Differences between the Southern and Northern States led to the Civil War.
As the United States continued to develop and expand throughout the 1800s, a number of distinct characteristics began to surface that differentiated Northern states from Southern states. These came to define the cultural and economic aspects of these two sets of state governments, and eventually came to a head in the incredibly destructive American Civil War.
Economy
As the two regions developed in the 1800s, the industrial revolution marked them in two very different ways. For the North, manufacturing factories began to proliferate and mark the basis of the economic development of the region. The South, however, used the advances of the industrial revolution to increase its agriculture and output of raw materials for sale to factories in the North. One invention that secured the South's continued reliance on agriculture was the cotton gin, a machine that could efficiently separate cotton from its seeds. This greatly increased the South's ability to produce raw cotton, and helped to secure the continued existence of one of the uglier parts of American history -- slavery.
Slavery
Slavery had been a contentious issue during the constitutional convention. While the North had little economic use for slave labor, and little to lose by restoring basic human rights to all human beings, the labor-intensive agriculture of the South gave representatives from this region a stake in preserving slavery's legal status. At the time, a lack of consensus convinced the constitutional framers to compromise on the issue and move on. Industrial developments were already moving in a direction in which the manually intensive labor, for which the South used slaves, would become economically unsustainable. Opponents of slavery believed the institution would die out with its economic usefulness for slave owners. However, Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin changed that. While it's wrong to place the blame for the continuation of slavery in America squarely on Eli Whitney's shoulders, the machine gave southern plantation owners the ability to use slave labor to produce factory-ready cotton on an industrial scale.
Industrialization
Because of the agricultural nature of the Southern economy, its development of an industrial infrastructure was limited. Farming plantations spread across acres and acres of land, and there were only a few railroads, used primarily to ship raw materials from the plantations to Northern factories. When war broke out, this lack of industrial infrastructure came to haunt the south. Without factories, the Southern states were unable to produce munitions as quickly as the factory-rich North. Additionally, the region's lack of a robust railroad system made it harder for the South to ship troops and equipment to the front lines, whereas the Northern states' capacity to develop their already larger rail system allowed them to do just that.
Reconstruction
The South lost the Civil War, but not before the conflict destroyed much of its infrastructure. The process of rebuilding the Southern states, known as "Reconstruction," was a tense and often violent period in which the culture of the pre-war, or antebellum, era were overturned by changes such as the abolishment of slavery. This sudden changing of the old ways met with cultural resistance from the Southern states, some of it violent. Vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan tried to enforce laws of an older era by murdering freed slaves who were practicing their newfound freedoms. The KKK committed similar violence upon anyone one who tried to support the new post-war order. This string of violence would continue into the 1900s.
Tags: Southern states, from Southern, from Southern states, industrial infrastructure, industrial revolution
