My beloved father was a proud Army Air Force veteran of World War II. He depised anything that smacked of being unpatriotic, and had a real disdain for actress Jane Fonda, whose 1960s anti-war antics incensed him (and left me with a total disregard for the Atlanta Braves years later when she and Ted Turner owned them). Dad was not a fan of doing business with one's enemies.
That being said, it was common practice early in the Civil War for businessmen in both the North and South to figure out methods of maintaining some semblance of trade, despite government orders that forbade such activities. One such entrepreneuring merchant and industrialist was York County's own Arthur Briggs Farquhar, who owned a burgeoning business that produced and sold farming implements and machinery, including "new-fangled" steel plows. Farquhar wrote about how he was able to skip being in the army by paying a substitute (a common practice that even Abe Lincoln used as an example to others), and how he kept his business going despite the legislated loss of several Southern clients.
