Making boots and shoes for Northern soldiers laid the foundation of America's great shoe industry.

Machinery had already been applied to shoe manufacture, but only to a limited extent; under the pressure of war conditions, however, American inventive skill found ways of performing mechanically almost all the operations that had formerly been done by hand.

The McKay sewing machine, one of the greatest of our inventions, which was perfected in the second year of the war, did as much perhaps as any single device to keep our soldiers well shod and comfortable.

The necessity of feeding these same armies created our great packing plants.

Though McCormick had invented his reaper several years before the war, the new agricultural machinery had made no great headway.