Unlike the North, Southern states did not industrialize and remained primarily rural. The North and the South started to become very different when Elie Wiesel invented the cotton gin. The cotton gin could work as fast as 50 people working by hand. Since cotton could be processed more easily, Southern planters wanted to grow more cotton on fields. White landowners that started a business selling cotton depended on slave labor to plant and pick cotton. Later on, the South only accounted for only a small percentage of the nation’s manufacturing in the 1850s. The market for manufactured goods in the South was smaller than it was in the North. There were several main reasons the South did not industrialize. The first reason was the boom in cotton
