Question

The South was the problem." The tragedy of the Civil War era stemmed from the South's
"peculiar" relationship with the rest of the nation. Defend? Criticize?

Answer 1

Southern states ' secession in 1860–61 and the resulting outbreak of armed strife were the culmination of decades of growing sectional conflict over slavery. The Northern states ' economy was increasingly modernizing and diversifying between 1815 and 1861. While agriculture remained the dominant sector in the North — mostly smaller farms dependent on free labour— industrialization had taken root there.

The Southern economy, on the other hand, was based primarily on large farms (plants) cultivating commercial crops such as cotton and relying on slaves as the main labor force. Instead of investing in factories or railroads as Northerners did, Southerners invested their money in slaves— even more than in land; by 1860, 84% of the capital invested in manufacturing was invested in free states.

Southerners, this seemed to be a sound business decision as late as 1860. In the 1850s, the price of cotton, the dominant commodity of the South, had skyrocketed, and the value of slaves— who were property after all — rose proportionately. By 1860, Southern whites ' per capita income was double that of Northerners, and Southerners were three-fifths of the country's richest individuals.

White Southerners feared the institution would be consigned to certain death by prohibiting the expansion of slavery. The two sides became more and more divided over the course of the decade, and lawmakers were less able to contain the conflict by negotiation. When the 1860 presidential election was won by Abraham Lincoln, the nominee of the distinctly anti-slavery Republican Party, seven Southern states carried out their threat and seceded, organizing as the Confederate States of America.

New South's most important project was the creation in the South of textile mills. Starting in the early 1880s, northern capitalists invested in the construction of textile mills in the southern Appalachian foothills of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, attracted to the area by being able to pay half the rate of jobs in northern mills to southern workers. Because of these low wages, the mills gave the southern economies in which they were founded only a small boost.