The combination of the inflation of the 1860s and the depression of the 1870s registered statistically—although these statistics are often indirectly derived and crude—in declines in per capita real income between 1860 and 1880, with the losses during the Civil War years and the depression years wiping out the gains of the postwar boom. In 1880, at the end of the depression, unskilled workers were worse off than they had been twenty years earlier at the beginning of the Civil War.
