Industrial Revolution

In the years 1865-1900 after Reconstruction, the world went through an era called the Gilded Age. The Gilded Age was a boom in industry that revolutionized the world further than it ever had been before. The Gilded Age was made up of by farmers who lived on the country side and the industrial workers who live in the big cities on the coast that both responded differently to industrialization.

The Gilded Age was made up of by farmers who lived on the country side that were affected by industrialization on an economic and a social level. Farmers were affected on a social level because of the fact that many of the yeoman farmers were free blacks. When the blacks had been slaves, they were at the bottom of the social pyramid. After the Civil War, blacks were seen as freemen but were still treated like slaves. The free blacks were still forced into servitude. The farmer was seen as the lowest class during the Gilded Age because most of the focus was on the large factories in the big cities that were turning the United States into the biggest manufacturer in the world at the time. The shift in focus from agriculture to manufacturing caused the government to shift their focus as well which often times caused the needs of the farmers to be ignored. The Gilded Age also affected farmers on an economic level. Without question the most vexing problem and the one that surpassed all others in both its negative effect and its difficulty to adjust to successfully was the problem of agricultural overproduction. The American farmer produced far too much product. In the years following the Civil War, agricultural production levels increased dramatically. The use of farm machinery such as the plow allowed the individual farmer to grow more, new farming techniques, and the spreading of the railroads all led to the flooding of the American market with agricultural produce. As more and more crops were brought into the American market, it decreased the prices farmers could demand for their produce. Farmers were growing more and more and making less and less. Between 1873 and 1894 cotton production doubled while the price of cotton fell from about 15 cents a pound to less than 6 cents a pound. The same thing happened to all other types of agricultural produce. Farmers fell victim as well to the tariff policy of the United States during the Gilded Age. They were forced to buy all the manufactured goods they needed for survival on a market protected by tariff legislation. The farmers had to buy the goods that they needed at extremely high prices while selling what they produced on an unprotected and highly competitive market at extremely low prices. As agriculture became less rewarding, more and more farm owners lost their farms when they could not repay bank loans and their mortgages were foreclosed or they could not pay their taxes and their farms were auctioned off. During the Gilded Age, more and more farmers lost their land and slipped down the agricultural