Civil War Economy

Mr. Lincoln’s war, The War for Constitutional Liberty, The War of Secession, The Second American Revolution. Whatever one calls it, the Civil War was a major turning point in American history. It was the time when various forms of tension between the northern colonies and the southern colonies divided the two into an immense war costing over 600,000 lives. No single issue could have caused a war of this scale. Thus, the outbreak of the American Civil War was caused by the combination of many demographic pressures in the forms of economic, racial, social, and political stresses. One of the major demographic pressures that lead to the Civil War was a difference in ethnicity between the citizens of the North and the South. From the very beginning, …show more content…
The North had a largely industrial economy as it has 85% of the country’s factories. These factories created a free labor economy because the factories were run by free, white laborers instead of slaves. The South, on the other hand, had had a largely agrarian economy. The invention of the cotton gin in 1794 made it much easier to process cotton and greatly increased the demand for it. This caused the South to move towards a one crop economy based solely upon cotton. The cotton was picked by slaves creating the south’s slave labor economy. This difference did not create a lot of conflict until America began to expand into the west. As the size of America grew, the “divergent economies were the basis for increasing sectional conflict over the territories in the West, which both sections saw as essential to their continued development”. Furthermore, the North and South had very different economies. The North had a industrial society that relied on free labor while the South had an agrarian society that relied on slave labor. This created a conflict between them as each sides wanted to spread expand their economy and therefore their ideas on what kind of labor is correct into each the new, western territories. This conflict became so large that it later became one of the major causes of the civil …show more content…
The North had roots in federalism and believed that the federal government should have jurisdiction over most issues. This caused northern citizens to support compromises such as the Wilmot Proviso or the Missouri Compromise in which the federal government would decide which new states would have slaves without the state’s government’s opinion. The South, in contrast, had roots in antifederalism and believed that there should be much more power left to the state. This caused southern citizens to support compromises such as the Compromise of 1850 in which the state’s government would decide if it would be a slave or free state without the influence of the federal government. This difference in opinion on the power of the federal government lead to a conflict that became one of the largest reasons for the secession of southern states. The first state to secede, South Carolina, “declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in [its] withdrawal from the Federal Union”. Furthermore, the North and the South had a difference in opinion regarding the role of the federal government in issues such as slavery rooted in their original differences on