"North vs. South"

 

In the decades before the Civil War, northern and southern development followed increasingly different paths. By 1860, the North contained 50 percent more people than the South. It was more urbanized and attracted many more European immigrants. The northern economy was more diversified into agricultural, commercial, manufacturing, financial, and transportation sectors. In contrast, the South had smaller and fewer cities and a third of its population lived in slavery. In the South, slavery impeded the development of industry and cities and discouraged technological innovation. Nevertheless, the South was wealthy and its economy was rapidly growing.

The South developed a new sense of “nationalism” that was rooted in its sense of distinctiveness and its perception that it was ringed by enemies from the North, where militant abolitionism had emerged.  Southern travelers who ventured into the North regarded it as a “strange and distant land”.

By the late of 1840s, a new and more explicit racist rationale for slavery had emerged.  White southern argued that it was a beneficial institution that created a hierarchical society superior to the leveling democracy of the North. By the same time, a growing number of southern ministers and politicians began to denounce the North’s form of capitalism as “wage slavery”. The condition of free labor, they argued, was actually “worse than slavery”, “Northern workers were simply “slaves without masters”.  More and more
Southern defended slavery on explicitly racial grounds, drawing on new pseudoscientific theories of racial inferiority. 

Seeking to free their region from cultural, economic, and religious dependence on the North, southern “nationalists” sought to promote southern economic self-sufficiency, to create southern-oriented educational and religions institutions, and to develop a distinctive southern literature. Beginning in 1837, southern leaders held the first of a series of commercial conventions in an attempt to diversify the southern economy and to rescue the South from Northern “pecuniary and commercial supremacy”

Regional independence was also called for in religion. Due in large part to fear of antislavery agitation, southern Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians sought to sever their denominational affiliations with northern churches. In the early 2000s, only the Baptists remain divided. Southerners also called for a distinctive and peculiarly southern literature. More than 30 periodicals were founded with the word “Southern” in their title, all intended to “breathe a Southern spirit, and sustain a strictly Southern character.” Authors such as Nathaniel Beverly Tucker and William Gilmore Simms called on the South to write on southern themes and to overcome the taunts of “Englishmen and Northern men” that they were intellectually inferior. [1]

America continued to expand its ethnic diversity during the 19^th century, with many Germans and Irish coming to America. Not everyone was happy about the changes and the fear of Irish in particular as they were very poor and came in large numbers. [2]. Many Southerns, especially elite women, did not see Irish servants as whites. Northerns stigmatized them much as Southerns stigmatized blacks [3]

The differences between the North and South are remarkable in so many aspects, the most significant exponent, is the American Civil War (1861–1865), also known as the "War Between the States". Eleven southern slave states manifested their secession from the United States to form "the Confederacy”, the other 25 states supported the federal government (the Union). After four years of struggle, the Confederacy gave up, and slavery was abolished absolutely in the nation.

Click on the following video to know about the origins of slavery in America:

http://www.history.com/videos/origins-of-slavery#origins-of-slavery

 

[1] Mintz, S., & McNeil, S. (2012). Digital History. Retrieved 09/13/2012 from http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/

[2] Enloe, Karin. Google Sites, Last modified 2012. Accessed September 10, 2012. https://sites.google.com/site/drecultural/home/early-republic-through-civil-war.

 [3] Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2011), 41.