How substantial were the differences between the North and South on the eve of the Civil War?

Clare Ford

The differences between the Northern and Southern halves of the United States were substantial on the eve of the Civil War. Both sides detested the other for reasons originating from as far back as the 1840. Sectional tensions had grown, with both Northern and Southern States provoking each other into conflict over their differences.

Economic, social, political and cultural contrasts led to the unchangeable disintegration of relations between the states and so their union in the years following the Fort Sumter fiasco of 1860. But these differences had been there for much longer before they caused such problems. Northerners demanded high tariffs on imports to protect their goods from cheap foreign competition. The South, however, wanted just the opposite: low tariffs on the many goods it imported. The persistent conflict over the tariff was crucial because at the time the federal government had few other sources of revenue. Neither personal nor corporate income taxes existed. Thus the tariffs funded the turnpikes, railroads, and canals that were so important to Northern industrialization and Western expansion. The South preferred to do without these improvements in return for lower tariffs. This conflict was never fully resolved until after the Civil War. Differences in economic thought and practice between the North and South characterized the United States on the eve of the Civil War.

Problems initially began because of disagreements over slavery. There were fundamental differences in the economy of the north and the south of the U.S. Industry in the north demanded fresh investments to seek more profits. While these drastic economic changes were going on in the north, the people in the south continued to follow the life styles of their Scot, Irish and Welsh ancestors. Although the majority of the southerners owned no slaves and worked on farms, a small section was big plantation owners with many slaves. Because of this fundamental difference, their interests often clashed. The North had nearly all the trade, industry and cities but the south was a land of farms, especially cotton plantations, which relied on slave labour. The North was essentially against this so-called “peculiar institution”, whereas the South, with its plantation crops and religious social hierarchy, was very much in favour of it. Since its settlement, the southern United States received most of its income from farming, which depended heavily on slave labour. By 1860 cotton ' King Cotton,' as it became known was the chief crop of the South and totalled 57 percent of all U.S. exports. Largely because of the dominance of cotton, the South resisted the industrialization that swept the North in the nineteenth century. In the pre-Civil War Southern states the economy was dominated by plantation agriculture and farming represented the most commonly practiced occupation. Southern Plantations included tobacco, rice, sugar cane and cotton. Slavery was an economically efficient system of production, adaptable to tasks ranging from agriculture to mining. So the Southern economy was based on slavery as the labour was cheap, output was high and so profits could be high. Slavery profited the Southern economy in the short term. Slavery played a critical role in economic development of the United States of America. One crop, slave-grown cotton provided over half of all U.S. export earnings. Therefore slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital investment, iron, and manufactured good that laid the basis for American economic growth. In addition, precisely because the South specialized in cotton production, the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the slave south, including textile factories, a meat processing industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers. But the North had grown to be more industrial. Its climate and terrain was generally unsuitable for slavery (cotton plantations), and it was more concerned by European immigration, its associated problems of crime. The Northern economy was based on industry and there was a lot of factory work. The north’s economy was thriving on the eve of the civil war without slavery whereas the south’s relied on it.

This is a preview of the whole essay

Southern society and culture was very much based upon the suppression of blacks. However the North came to accept black immigrants. Consequently, Northerners began to see Southerners as a brutal, unprincipled race of uncivilised ruffians. The South’s response to this was embodied by the 1832 South Carolina Ordinance of Nullification, which accused the North of victimising the culture and Southern states, and of arbitrarily imposing prohibitive taxes on cotton and Southern goods. Later, the South particularly John Calhoun, in his objections to Henry Clay’s 1850 Compromise which was to placate sectional antagonises accused their northern neighbours of a long list of offences. The South claimed that it was the victim of restrictive tariffs on Southern products, the implementation of the apparently abolitionist Personal Liberty Laws, and that Northern aggression had been manifested in the Wilmot Proviso which was favoured by free soilers and the Republican Party. The Missouri Compromise which allowed Missouri the 24th state to become a slave state was, in Calhoun’s view offensive and repulsive to the decent and civilised inhabitants of the South. The North was enraged by Calhoun’s protest in the face of what had appeared to be a successful compromise. They believed that Clay a champion of Southern rights had handled the situation deftly and without overdue bias, although there were obviously clauses that they ardently disagreed with.

