Civil War in America

...

differences between those two regions, it was often said that “while the South picked cotton, the North turned it into fabric.” This detail, more than showing that cotton industry was also flourishing in the North, showed the economic importance of the South for the whole country. Economic growth there followed the American pattern: Southerners also speculated in land, settled in the wilderness and enjoyed the fruits of unprecedented prosperity. The growth rate of Southern economy in the first half of the 19th century even exceeded that of the North, but, unlike the Northern States, which experienced the early stages of a vigorous transformation that modified the structure of economy and society, the Southern States produced more by putting more land into cultivation: quantitative growth did not lead to qualitative development. Southern wealth was based on the ability to export quantities of a highly prized commodity, but did not indicate a developed economy. However, the North and the South still had strong economic ties: Northern bankers, insurers and shippers provided most of the credit and transportation that helped maintain the cotton economy, but other signs told the South’s backwardness: in 1860, the South per capita income stood at $103, while the North’s totalled $141. Southern manufacturing capacity declined and the South also badly trailed the North in railroad construction, literacy (even excluding Black population) and education.

Those differences were initially not as important as interdependence, but the evolution in the country’s economy and thought pattern widened the gap between North and South. It became clear when, in May 1828, President John Quincy Adams turned a tariff bill into law. It imposed high duties on a wide range of manufactured products and was the result of complex political manoeuvring. The supporters of Andrew Jackson, Adams’s political adversary, introduced a bill with tariff rates so high they felt confident it would be rejected by anti-protectionist Southerners and moderates from other regions. But the manoeuvre went awry and the New Englanders eventually found the tariffs favourable to manufacturing – and supported them. The Southerners called them the “Tariff of Abominations” and one anonymous person from South Carolina denounced this law as unconstitutional, in December 1828. He was John Caldwell Calhoun, the then Vice President, but only revealed his identity three years later, in 1831. At the same occasion, he set up the theory known as “Nullification”, which would then be used by the Southerners. Calhoun’s main idea was that the States were separate body politics and were only bound to the Federal Union through a contract. Therefore, it was up to the States, and not to the Federal Supreme Court, to verify whether the clauses of the contract were respected or not. If one Federal law then seemed unconstitutional, one State could “nullify” it and refuse to enforce it. This theory thus contributed to widen the two sections of the country [cf. sectionalism].