Finding Paragraph #3

The economy during the Civil War was not a contest between equals. During this time period, the South didn't have any factories to produce guns or ammunition, and the railroads were small and not interconnected, so it was hard to move weapons and food to mean quickly and over long distances. Agriculture was a big "money-maker" in the South. Farmers focused mainly on cash crops such as tobacco and cotton, but didn't produce to feed the whole Southern population. "The North, on the other hand, had enough food and enough factories to make weapons for all of its soldiers. It also had an extensive rail network that could transport men and weapons rapidly and cheaply. The differences in manpower and industrial capacity were so profound that the fact that the South almost won the war was a shock to observers all over the world." In reality, there was no way that the South could have defeated the North because the North had all the materials and all the financial advantages. Since most of the South's profit came from cotton, the first thing that the Union did was blockade the southern ports. After Louisiana was captured, the amount of cotton exported to England stopped and so did the South's profit. This was something the North desperately needed to defeat the South (The Civil War).