As Kevin Phillips wrote in Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich, at the same time that the Civil War destroyed Southern wealth, it immensely enriched Northern capitalists. Holding Union debt was extremely lucrative. Supplying the Union war effort was even more profitable. “A surprising number of the commercial and financial giants of the late nineteenth century—J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, Marshall Field, Philip Armour, Collis Huntington, and several other railroad grandees—were young Northerners who avoided military service, usually
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