Not the common people but the wealthy elite in the "Empire State" are still causing grief to all the rest of us with their greed and their influence on the government.
Your reading and understanding of the civil war lacks the current writings of the times
I have read much of the writings of that time and from various sources, but what people write, and what financial numbers show patterns of, are two different things.
Let me show you a map that may give you an idea of what was going on.
72% of the money represented by those stacks of coins came from the South.