enty percent in the decade preceding the Civil War. As land increased and technology advanced, harvests were more plentiful each year. Bushels of wheat increased thirty-three and one-third percent between 1849 and 1859. The harvest of corn increased by twenty-five percent while oats increased by fifteen percent within that same time period. As important as these crops were to the Southern people, cotton defined the Southern economy. Between 1850 and 1860 the amount of cotton harvests improved by one hundred and twenty percent. In 1860 seventy five percent of the cotton consumed by the European continent was provided by the Southern American states.
             In the years during the Civil War as well as those following it, both the Northern and Southern states experienced an economic recession. The Gross Domestic Product of the United States declined sharply in the years following the war. The agricultural South was hit much harder than the industrialized North. Because the majority of the war was fought on Southern territories, much of the farmland and equipment necessary to farm was destroyed. Industrial sites that were coming into existence in the South were decimated. Throughout the South, the war, instead of stimulating infant industries already in existence, interrupted their normal growth. In the decade following the Civil War, the South made no industrial progress. In the years preceding the war, North Carolina compiled a list of forty cotton mills and eight woolen mills within its jurisdiction. These numbers declined rapidly during the war because of lack of maintenance as well as destruction caused by Norther
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