Among obvious items are the collections made by the
Sanitary Commission for the benefit of the hospital service,
amounting to twenty-five million dollars, and about six millions
raised by the Christian Commission. In a hundred other ways both
individuals and localities strained their resources to supplement
those of the Government. Immense subscription lists were
circulated to raise funds for the families of soldiers. The city
of Philadelphia alone spent in this way in a single year
$600,000. There is also evidence of a vast amount of unrecorded
relief of needy families by the neighbors, and in the farming
districts, such assistance, particularly in the form of fuel
during winter, was very generally given.
What made possible this enormous total of contributions was, in a
word, the general willingness of those supporting the war to
forego luxuries. They ceased buying a great multitude of
unnecessary things. But what became of the labor that had
previously supplied the demand for luxuries? A part of it went
the way of all other Northern labor--into new trades, into the
army, or to the West--and a part continued to manufacture
luxuries: for their market, though curtailed, was not destroyed.
There were, indeed, two populations in the North, and they were
separated by an emotional chasm.
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