by Derek Viger

Created on: September 23, 2008   Last Updated: March 01, 2010

There is a tendency to simplify events in history. America fought in Vietnam to stop the spread of communism; America was brought into World War II by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The cause of the American Civil War is often summed up in one word, slavery. The true answer is far more complex than that and so are the events that led to the Northern victory. Many social and economic factors played a hand in the prelude and conflict itself. Only then does the drama of the Civil War truly unfold itself.

The economies of antebellum North and South had obvious differences, mainly an industrial North and an agrarian South. Rich farmland in the Southern States and slaves as a source for labor allowed plantation owners to make large profits off their crops. The invention of the cotton gin, which mechanically separated seeds from the cotton, by Eli Whitney expanded the profits of cotton growers.

Demand for cotton grew rapidly. During the 1830s more than half of US exports were cotton. On the eve of the Civil War, the south grew two-thirds of the world's cotton. The rapidly industrializing north consumed much of this cotton, as did Europe. Rising demand and rising prices enticed many slave owners to pull slaves from the cities to work on their plantations.
Farmland in the north was not well suited for much beyond sustenance farming. Innovations in railroads and canals contributed to a great growth of industry in the north. Imported goods from farm rich areas of the nation to the north made specialized farming impractical there.

The farmer seeking to maximize financial return on his labor"cannot afford to make at home his clothes, the furniture or his farming utensils; he buys many articles for consumption for his table." Levine p 54

A free labor economy instead developed in the north. The labor force was largely landless. Many worried the northern population would become as dependent as the southern slave population. One New Yorker stated in 1847 that New York City was "overburdened with population, and where the two extremes of costly luxury and living, expensive establishments, and improvident waste are presented in daily and hourly contrast with squalid misery and hopeless destitution." Levine p 70

Demand for goods increased by large "waves" of immigrants and growing northern wealth, the already mentioned advances in transportation, and the growth of cotton production in the south, fuelled the northern economy. Textile manufacturing, shoemaking, food processing,

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