Many of the reservoirs of this ante-bellum wealth sound strangely in our modern ears.

John Haggerty had made $1,000,000 as an auctioneer; William L.
Coggeswell had made half as much as a wine importer; Japhet Bishop had rounded out an honest $600,000 from the profits of a hardware store; while Phineas T.Barnum ranks high in the list by virtue of $800,000 accumulated in a business which it is hardly necessary to specify.
Indeed his name and that of the great landlords are almost the only ones in this list that have descended to posterity.

Yet they were the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Harrimans, the Fricks, and the Henry Fords of their day.
Before the Civil War had ended, however, the transformation of the United States from a nation of farmers and small-scale manufacturers to a highly organized industrial state had begun.

Probably the most important single influence was the War itself.

Those four years of bitter conflict illustrate, perhaps more graphically than any similar event in history, the power which military operations may exercise in stimulating all the productive forces of a people.