Industrialization also contributed to urban growth. Military necessity spurred southern industrialization. At the beginning of the war, the South contained only 15 percent of the factories in the United States. But unable to buy industrial goods from the North and limited in its trade with Europe, the South was forced to industrialize. By January 1863, the huge Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond employed more than 2,500 men, black and white. A factory to produce cannons opened in Selma, Alabama, where more than 10,000 people worked in war industries. According to a local newspaper, clothing and shoe factories had “sprung up almost like magic” in Natchez and Jackson, Mississippi. War widows and orphans, enslaved blacks, and white men too old or injured to fight were recruited for industrial labor in many cities.

The vast expansion of the South’s cities and industry enhanced class consciousness during the war. When Virginia legislators introduced a bill in the fall of 1863 to control food prices, Richmond workers hailed it by voicing their resentment toward the rich. “From the fact that he consumes all and produces nothing,” they proclaimed, “we know that without [our] labor and production the man with money could not exist.” Workers also criticized lavish balls hosted by the wives of wealthy industrialists, planters, and politicians during the war. Women like Mary Boykin Chesnut, a planter’s wife, insisted that such events were necessary to maintain morale and demonstrate that the South was far from defeated. But the Richmond Enquirer captured the views of the laboring class, arguing that these events were “shameful displays of indifference to national calamity . . . a mockery of the misery and desolation that covers the land.”