Northern Economy

• The Northern states--including New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and New York--were free from slavery, highly industrialized, and urbanized. Their economy was mostly based on industry and large farms. They used cotton from the South for different products and perfected their mills to increase textile production. Industrialists thought that the South's slavery practices were a threat to democracy and emancipation, and they started schooling African-American children.
  
  

Industrial Society

• Society in the North consisted mainly of Protestants. They strongly opposed the British oppression that they had fled, and they had strong moral beliefs regarding slavery and freedom. A small percentage consisted of unskilled workers, the rest were skilled workers and farmers. However, after two decades of immigration, the North received Catholic Irish and German-speaking immigrants who were mostly unskilled workers and became the labor force in different industries. Besides workers, industrialists, businessmen and free farmers made up the North society before the Civil War.
  
  

Southern Economy

• The South states, including Virginia, Georgia, Texas and Mississippi, were rural and non-industrial. Their economy was based on land and slave owners. Large plantations used slaves for labor, and the plantation owners grew wealthy as slaves were unpaid. The invention of the cotton gin, which facilitated the separation of cotton from the seeds, allowed plantation owners to gain more profit in a shorter time. Plantation owners fought to preserve slavery and opposed its abolition.
  
  

Slavery

• Landowners, slave owners and slaves basically made up Southern society. Before the Civil War, half the population in the South were slaves. The aristocratic plantation owners had ties with the British aristocracy. They condemned the industrialized society of the North because, they said, they provided their slaves with all the necessities of life--food, clothes, medical assistance--while workers in the North had to pay for everything out of their low wages. But although the middle and upper-middle classes provided a balance in the social and financial structure of the North, a handful of aristocratic landowners in the South were getting richer exercising their power to influence laws in their favor.