Civil War in America

I. THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE “NORTH” AND THE “SOUTH”

Those differences were first due to geography and the character of each region. While the colonies of the North soon favoured industry and the development of maritime commerce, the climate in the Southern colonies favoured agriculture on a large scale. Tobacco was their first main resource, but, in 1793, the invention of the “cotton gin” by Eli Whitney, which enabled a quick removal of cotton seeds, increased the amount of land devoted to cotton-growing in the Southern States and this resource quickly became capital in the economy of those regions. Still based on the model of the plantation, the mode of living in the South relied on workforce provided by slaves. The two areas were, originally, not settled by the same kind of people: while the North was still underpinned by Puritanism, the South was dominated by an aristocracy of planters – which made the Southern society more “European”, in a way – and it has often been written that this opposition was the same as the one between the “Roundheads” and the “Cavaliers” during the English Civil War, back in the 16th century. Conservatism somewhat gripped the South, but it was far from being a uniform society. Within it, the majority of Whites were neither slave owners nor close relatives of slave owners. Their majority status in a society organized around slavery created enormous tensions, all the more so as Black people were not all slaves. Some of them had been emancipated, even though they were a small number, and the very conditions of slaves ranged from a fairly comfortable living to daily ordeal and despair. Dependence lay at the heart of the slave condition and made it unbearable, as the slaves escaped natural law to be placed under the law of one man.

The causes of the perpetuation of slavery in the South have been extensively studied, but the distinctive character is nowhere more blatant than in the lack of Southern urbanization. In 1860, there were only five Southern cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants and four of them were on the periphery of it, looking northward economically and culturally: Baltimore, Saint Louis, Louisville and Washington, D.C. Only New Orleans, a cosmopolitan city with French and Spanish roots, was located in the Deep South. Apart from Charleston (SC) and Mobile (AL), the great interior of the South was almost totally rural. This low level of urbanization reflected not only the region’s lack of modernization, but also the slave system, as, in general, slavery and urban life made a poor mix.

On the contrary, urban living characterized the North and big cities such as New York and Philadelphia had already become urban giants struggling to integrate the new residents who poured in from the surrounding countryside as well as from abroad. Railroad, for example, opened vast new markets, pulling iron, timber and coal industries along in its tracks; Pennsylvania was at the heart of a vast coalfield, experienced an economic development estimated twelve times larger than Europe’s. This frantic urbanization did not mean the disappearance of agriculture, as farmers tended to produce more and more for the market. In the cities, a new class of labourers also emerged and the Industrial Revolution that was taking place in England was also taking place in the North of the USA.

Even though there were sharp

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