Economic Issues Between 1835 And 1860

The North’s economy was based on textiles, shipping, and skilled trades. Their climate was not suited for the same type of agricultural products that the South produced like cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco. Northern states like New England manufactured and shipped goods like guns, clocks, plows and axes (page 399). One reason for the South’s dependence on slavery is because their economy relied on the existence of slave labor. For example, the cultivation of cotton depended largely on slave labor, with 75% of the crop grown on plantations,

As we already noted – in the 1800s expediency of slavery was disputed. While industrial North almost abandoned bondage, by the early 19th century, slavery was almost exclusively confined to the South, home to more than 90 percent of American blacks (Barney W., p. 61). Agrarian South needed free labor force in order to stimulate economic growth. In particular, whites exploited blacks in textile production. This conditioned the differences in economic and social development of the North and South, and opposing viewpoints on the social structure. “Northerners now saw slavery as a barbaric relic from the past, a barrier to secular and Christian progress that contradicted the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and degraded the free-labor aspirations of Northern society” (Barney W., p. 63).

The Northern and Southern sections of the US had various economical differences which led to the Civil War. During that time period, the Northern part of the country’s economy was heavily based on industrial practices, in comparison to the Southern economy which was founded on agricultural practices. In the map of Railroads in 1860, railroads were heavily located in the Northern part of the US compared to the South because the Northern economy demands the need for railroads in order to transport the

One thing that South did that the North did not do was that it used slaves to tend its large plantations and other duties. The south also made a business of this and rented, traded and sold slaves to pay debts. Therefore, slaves were seen as property of individuals and businesses and represented the largest part of the region’s personal and corporate wealth. But not only did the North and South became divided economically because of manufacturing and railroad differences. It also became divided due to tariffs. When a protective tariff was established in 1828 to promote the industry of northern industrialists, many Southerners felt it unfairly targeted their agricultural-based economic system.This ultimately led to conflict between the two different economic

Between the time period of 1840 and 1860, slavery played an influential and pivotal role in the development of a new southern lifestyle. In the struggle for dominance in America, slavery was the South’s stronghold and the underlying cause in much of their motives for many of the economic instigations along with the affirmative political actions. By dominating the everyday southerner’s life, slavery also dominated the economic and political aspects of life during the height of the slavery period. By the 1840’s the Southern economy had become almost entirely slave and and agriculturally dependent. Without the dependence of slaves in the south, a person was to remain landless, poverty stricken or struggling to sustain life through the means

One of these economic differences was how goods were produced. While both the North and South were successful in the production of goods, the North was much more efficient. This was because they used manufacturing industries instead of farms, which were used by the South more. The North depended on the South for farming and the South depended on the North for machinery. For example, in Document 2, Virginian Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams from Massachusetts, a letter stating, “For finer things, we shall depend on your northern manufacturers. Of these companies we have none. We use little machinery.” To clarify, the South had very little machines and companies, therefore, they depended greatly on the North who were very advanced in this technology. Nevertheless, the North also depended greatly on the South, who were almost entirely run on agriculture. The South’s agricultural items were sent to the North to be manufactured. For instance, the South harvested cotton, which was then sent over to the North to be made into textiles. As conflict arose between the North and South, the economy would suffer as they relied so heavily on each other. Likewise, the North and South had different forms of labor. As aforementioned, the North’s economy included a great deal of manufacturing, while the South did not. In the North, for the most part, slavery was abolished. The North relied on free labor, which was the ideology that one could work for payment and that one had the opportunity to raise this wage through hard work. In the South, however, slavery was a key to the economy. At first, the southern slaves had to separate the seeds from cotton fibers by hand, but with Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, cotton could be separated by the machine. The cotton gin revolutionized the production of cotton by greatly speeding up the process. Now, slaves could process more cotton. However, with more

In the time just before the Civil War, the United States was one of the most successful nations in the world. The United States had become the world’s leading cotton producing country and had developed industry, which would in the future, surpass that of Great Britain. Also, the United States possessed an advanced railroad and transportation system. However, despite its successes, the United States was becoming increasingly divided. The North and the South had many distinct differences in terms of their social, cultural, and economic characteristics that brought about sectionalism and, eventually, the Civil War.

