4. THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC GETS UP AND RUNNING

GROWING SECTIONAL TENSIONS

Economically speaking, the American South had always functioned as a supplier of raw materials to England: tobacco, dyes and – at first – small amounts of cotton.  New England on the other hand had geared its economy largely around the idea of meeting its own needs locally, from agriculture to finished industrial products.

The impact of the industrial revolution.  The New England or "Yankee" temperament also made for a lot of industrial creativity – with Samuel Slater in the 1790s for instance setting up first in Rhode Island, then Massachusetts, then Connecticut and New Hampshire, spinning mills which turned cotton into thread – at about the same time that Eli Whitney invented the machine that could do the work of masses of individuals (slaves mostly) in removing the troublesome seeds from cotton balls, revolutionizing the cotton industry in the American South – able now to fill the industrial needs not only of the spinning and weaving factories of Britain, but also similar factories in the American North.

While this vital North-South industrial relationship should have strengthened the ties between these two sections of the country, actually the reverse resulted.  While such developments in the North encouraged the ambitious, hard-working and inventive character of Yankee culture, the South tended to see in this economic development the ability to go deeper into its traditional feudal social dream of a leisured gentry standing atop a social order of hard-working slaves – slaves stripped of any ambition or ability to think inventively.  To be sure there were plenty of poor Whites in the South found well outside this romantic dream, living desperate lives trying to compete with the huge plantations in the cotton export business.  But these poor Whites themselves were caught up in the same Cinderella dream – hoping, even believing, that they too one day would be sitting on their own verandas, sipping Mint Juleps while discussing social affairs and grand ideas.

Over time, such an industrial dynamic was pushing the North way ahead of the South in terms of overall economic development.  Factories were going up everywhere and infrastructure in the form of major roads, canals, and even the first of the railroads was being laid out everywhere.  To be sure, some of this same activity was taking place in the South, but not at nearly the same degree as in the North.  Industrial entrepreneurship certainly did occur across the South.  But it did not bring the prestige or stir human ambitions and readiness to undertake the hard work to bring about entrepreneurial success the way it did in the North.