nation. Lincoln was one of the first to use the United States as a singular to talk about the United States as a nation. Prior to him, the general pattern was to refer to the United States as a plural. The United States are. The United States are a set of states, a set of nations that come together for particular purposes. The United States is was a product of the Civil War. It was a material product in the sense that the government of the United States, the government in Washington DC, put down a rebellion and conquered half the country out of many one. One nation came out of the Civil War. And one nation was created by the legislative actions of the Congress that was freed of Southern representation in 1861 and 1862. It wasn't only the work of the Union Army that created one nation, although it did, the extraordinary sacrifices of the soldiers in the Union Army, the extraordinary experience of huge numbers of people. Scott's Army that conquered Mexico had 15,000 soldiers in it. Grant's Army that marched into Virginia in 1864 had 10 times that number. So you had huge numbers of soldiers fighting together from all parts of the nation, spreading ideas, musicals, songs, games like baseball. Spread through the country just because so many soldiers were together in one place. There was all that. But there was also the work that was accomplished by Congress when the Republicans had an overwhelming majority. The South left. The members of the Senate and House walked away, leaving the Republicans with a huge majority in both houses of Congress plus control of the White House. And soon enough control of the Supreme Court when Southern has left the court, a control of the Supreme Court that was solidified when they added judges to the court to make sure they had a majority, something they could do because they controlled Congress and the White House. What did the Republicans do? They established a national currency, a national banking system, national funding for education, leading to the establishment of land-grant universities in every state, the institution where I teach. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst was founded in 1863 with federal funding, national tariffs to establish and protect American industries, funding for national infrastructure, including a railroad going to California, river dredging, a harbor construction, establishment of a national pension system to support soldiers in their old age. But this is a system that supported maybe half of the elderly population in the United States by the 1890s because there were that many who would fought in the Civil War. As I said, these armies in the Civil War were huge. National citizenship and national citizenship rights. The Constitution's Bill of Rights was extended to the states under provisions of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which established national citizenship for the first time. People were no longer just citizens of Massachusetts, New York or Georgia. They were citizens of the United States. This is something that hadn't existed before. All these were products of the Civil War. If you look at economists look at the Civil War year and say, oh, it was a bad time. The 1860s had slow economic growths compared to every other decade of the 19th century. Yes. But what happened in the 1860s constituted an American revolution with lasting impacts. Just like the French Revolution in 1789 had an immediate negative effect on economic growth, the Civil War, of course, it had a negative effect on growth. It had hundreds of thousands, actually millions of soldiers involved fighting wars, destroying things rather than building things. Of course, economic growth was slow in those years. But what was left behind the institutional legacy of the banking system, the financial system, the infrastructure, the new tax system, the national citizenship made the United States what it is today, and laid the groundwork for more rapid economic transformation in the rest of the 19th century. That's the economic legacy of the Civil War, a legacy that rests on the Civil War's political and social legacy. Plus, we got baseball. So thank you very much and have a good day. Bye-bye.