South-North SimilaritySouth-North Similarity  The South and North’s geographical sizes were roughly the same.  White southerners shard a heritage of heroes and ideology from the era of the American Rev. with the northerners.  Southerners spoke the same language and worshipped the same Protestant God as northerners.  Southerners lived under the same Constitution as the northerners, and they shared a common mixture of nationalism and localism in their attitudes toward the government.  The South shared in the nation’s economic booms and busts during the thirty years before the Civil War, such as the Panic of The distribution of wealth and property in the two sections was almost identical by the eve of the Civil War in 1860 (i.e. 50% of free adult males owned only 1% of real and personal property, while the richest 1% owned 27% of the wealth).  Even if their wealth was invested in different kinds of property, both North and South had ruling classes.  Southerners and northerners shared an expanding capitalist economy  Entrepreneurs (a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses) in both sections sought their fortunes in an expanding market economy.

South-North DissimilaritySouth-North Dissimilarity  The South’s climate and longer growing season gave it a rural and agricultural density.  The southerners came to the conclusion that as a biracial society, the liberty of one race directly depended on the enslavement of another, in this case, white wealth on top of black labor.  Cotton growers spread out over as large an area as possible  population density was low.  The population density in the nonslaveholding states east of the Mississippi River was roughly three times higher.  The southerners were strongly committed to their churches and some believed universities were crucial, but such institutions were far less developed than the North.  Factories were rare because planters invested most of their capital in slaves.  The largest southern industry was lumbering, and the largest factories used slave labor to make cigars. Even with this, the South was slower than the North in developing a unified market economy and a regional transportation network: the South had only 35% of the nation’s railroad mileage in  Because of a lack of jobs, the South did not attract as many immigrants as the North did with its many various occupations.  Southern evangelicalism was distinct from its northern practice: unlike the North, in the South, Baptists and Methodists concentrated on personal rather than social improvement.

South-North Dissimilarity con.  The South tended to focus more on the “agricultural industry” unlike the North. The South was far behind the North in nearly any measure of industrial growth.