Why were people poor during the civil war?

Answer 1

Not everyone was poor. But most of the population was rural, living on farms. Even almost forty years later, ninety per cent of people were still rural. Most of these rural dwellers were subsistence farmers, meaning they lived mostly on what their farms produced. Certain items could not be produced on most farms, such as salt, gunpowder, coffee, and farmers would trade extra farm produce for these items, or would sell some for some cash to buy these items. Farming was very inefficient and few farms produced much of a surplus. Even if they did there was no convenient way for most farmers to get these to a market. Usually the nearest town was the county seat, but these tended to be very small towns, with only a few hundred inhabitants and a few storekeepers to trade with. What passed for roads were pitiful, and horse-drawn wagons were the only means of land transportation in most places. Some farmers lived near the few large cities, where roads were better and they had access to larger markets. Some lived near a growing railroad system and could get crops to market that way. Others had been floating crops down a river for decades, but this was a big project in itself. Railroads were only just beginning to knit the country together in a reliable transportation network. Without some means of moving goods around, large scale trade is not possible. Some people had always lived near a navigable river or in a seaport, but most were nowhere near these natural highways. People first of all had to go where there was land available that they could afford to buy, and these were often remote, isolated areas, where they "subsisted" on what little they could scratch from the soil with a thin margin of surplus to trade for necessities. Salt was a necessity, as the only means of preserving meat, in this era before refrigeration. People also had to some how come up with enough hard money - actual cash - to pay their annual real estate taxes to the county.