Civil War
How did it happen that the North won the Civil War, notwithstanding the fact that the South had its own powerful advantages? This paper explores that question using chapters 11, 12, 13 and 14 for reference sources.
Background on the Southern economy and politics
The South greatly expanded its agricultural industry (the plantation system) between 1800 and 1860, and in doing so became "increasingly unlike the North," the author explains in Chapter 11. The "lower South" relied on cotton (short staple cotton) and the market for all that cotton in New England and in Great Britain made many plantation owners wealthy. Because of the skyrocketing cotton industry, more and more slaves were needed to tend those crops, and some 410,000 slaves were moved from the upper South to the lower South. And yet the South depended economically on the North (which had a booming industrial growth period) and the South did not establish many industries besides cotton to beef up its economy (p. 302). Those landowners with hundreds of slaves and huge cotton plantations controlled the politics; hence, a great deal of political power was in the hands of a few wealthy men. Hence, the lack of industrial strength was a Southern weakness, and the existence of a commercial-industrial culture in the North was its strength.
Slavery was a business, not just a social system in the South. Slavery was the foundation of the agricultural...
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