By the end ofthe Civil War （1861-1865） most ofthe forces that would typify twentieth-century America had begun to emerge. Northern industrialism had triumphed over Southern agrarianism, and from that victory came a society based on mass labor and mass consumption. Mechanization spread rapidly as steam engines, linked to machines, displaced hand work on farms and in factories. The conditions oflabor changed, for the new machines, with their great cost and efficiency, seemed far more valuable and more useful than the workers who tended them. Yet increasing numbers of Americans left the farms to seek jobs in urban factories.
In the cities, swollen with growing numbers of the poor and the unskilled, angry forces were stirring that would profoundly alter the nation'spolitics and its social ideals. Traditional political alliances had begun to shift as the lower classes sought greater power at the poils. The great age of big-city bossism began, and the art of political patronage and graft rose to new heights throughout the land. During the Civil War the powers of the federal government rapidly expanded. The first conscription laws were passed, the first federal income taxes were levied, and a national currency, controlled by the federal government, was issued. In 1865 the first step toward racial equality was made when the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was adopted, abolishing slavery within the United States. Business growth and exploitation of natural resources created new wealth, concentrating vast riches and economic power in the hands of a few. It was the beginning of what Mark Twain called "The Gilded Age," an age of excess and extremes, of decline and progress, of poverty and dazzling wealth, of gloom and buoyant hope.In the first decades after the Civil War, Americans ceased to be isolated from the world and from each other. Telegraph lines spanned the nation,and in 1866 a trans-Atlantic cable joined America and Europe. The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, linking the Atlantic and the Pacific. Soon the United States had the most extensive railroad system in the world, which in turn generated enormous commercial expansion. The cost of transporting raw materials and finished goods dropped. Products once made locally by costly handwork were replaced by inexpensive goods.
The tempo oflife accelerated as Americans became increasingly mobile,Journeys of weeks or months were reduced to a few days. In the last surge of westward expansion, Americans, lured by the promise of free land, settled the last of the first forty-eight states, By 1890 the frontier, the westward-moving line of settlement begun three hundred years before on the Atlantic Coast,ceased to exist. Yet its influence would long remain, shaping the life of the nation and inspiring the legends, novels, and western movies by which the world would come to know America.
The period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I was a time of steel and steam, electriaty and oil. Steel production in the United States increased more than six hundred times, and steelmaking became the nation's dominant industry. Alternating electrical current was introduced in 1886. Incandescent lamps illuminated the cities with electricity provided by giant, steam-driven dynamos. The tallow candles and whale-oil lamps of rural America were replaced by lanterns filled with kerosene made from crude oil. The American petroleum industry began, and with it came the age of the automobile.
From 1870 to 1890 the total population of the United States doubled.Villages became towns, towns became cities, and cities grew to a size and with a speed that would have astonished the Founding Fathers. From 1860 to 1910 the population of Philadelphia tripled, that of New York City more than quadrupled, while the population of Chicago increased twenty times to two million, making it the nation's second largest city.
