Emerging from the Civil War and Reconstruction as both agent and product of northern economic development, the American state's close identification with the interests of northern industry and finance created a political economy in which the South was systematically impoverished. Estimates of war devastation within the bounds of the vanquished Confederacy range as high as 40 percent of antebellum wealth, and the postwar American state contributed little or no assistance to the rebuilding of the region. The temporary imposition of cotton excise taxes even further depressed what little recovery occurred in the years immediately after the war. Over the longer term, the operation of the tariff, military pension disbursements, Treasury debt and money policies, transportation subsidies, and the concentration of federal services and employees in the North all contributed to a massive redistribution of wealth out of the South into northern industrial and westward expansion. The systemic impact of these policies reinforced the already significant advantages the North possessed in the national marketplace. The South's weak position in the national political economy was most evident in the structure and operation of the financial system. Charter restrictions on entry into the national bank system, for example, retarded bank formation in peripheral agricultural regions, while reserve requirements promoted the consolidation of capital in national financial centers, where it accelerated industrial expansion.