Chapter 19 "The Worlds of North and South"

Transportation of in the North

Although factory owners needed fast, inexpensive ways to deliver their goods to distant customers. The purpose of this highway was to tie the new western states with the east. Moreover, as popular as the National Road was, in 1816 President James Monroe vetoed a bill that would have given states money to build more roads.

Society of the North

As in the South, most people in the North were neither wealthy nor powerful. By 1860, about seven out ten northerners still lived in farms , and more and more northerners were moving to towns and cities. Even new or old, northern cities often lacked sewers and paved streets, in dirty and crowded neighborhoods, diseases spreaded rapidly.

Geography of the South

This climate and natural features encouraged southerners to base their way of agriculture. Comparing to the North, the southern states enjoyed mild winters and long, hot humid summers. There are plenty of rainfalls and long growing seasons made this a perfect place for raising warm weather crops that would've withered and died farther north.

Geography of the North

Northerners adapted to these geographical differences by creating different industries and ways of making a living. All of the Northern States experienced four very distinct seasons from frozen winters to hot humid summers. Shipbuilding, fishing, and commerce flourished in this area, while towns such as Boston became seaports.

Economy of the North

The beginning in the late 1700s, however, inventors started to devise machines to make products more quickly and cheaply. Francis Cabot Lowell saw how mill owners were using machines to spin cotton into thread and weave the threads into cloth. In 1830, inventors had learned to use steamed engines to power machinery.

Transportation in the South

Most of the rail lines were in the North, and in the South, people and goods continued to move on rivers. As you can see the most important southern product shipped by water was cotton, and on plantation docks, slaves loaded cotton bales directly onto steamed powered riverboats. Since because river travel was the South's main form of transportation, most southern towns and cities sprang up along waterways.

Economy of the South

Most white southerners were agrarians who favored a way of life based on farming. It was mostly true to rich plantation owners, who did not have to do the hard work of growing crops themselves. Well, most white southerners worked their own small farms, plantation owners used slaves to grow such as cash crops as tobacco, rice, sugarcane, and indigo.

Society of the South

The South was not greatly affected by the Jacksonian spirit of equality and opportunity or the reform movements of the 1840s. As slavery deeply affected the lives of all southerners, black and white, and as long as the slave economy could be preserved, the South had little incentive to make progress economically or culturally. Southern church leaders defended the practice taking a position that divided them from many churches in the North, whose leader taught that slavery was unchristian.

cotton gin

a hand operated machine that cleans seeds form other unwanted material from cotton

plantation

a large area of privately owned land where crops were grown through the labor of workers, usually slaves, who lived on the land

agrarian

a person who favors an agricultural way of life and government policies that support agricultural interests

immigrant

a person who moves from one country to another, such a movement is called immagration

industrialist

a person whose wealth comes from the ownership of industrial businesses and who favors government policies that support industry

deforestation

the clearing away of forests

Industrial Revolution

the dramatic change in economies brought about by the use of machines to do work formerly done by hand, the industrial revolution began in England in the late 1700s and spread to America and the rest of Europe