Industry in the North was making rapid progress; there was urbanisation and big cities such as Chicago were taking form. However the North was still agricultural as well as being industrialised. The south also had made some progress, however not in the same way as the North. In the South, the cotton gin made the processing of cotton easy and by 1860, 60% of US exports consisted of cotton. Although this may seem good for the South, it still meant that shipping the cotton was impossible from the south, and therefore they had to look towards the North. The industrialized North had the facilities and the harbors to ship the cotton but this meant that the South had to pay the North to do so. The cotton exhausted the soil very quickly and therefore the centre of production had to move westwards towards the Mississippi and Alabama, this expansion was encouraged by the UK.
Another difference between the North and the South was that the North had realized how important education was, and therefore was giving free education even to the poor. However the South had only one school for orphans and didn’t give much attention to education.
Their ideas on how the government system should be run also differed. The South wanted individual states to have more power than the Federal government, but the North thought that the Federal government should be given most of the power to come to decisions for the separate states.
The Mexican war in 1846 made the hostility between the North and the South even greater. Mr. Polk (President of USA at the time) convinced congress that USA should go to war with Mexico as they were not handing California and New Mexico to the USA. The war did take place, and 2 years later the USA had won and California and New Mexico was now owned by the USA. The Mexican cession included Utah, Nevada, California, New Mexico and Arizona, the question was whether they should be Free states or slave states. Voting would be very difficult as people voted on sectional lines and so the outcome would have always been fifty – fifty as 2 people represented each state and the number of states in the North and the South was equal. This showed a substantial difference between the North and the South and on the subject of what the Mexican Cession should be Free or Slave states. After some time Stephen Douglas (a politician) finally came to the decision of what should happen to the Mexican Cession, the end result was that California came in as a Free State and popular sovereignty was bought into New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Arizona.
There were also some similarities between the North and the South as well, for example both had a high code of honour. The people in the South were more respectable and had higher status if they had a lot of slaves. The North also had a high code of honour and this depended on their education and careers. Both the North and the South were also very religious and practiced their religion.
Overall, I feel that the differences were very substantial between the North and the South as these differences played a part to the Civil War. The main difference was due to slavery and their opinions about it what made it more worse was that the North was strongly against slavery and the South firmly believed in it, as both sides had extreme ideologies which were completely opposite, it caused hostility. If the North felt that slavery is bad but did not interfere with the South the tension would not have been so bad.
