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The United States Is A Relatively Young Country When Compared

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The United States is a relatively young country when compared to its other Western counterparts; however, in the course of nearly 200 years, it has managed to shape international affairs and become a global power. This does not mean that this transformation from a small group of colonies that band together to fight off their colonial oppressors into a leading nation in the global market went smoothly. The challenges that the United States had to overcome were plentiful and weighty, for instance, the U.S. Civil War, which nearly split the budding nation into two different states, the Union or the North and the Confederacy, also known as the South. One of the primary reasons why there was a split to begin with between the two sections of the …show more content…

These increasing numbers in the population meant that, at least in the Northern states, there was less need for free labor from slaves. Another reason why the North seemed to be less dependent on the need of a population of free labor was because of new technology that was being created. Inventions such as the Cotton Picker helped relieved the need for a large amount of manual labor when a machine could do the same job faster, without any objection on moral grounds of whether enslaving people is wrong and does the job for relatively less money. Without that demanding need for free labor, more people had the ability to reflect on whether or not keeping the African American population in the South enslaved.
The Southern culture was threatened by this rapid shift from the more traditionalist ideas that the slave population was needed to garner manufactured goods at a low price. These new inventions and a population of immigrants that were willing to do jobs for a low price, saw more Northern states moving away from the Southern economy. The Southern states argued that even with an expanding population and economy it saw that, “In the North overall an estimated 30 percent of the population held 92 percent of the wealth” (Paludan, XXIII). Also that the influx of immigrants arriving on the shore meant that there was a deep incline from the morals that the United States had once held on high standards. The Southern states believed that the new

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