The Civil War transformed labor and the working class. Many of the men who went to war in 1861 came home four years later to find that the jobs they previously held no longer existed or no longer paid enough. The result was large-scale unemployment following the war. Additionally, the war expanded the size and the cost of the federal government. In order to fight the war, the Lincoln administration issued large government contracts handed out to big businesses for goods, and businesses that received those contracts grew rich on federal dollars. The war taught many companies that the government could be a lucrative source of income, and they continued looking for these opportunities after the war was over, leading to a growth of big business that lasted through the rest of the nineteenth century. All these factors supported the spread of the capitalist economy that increasingly characterized America after the Civil War.