A Nation in Rapid Transition
The extraordinary acceleration in technology and industry that started in the mid-nineteenth century came on the heels of an extensive transformation in the international economy.
For the first time in history, advancements in medicine, science, transportation, and communication interwove to spur a vast network of people and ideas that stretched around the world. In a matter of decades, the pace of change hastily approached daring speeds that would challenge the foundations of the growing shift toward democratic governments.
The Start of Civil War
The 1850s brought cascading challenges to a still young United States which saw the threat of civil war grow rapidly. More than a decade after Jan Willem and his family arrived in the United States, conflict over the evil of slavery was inevitable.
The newly elected American President, a self-taught lawyer from Illinois, found himself immediately thrown into the most trying test of democracy in a half-century. Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 stirred secessionist fervor in the South, where, between 1860 and 1861, 11 Southern states seceded and formed the Confederacy to oppose Lincoln’s march toward the death of slavery.
When Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter [South Carolina] in spring 1861, the American Civil War was ignited, and with it a desperate rally to support the cause. President Lincoln called for volunteers from the North’s governors, including Wisconsin Republican Governor, Alexander Randall. Wisconsin supplied several regiments to serve in the Union army and more than 91,000 Wisconsin troops left for battle lines, serving 56 regiments total.
Some soldiers left home to serve for personal reasons like advancing a military career or their own political aspirations. Others felt compelled by the nobility of the cause to serve and protect the democratic experiment and extinguish the nation’s reliance on slavery. While it seems reasonable some descendants of Jan Willem went to fight in the Union army, the scope of this writing revealed no such service by those descending from Jan Albert.
More broadly, however, every member of the family was undoubtedly impacted in some way by the war effort, including the need to accelerate crop production to feed Union soldiers or work in factories that made weapons, artillery, and other materials. As is often the case with any war, the home front is a critical contributor to battlefield success.
Recruiting the Wisconsinites
New recruits to the Union army from Wisconsin often trained in some of the state’s largest cities including Racine, Milwaukee, Madison, and Fond du Lac. Camp Randall, in the state’s capitol, was used throughout the war years to house Confederate prisoners of war. Wisconsin soldiers would fight in nearly every battle of the war, including on the blood-soaked battlefields of Gettysburg and Antietam.
Old Abe the Screaming War Eagle of the Wisconsin 8th Infantry, Circa 1881 | Photo Courtesy State Historical Society of Wisconsin Visual Archives
In all, more than 12,000 Wisconsin men died during the Civil War, a third of which were killed in action or died of their wounds, and the others from disease.
Families operating Wisconsin’s farmlands were forced to accelerate crop production (primarily wheat) to meet the high demand of the Union army. As crop prices increased, demand amplified for farm equipment, which led to an industrial explosion of manufacturing companies based in Wisconsin during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Lincoln leveraged the expanding railroad network in the North to move troops and supplies between key battles (for historical context, the South’s transportation network was significantly less mature).
As the railroad was weaponized to win the war, transportation and industry gradually consolidated by increasing the growing network across the central and eastern parts of the northern United States (think Chicago to New York, and so on).
The 24,000 miles of railroad track in the North during the early 1860s became a machine for Lincoln’s ambitious war strategy. He recognized the critical role activating the North’s industrial complex could play in delivering consistent blows to the Confederates.
In addition, the President mobilized the entire industrial might of the North, bringing more women than ever into commercial industries to produce everything from textiles to ammunition to wagons. In the 1860s alone, the number of women fueling growth in the industrial complex grew by over 500 percent (they also took many of these jobs because their male counterparts were serving in the military).
For the first time in history, the power of industry was put behind a war effort, an approach that would be emulated again in both World Wars about five decades later.
The End of Civil War
On top of this rapid change, Lincoln saw the potential of leveraging the 50,000-mile telegraph network winding through every kind of terrain across the United States to communicate instantaneously between the front and Washington. As it became clear to both sides the Union was dominating the contest, Lincoln pushed the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution through Congress which formally abolished slavery and indentured servitude, formalizing the Emancipation Proclamation declared in 1863.
By the spring of 1865, the Confederacy submitted to the Union, and the war finished. While he may have died at the hands of an assassin within a week, Abraham Lincoln facilitated a rapid transition to the modern industrialized economy that gained dramatic growth in the period which immediately followed.
The social, political and economic forces that emerged from the fields of the Civil War invariably impacted the life of ordinary Americans in the fields of the heartland. For the previous 400 years of the Loomans family’s lineage, little to no change between generations occurred—times and conditions remained relatively unevolved and inconsequential.
The advent of the industrial age changed the game significantly and forced the Loomans family to change with it. The children of Jan Albert and Jacoba Loomans would become the first generation without memory of the motherland, the first in the Loomans lineage to be fully immersed from birth in the spirit of the American experiment.