Between 1800 and 1865, slaves lived in the Southern States and worked in the tobacco, wheat, rice, corn and cotton plantations. Essentially, slavery was an economic institution with far-reaching benefits to slaveholders, since the value of slave labor was considerably more than the cost of their maintenance. Demands for democratization, respect for human dignity and American Civil War presented a major turning point in the institution of slavery as farmers turned to lesser labor-intensive production methods such as the use of Eli Whitney 's Cotton Gin. This paper analyzes different ways in which institution of Slavery affected the development of American South between 1800 & 1865, and the lives of people living in the region. In doing so the paper considers economic, political, social and cultural implications of the institution.

The economic differences between the North and South were clearly defined and distinctly divided the two regions ideologically. As shown by the various maps in Document 1, the amount of railroads in the North in 1860 far surpassed the number of those in the South, while slave density and cotton production in approximately the same year were concentrated heavily in the South. From this information it can be inferred that the North’s economy relied primarily on industry, and thus manufacturing, as opposed to the Southern economy of commercial cotton production. It can also be inferred from the maps that the South relied much more heavily on slave labor than the North, which was a major point of conflict between the two regions and significantly contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War. (Doc 1).

Before the Civil War broke out in the United State the North and South had differences contributing to the tensions between the two regions in manufacturing and economics. Some of these differences included value of manufacturing and major railroads in the South and North. During 1860 the Northern states made 1,130,200,000 billion dollars more in manufacturing than the south. This difference is because during 1860 the South’s main source of income came from slavery, cotton, and tobacco. They did not have any reason to manufacture and have factories for they weren’t making much money off it.

The North and South’s differences were too great to make the environment work. For one, the South believed in having their plantation agriculture, and the Union believed in industrialized capitalism. Another reason was because the union had the idea that all men had been created equal, and slaves should be free. The Confederates were arrogant about that idea, and believe “Negros” were born to be slaves. “The Confederacy, by contrast, "is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.( "Civil War: Causes of the War." Encyclopedia of the Confederacy. Ed. Richard Nelson Current. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. U.S. History in Context. Web. 2 July 2015.) These opposing ideas is what lead to the start of the Civil war. Before Eli Whitney created the cotton gin, slavery was almost going to cease to exist, because it cost more to have slaves compared to that of what they could

The North and South had almost opposite economic systems. The North was industrialized, with factories and sweatshops, whereas the South had an agricultural society, with farming and plantations, with cotton as their main crop. To further exacerbate this divide, in the 1830’s and 40’s, the North experienced the Industrial Revolution, a breakthrough of power-driven machinery. The Industrial Revolution quickened the pace of manufacturing and transportation. Faster production led to an increase in capital. As Document 1a proves, by 1860, most Northern states had a much higher value of manufacturing than the South.

The primary focus of selling slaves for profit became an obstacle due to expanding slave populations that were needed to sustain profitability and crop production. This economic perspective defines the “hegemonic” struggle between the agrarian pre-capitalist South and the industrial capitalism of the North in the late antebellum era. Of course, the South relied heavily on cotton crops as a primary source of the southern economy, which forced them to be aggressive in terms of acquiring new lands to the west. In this limited and monolithic culture, the refusal to invest in industrial factories and wage earning forms of labor kept southern plantation owners in this form of closed agricultural system. Therefore, the political effects of the Missouri Compromise and the conflict between free and slave states became a serious issue for plantations owners that relied so heavily on selling slaves and seeking out new land to grow cotton. The southern plantation owners feared industrial factories due to the threat of wage earning white laborers threatening the slave owning monopoly. In this manner, Genovese (1989) defines the dual role of land and slavery as a systemic aspect of a pre-capitalist expansion into the west that sought to countermand the northern industrial system of capitalist

In conclusion, in The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South, Genovese is able to convey two important ideas from slavery in the South in terms of its political economy. First, the slaveholder power and structure of the Southern society relied on slavery and its expansion, which rejected adopting the North’s industrial and bourgeois system and secondly, slavery was ineffective and could have been improved, at the cost of change in structure, which the South refused to consider.

In the mid-19th century, while the United States was experiencing an era of stupendous growth. However a fundamental economic difference existed between the country’s northern and southern regions which led to the conflict. While in the North, manufacturing and industry was well developed, and agriculture was less likely depended on farming. Instead, the South’s economy was based on a system of large-scale farming that depended on the black slaves to grow certain crops, especially cotton and tobacco. The economy of the North and the