The XIX century was an era of the unprecedented rise of American civilization, but its results were different for the North and the South. In the North, with the rapid development of capitalism, social inequality is growing, urbanization generates poverty and unsanitary conditions in cities, and cruel exploitation of workers reigns in enterprises. An agrarian civilization developed in the South, in which patriarchal traditions mitigated social inequality. In the XIX century, two local civilizations were formed in the USA, which were facilitated by the geographical factor. Geography was an important factor of how economic relations between the South and the North were established.
The distinctive feature of the USA has always been development, but in the XIX century, the country was experiencing an unprecedented rise which was mostly caused by geographical differences between the South and the North. Unprecedented growth was registered in three directions. These include the fact that the influx of population increased fourfold; the territory expanded fourfold due to conquests, annexation, and purchase of fertile land in the South. Moreover, the gross national product, made in the industrial North, increased seven times. No nation of that time could compare with the American one in at least one of the listed indicators, and the combination of all three points turned the United States into the world’s leading economic power. The main machine tool manufacturing enterprises and most of the factories were located in the North. As noted above, such industrial development of the Yankees can be explained by a special geographical location, distinctive from the South, with the impossibility of maintaining a plantation economy.
Wage labor in the North was also a form of dependence that contradicted the republican principles on which the United States stood. Instead of receiving fair pay for their work, artisans they were forced to receive a certain salary, conditioned by the market. By 1850, several large cities had grown up in the South, whose population was mainly engaged in production for the needs of plantations. Artisans, mechanics, miners, railway workers, and port workers lived and worked in them. By 1860, this young working class began to organize into trade unions, which carried out some independent political actions. Only a tenth of southerners lived in cities, compared to a quarter of northerners. This is determined by the fact that it was more profitable to use fertile soil to keep house. The military profession of men was twice as much demand in the South as in the North, while the ratio among cultural figures was exactly the opposite, Yankees were three times more represented in business and six times more among engineers, since farming was not available in those geographical conditions. Since the slave labor of slaves employed on plantations remained dominant in the economy of the South, the ruling class was the slave owners-planters. The different climates and geographies of the North and South made them susceptible, first to tobacco and later to cotton production, and became a major engine of the Southern economy, which had profited from slavery.
Thus, significant economic differences between two economically powerful regions in one state were largely determined by geographical factors. The latter, including the peculiarity of the climate, soil fertility, and the location of water and mountains, determined the economic structure of the region. The trade mechanisms between the two regions was determined by the transporting ways Having different views on property relations, representatives of the South and the North continued to contact each other as long as it was possible.
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