Social Differences Between North And South

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Early in American history when forming the Constitution, the main struggle was to find a way to create a representative government that would be able to accommodate all regions of a geographically expansive country. Knowing that people from different parts of the country had different needs and interests, a large and extensive republic was formed with diversity so that all groups would be able to check and balance one another (Prior, Lecture 7)*. In the colonial period the South had established itself as the agricultural hearth of the country through cash crops, while Northern agriculture mainly relied on a system of subsistence farming. This was not by choice of either section, but rather by the different land, soil, and climate of the…show more content…
When examining differences between any two groups of people, it is important to compare each party’s social structure. Social distinctions boil down to the very character and culture of a society (Pessen 1127). The historian, Edward Pessen, is in this assertion, but his argument that the actual social structures of the North and South should be seen as more similar than different, he is wrong. The Market Revolution brought about social changes in the North that further differed Northern culture from Southern. In the South, the majority of families lived the traditional southern lifestyle of subsistence farming and providing for themselves, giving them a weak link to the market (Holmes, Lecture 9)*. To the North, the Market Revolution created a consumer class of factory wage laborers, merchants, and commercialized farmers that relied on the market to obtain the necessities that they didn’t provide for themselves (Holmes, Lecture 9)*. The new innovations brought by the Market Revolution shifted families in portions of the North from self-sufficiency to commercialization, thus, also shifting the importance of the
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