Sectional tension in America graduated from focusing on slavery and began to concentrate on the notion of Slave Power. The North’s belief in the Slave Power conspiracy was to have dire consequences. They thought that the South was seeking to extend slavery into the new western territories in New Mexico, California and Utah, and that it wanted to construct a vast Central American slave empire. In doing this, the Southerners would be able to marginalize the North, or so the new Northern abolitionist movement claimed. The Slave Power notion was perpetuated by Southern opposition to the Free states, and by its obviously intrusive meddling in the state of Kansas. There, the state’s future as to whether it would be a free or a slave state was to be decided by popular election. The South rigged the elections by using sly border ruffians from the slave state of Missouri, and consequently won the vote. Moreover, the Know Nothing party, which grew substantially during the late 1850s, drove Northern sentiments against immigration. The North began to associate immigrants including blacks with crime and disorder, and so was shocked when the apparently pro-Southern Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 which allowed the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery within there borders, repealed the longstanding Missouri Compromise. The North believed the Act to be another piece of evidence proving the existence of Slave Power. The North genuinely believed in a Slave Power conspiracy that had been exaggerated by the Republican Party, who relied on substantial anti-Southern sentiment to secure votes. Although there is much to suggest that Slave Power did not exist on a scale as massive as the North believed, it was true that the South advocated slavery and sought its expansion. They wanted, for example, a Southern Pacific railway to further their slave-based economy, and proposed slavery expansion into the Louisiana Purchase territories which extended from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, the West, and Cuba. By 1860 though, the North’s opposition to these proposals was enhanced by such blatantly unfair, biased and undemocratic events as the Kansas electoral fiasco, the Dred Scott Judgement of 1857 to make slavery legal in all territories. The South, meanwhile, was similarly angered by the sweeping tide of abolitionism in the North. This had manifested itself in events such as the outrageous John Brown raid, the apparent refusal of President Buchanan to intervene in the disastrous 1857 economic depression, and the election of Abraham Lincoln on an almost entirely pro-Northern platform in 1860.The abolitionists drove divisions between the North and South because they made the North hate Southern slaveholders. They also infuriated Southerners and polarised American society and heightened sectional tensions. So while the North was suspicious of Southern Slave Power, the South was suspicious of Northern abolitionism, and this was the situation and the substantial difference between the North and the South in 1860 just before Civil War broke out.

On the eve on the American Civil War the North and South were very different so war was more or less inevitable. With the Southerners desire to become a separate country and the North’s different economics and cultures. By 1860, the differences between the North and South had become so great that Northerners and Southerners felt as if they belonged to two different countries. For two halves of a union to posses such different qualities and ways of life it was almost impossible to avoid civil war. But slavery in the South antagonised the North for example with the Fugitive Slave Act and the North provoked the South with the Abolitionists.

With more accommodating compromises and more astute president’s war may have been avoided. However the Union could not exist for much longer the way it was with such division. It was unlikely the South would give up its profitable way of life but also as impossible, that the North would lay down its morals i.e. slavery and economic views. Southerners had no desire to abandon a system on which their entire economy depended. Up to 1860, only a few extremists in the South wanted to create a separate Southern country. Moderates of both North and South hoped that a compromise could be reached over their differences about slavery and taxes. But instead the fight over slavery contributed extensively to starting the civil war. The war is sometimes called “the war of Southern Independence” showing the union was divided because the South wanted to break away. Civil War became inescapable and a necessary to resolve the North and South’s issues once and for all.

How substantial were the differences between the North and South on the eve of the Civil War?

This is a preview of the whole essay

Document Details

Related Essays

How substantial were the differences between the North and South on the eve...

'To what extent had the USA become two different societies by the eve of th...

The Korean war and the conflict between North and South.

Why did the South lose the Civil War?