Cultural Differences Between North And South

From the moment the ink dried on the Constitution, Northerners and Southerners carried deeply held differences about the meaning of nationhood. For the South, the nation was only an alliance of sovereign states that had power independent from the federal government. To the North, the creation of the Constitution was the start of a nation with a strong federal government that overruled the states. These opposing viewpoints were the result of the different cultural identities and political institutions of the two regions, and were reinforced as the nation developed. The South developed around an agricultural lifestyle, based upon the labor force provided by slavery, and dominated by a landed aristocracy. In contrast, the North developed into an industrial powerhouse, with an economy based on factories that were run by a free workforce. These different identities (the economic and cultural divide between these two …show more content…
The land and locality-based culture of the South reflected their view of the nation’s identity as a group of states that worked together to a point, but had their own political institutions and laws that overruled any federal authority. In contrast, the North had a national identity of a nation where a man could advance himself regardless of where he came from. This identity required a nation where no state was greater than the federal government, because a strong central power to regulate trade and economy was necessary to allow for advancement. The growing divide between the two regions made it increasingly difficult for them to find common ground on which they could compromise. The South needed a weak union to preserve their agricultural, slave-based system, and the North needed a strong one to regulate trade and keep the states cooperating. Those differences could not be solved peacefully, and were settled in the Civil