The Northern Economy

The Northern Economy

The Northern Economy
Reading Level

	edHelper's suggested reading level:	high interest, readability grades 3 to 5
	Flesch-Kincaid grade level:	4.48

Vocabulary

	challenging words:		harbor, bond, navy, beginning, caption, print, banks, amount, battle, million, income, certain, order, government, case, soil
	content words:		New Orleans, Civil War

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The Northern Economy
By Cathy Pearl

¹     Caption: Destruction of New Orleans harbor by Union navy, April 24, 1862. About eight million dollars worth of cotton was destroyed by the South to keep it from falling into Union hands.

²     The Civil War affected the Northern economy in different ways than it did in the South. In some ways, the North was better off during the war. There were more factories and more miles of railroad in the North. Both of these would help them to win the war.

³     Like the South, the North struggled to raise money. The war was the most expensive that the country had fought at that time. The government was forced to think of new ways to raise money.

⁴     One way the government did this was to sell bonds. When a person bought a bond, he was lending money to the government. In this case, the money was used to fight the Civil War. The bond was guaranteed to earn a certain amount of interest during the life of the bond. When the bond matured, the buyer would get the face value of it. A bond can mature at different times. Some mature in months; others take years.

⁵     The government in the North started a national bank to sell the bonds. The people in the North had money saved in banks. This saved money was used to buy bonds. Still, the people in the North could not buy enough bonds to pay for the war.

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