1. The Northern and
Southern Economies
1800 to 1860

2. Main Ideas
 In the early 1800s, America could be divided into
two distinct regions, or sections.
 Northern Section: New technologies helped
agriculture prosper, while a variety of new industries
brought growth – with its benefits and problems – to
the North. An increase in people worked in urban
areas, or cities.
 Southern Section: In the early 1800s, cotton farming
became the South’s main economic activity. As a
result, the South became dependent on slave labor.

3. The Northern Section
 An increasing number of people in the Northeast –
the New England states, NY, NJ, and Pennsylvania –
worked in factories in urban areas, or cities.
 Industrialization, or the development of industries
to manufacture finished goods in factories, increased
rapidly in the Northeast.
 Farming opportunities in the region were limited b/c
the population had outgrown the land and
thousands of young workers moved to the cities.
 A growing number of urban poor people lived in
areas with cheap, run-down housing called
tenements, or crowded apartments with poor
standards of sanitation, safety, and comfort.

4. The Northern Section – Labor
Disputes in Factories
 Industries aimed to make a profit at the expense of
their workers.
 Most factory owners paid their employees very little
and did not provide a healthy work environment.
 Before long, laborers began to demand more from
their bosses and complained mainly about the long
hours and low wages.
 As workers saw factory owners grow rich, they began
to want a slice of wealth that their hard labor
produced.

5. The Northern Section – Labor
Disputes in Factories
 The American government set no minimum wage
and workers could not go to their legislatures or
courts for help.
 Workers had only one real weapon – the could call
for a strike, or a work stoppage to demand shorter
hours and higher pay.
 In 1834, workers organized the first national labor
union – an organization of workers formed to
protect the interests of its members, usually by
negotiating to resolve issues concerning wages.
 First national labor union – NTU: National Trades
Union.

6. The Northern Section – Labor
Disputes in Factories
 Nearly 300,000 people joined the NTU or other labor unions
in the 1830s.
 These early unions died out and factory owners obtained
court rulings that outlawed labor organizations.
 Despite its failures, the early labor movements showed that
some workers were willing to take action against their
employers.
 By the 1840s, the North had a booming and complex
economy with a mixture of industry and agriculture.
 It was a region of cities and towns, banks and factories, with
huge benefits and problems caused by a growing population.

7. The Southern Section
 One famous phrase sums up the economy of the
South in the first half of the 1800s: “King Cotton”…
the phrase came from the book Cotton Is King by
David Christy.
 He claimed southern slavery would’ve ended except
for the ever-rising demand for cotton products.
 Christy said, even Northern critics of slavery
continued to use more and more cotton and other
products of slave labor – and the American economy
had come to depend on the revenue from the sale of
raw cotton.

8. The Southern Section
 In 1860, King Cotton made up two thirds of
the total value of American exports and it
created enormous wealth for the South.
 Cotton Belt States: North Carolina, South
Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida,
Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas,
and Texas – the economy of these states relied
almost completely on the production of
cotton.

9. The Southern Section – Geography
of Southern Farming
 Why did the physical geography of the Southern states make
farming highly profitable?
 The South remained mostly rural, made up of farms and
countryside instead of cities.
 Farmers could count on 200-290 frost-free days a year to grow
crops
 Southern land was fertile and had plentiful rains.
 15,000 Southern families owned plantations which used a
great number of slaves to produce a cash crop.
 Hundreds of thousands of families owned just a few slaves
and raised their own cash crops, own food, and livestock.

10. The Southern Section – Geography
of Southern Farming
 Only one fourth of all slaves lived on plantations
with more than 50 slaves.
 During the early 1800s, farms with six slaves or fewer
produced HALF of the Southern cotton crop.
 With the invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in
1793, Southerners scrambled to put more land into
cotton production which increased the number of
slaves.
 By 1850, of the 3.7 million African Americans
nationwide, only 12% (444,000) were free – some
lived in the North but most lived in Southern urban
areas or rural areas away from large plantations.

11. The Southern Section – The Slavery
System
 In 1808, Congress banned all further importation of
slaves to the United States.
 In the South, however, the population growth among
people already enslaved contributed to a sharp
increase in the internal slave trade for the next 50
years.
 Any child born into slavery became a slave.
 Slave population:



1820 = 1.5 million
1850 = over 3 million
1860 = slaves made up half the population of SC and MS;
two fifths of the population of FL, GA, AL, LA

12. The Southern Section – The Slavery
System
 On small farms, slaves often worked side by side with
their owners in the fields.
 Most slaves did not live on small farms but on large
cotton plantations.
 By 1850, cotton farming employed nearly 60% of the
enslaved African Americans in the US.
 On the plantations, life was generally harsher than
on small farms where workers often toiled in large
crews under the supervision of foremen.
 Most owners saw slaves as “property” that performed
labor for their businesses.

13. The Southern Section – Slave
Revolts

Slave rebellions, especially on a large scale, stood little chance of
success.
 Most were small, spontaneous responses to harsh and cruel
punishment and they ended in failure.
 Turner’s Rebellion
 Nat Turner, a 31-yr-old African American preacher, planned and carried
out a violent uprising in 1831
 Acting because of “divine inspiration”, he led 70 slaves in raids on white
families in southeastern Virginia.
 The slaves killed more than 50 people before the local militia captured
them.
 20 were hanged, including Turner.
 In many Southern communities African Americans outnumbered the
white population and for this reason, Southern states tightened restrictions
on slaves – meeting, learning to read and write…