<P> By 1862 most northern leaders realized that the mainstay of Southern secession, slavery, had to be attacked head - on . All the border states rejected President Lincoln's proposal for compensated emancipation . However, by 1865 all had begun the abolition of slavery, except Kentucky and Delaware . The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by Lincoln on January 1, 1863 . In a single stroke it changed the legal status, as recognized by the U.S. government, of 3 million slaves in designated areas of the Confederacy from "slave" to "free". It had the practical effect that as soon as a slave escaped the control of the Confederate government, by running away or through advances of federal troops, the slave became legally and actually free . Plantation owners, realizing that emancipation would destroy their economic system, sometimes moved their slaves as far as possible out of reach of the Union Army . By June 1865, the Union Army controlled all of the Confederacy and liberated all of the designated slaves . The owners were never compensated . Nor were the slaves themselves . Many of the freedmen remained on the same plantation, others crowded into refugee camps operated by the Freedmen's Bureau . The Bureau provided food, housing, clothing, medical care, church services, some schooling, legal support, and arranged for labor contracts . </P> <P> The severe dislocations of war and Reconstruction affected the black population, with a large amount of sickness and death . </P> <P> The Union had a 3 - 1 superiority in railroad mileage and (even more important) an overwhelming advantage in engineers and mechanics in the rolling mills, machine shops, factories, roundhouses and repair yards that produced and maintained rails, bridging equipage, locomotives, rolling stock, signaling gear, and telegraph equipment . In peacetime the South imported all its railroad gear from the North; the Union blockade completely cut off such imports . The lines in the South were mostly designed for short hauls, as from cotton areas to river or ocean ports; they were not designed for trips of more than 100 miles or so, and such trips involved numerous changes of trains and layovers . The South's 8,500 miles (13,700 km) of track comprised enough of a railroad system to handle essential military traffic along some internal lines, assuming it could be defended and maintained . As the system deteriorated because of worn out equipment, accidents and sabotage, the South was unable to construct or even repair new locomotives, cars, signals or track . Little new equipment ever arrived, although rails in remote areas such as Florida were removed and put to more efficient use in the war zones . Realizing their enemy's dilemma, Union cavalry raids routinely destroyed locomotives, cars, rails, roundhouses, trestles, bridges, and telegraph wires . By the end of the war, the southern railroad system was totally ruined . Meanwhile, the Union army rebuilt rail lines to supply its forces . A Union railroad through hostile territory, as from Nashville to Atlanta in 1864, was an essential but fragile lifeline--it took a whole army to guard it, because each foot of track had to be secure . Large numbers of Union soldiers throughout the war were assigned to guard duty and, while always ready for action, seldom saw any fighting . </P> <P> By 1864 the top Union generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman realized the weakest point of the Confederate armies was the decrepitude of the southern infrastructure, so they escalated efforts to wear it down . Cavalry raids were the favorite device, with instructions to ruin railroads and bridges . Sherman's insight was deeper . He focused on the trust the rebels had in their Confederacy as a living nation, and he set out to destroy that trust; he predicted his raid would "demonstrate the vulnerability of the South, and make its inhabitants feel that war and individual ruin are synonymous terms ." Sherman's "March to the Sea" from Atlanta to Savannah in the fall of 1864 burned and ruined every part of the industrial, commercial, transportation and agricultural infrastructure it touched, but the actual damage was confined to a swath of territory totaling about 15% of Georgia . Sherman struck at Georgia in October, just after the harvest, when the food supplies for the next year had been gathered and were exposed to destruction . In early 1865 Sherman's army moved north through the Carolinas in a campaign even more devastating than the march through Georgia . More telling than the twisted rails, smoldering main streets, dead cattle, burning barns and ransacked houses was the bitter realization among civilians and soldiers throughout the remaining Confederacy that if they persisted, sooner or later their homes and communities would receive the same treatment . </P>

Who had more factories the north or the south
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