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 seven v Hearts and Minds in the Days of Total War By the war’ s midpoint all aspects of Illinois life had adjusted to the reality of a long and bloody ordeal. The state’s economy increasingly reflected the changes—and opportunities—generated by war. Secession augured potential problems for Illinois farmers, who before the war were linked to Southern markets via the Mississippi and Ohio River basins. The outbreak of war disrupted this Southern trade and produced a commercial downturn in 1861 and 1862 that decimated the state’s banking industry and pinched many Illinois farmers. By 1863, however, with demand for foodstuffs and supplies soaring, Illinois agriculture rebounded. As more and more men marched off to battle, rural women assumed new economic roles, managing the day-to-day operations of the family farm. Farmers with the means to do so also responded to the labor shortage by purchasing labor-saving devices such as the McCormick reaper, increasing productivity in the countryside and stimulating the farm machine industry in Chicago, Moline, and other Illinois towns. Illinois farms, especially larger ones, eventually realized handsome profits from the provision of cereals and livestock to the western armies, but wartime prosperity came at the cost of greater reliance on railroads and powerful grain elevators, which after the war reoriented Illinois’s farmers to markets north- and eastward. Illinois railroads saw their profits rise on the shipment of foodstuffs and military supplies, adding further momentum to the state’s growing iron and coal industries. During the war Chicago, at the center of the West’s rail system, secured its place as the largest market for processing beef, pork, grain, and lumber, eclipsing Cincinnati, St. Louis, and other contenders. The western armies relied on Chicago’s workforce for everything from harnesses and wagons to boots and shoes, from wool uniforms to salt pork and other packed meats. Little wonder that Chicagoans cheered the Union army’s Quartermaster Department as the primary “stimulus to trade and manufacture in our midst.”1 Not everyone benefited equally from the wartime expansion. Inflation—in part a function of the 1862 Legal Tender Act, which flooded the Union with paper “greenbacks”—outpaced wages during the war years. Facing rising rents and prices for goods, coal miners, locomotive engineers, iron molders, printers, stevedores, and carpenters all staged strikes, while skilled workers in several Illinois cities  illinois’s war established trade unions. The most active of these movements was based in Chicago , where one-half of the state’s rapidly expanding class of industrial workers resided. Here workers formed a citywide trades assembly to concentrate labor’s emerging political and economic clout. High on labor’s list of demands was repeal of the so-called LaSalle Black Laws, enacted in 1863 in response to a wave of strikes in Illinois coal towns. These statutes made it a criminal offense to advocate or engage in strikes or related activity, such as picketing. Coal operators hoped the legislation would destroy the state’s largest union at the time, the Miners’ Union Association (precursor to the American Miners’ Association), which had formed in Belleville in 1861 and spread to many other Illinois coal towns. But the LaSalle Black Laws—so called to underscore the workers’ feelings of second-class status— limited the freedoms and organizing capacity of all workers. As such their repeal remained a paramount object of the Illinois labor movement for decades to come. Meanwhile women’s activism on the home front continued to evolve. In late 1862 the U.S. Sanitary Commission was restructured in an effort to enhance efficiency and coordination of relief. The reorganization imposed greater centralization on the commission’s regional branches, which up to this point had worked fairly autonomously. Jane Hoge and Mary Livermore, directors of the Chicago Sanitary Commission, joined in the reorganization (reflected in their office’s name change to the Northwest Branch of the USSC, in early 1863). By 1863 their Chicago offices—including a large warehouselike depot on Madison Street—was receiving bulk donations of goods from across the Northwest and coordinating their distribution throughout the western theater of war. The organizational and business talents of Hoge, Livermore, and many others were displayed in the hugely successful Northwest Sanitary Fair, held in Chicago in October 1863. The Northwest Branch followed this success with the 1864 Illinois State Sanitary Fair, held at Decatur, and a second Northwest Fair at Chicago in May 1865. Still, the vast majority of Illinois women were not paid...

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