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Between 1820 and 1860 there were a few fundamental differences between the economies of the North and South. How far do you agree?

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Between 1820 and 1860 there were a few fundamental differences between the economies of the North and South. How far do you agree? Between 1820 and 1860 there were problems in America that resulted in the civil war in 1861, the economy affected the North and South during the civil war, and some major differences helped win the civil war. However this does not mean that the economy had many fundamental differences. For example the methods of earning money were different, but overall both earned roughly the same amount of money. Firstly, the main difference was that the North relied much more on money from industry and manufacturing, as they had more connections with foreign countries, and more factories were built. In the North in 1860…show more content…
This majorly benefitted the North as they were the main distributors. However the South were very worried about this because they believed that if they stopped buying the expensive foreign goods, then foreign countries would stop buying their goods, as they would have tax on them too. This affected the economy until the tax was promised to be reduced after the law in 1833. In contrast the North and South didn’t have many fundamental differences. They both created a lot of money, and were not lacking at all, the only difference was the method in which was used to make the money. The economic diversification was similar too, as 10% of Northerners owned 68% of the wealth, and the wealth was dominated by the plantation owners, called oligarchies, as there were few free-soilers. 12% of the plantation owners owned half the slaves. This shows that there were few farmers, but the big plantations owned many slaves. Even though the North seems to be more industrial, the South also made efforts to modernise industrially, but they just lacked because of the closed opinions of the southerners. Also not many people in the North and the South owned slaves, it was more of a rare thing, and the main owners, owned a large amount of slaves. However there was a larger need for slaves in the South, because there was cheap labour force from Europe settling in the North which meant slaves were more expensive so were not deemed as important. Overall I think there were many
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