The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [112]
Perhaps the greatest divide between the North and South was cultural. The North was an urban society attracting the wealthy, inventive, and liberal social thinkers of the era. In urban societies social movement, from poor to middle class or uneducated to educated, was common and somewhat easily done. There was far more opportunity for advancement on merit in metropolitan areas where race, class, ethnicity, and the like did not totally determine one’s place in the world. The South’s rural society determined status by birth, and change over the course of one’s lifetime was unlikely. Landowners controlled the wealth, with a few exceptions, and the middle class was small. This was a stratified rural society, much like the society of the Dark Ages, divided chiefly into the wealthy and the poor.[126] The South was populated mostly by poor white farmers who were either sharecroppers or held small farms on poor ground. The rich folk’s families had arrived first, acquiring the best land and building large plantations. These extraordinarily wealthy landowners became the slaveholders. Owing to their menial economic situation, Southern hardscrabble farmers could not own slaves. Thus, the solid majority of southerners were NOT slave owners.
The stratified society of the South broke along more than racial lines. Whites were not to mix with blacks; the poor did not mix with the rich; the educated avoided the uneducated; men and women were highly regulated in their conduct with one another, and one always held their “place.” This kind of separation is common in agricultural societies because large landowners are set apart from common soil tillers by a large economic gap. The dirt poor vastly outnumbered the superbly rich; thus, keeping the poor in their place, both black and white, was critical for elite landowners.
These two societies, Northern urban and Southern rural, could not live in harmony unless they left one another alone. If each side ran separate societies, without the federal overlap, peace might prevail. For example, the South could have abolished tariffs while the North kept them; however, the nature of federalism demanded one must destroy the other unless each ignored the other. But interference happened. The radicals of the North roared that slavery, this outrage to humanity, deserved destruction no matter what the cost. As the furor of the language increased, trust decreased. The South distrusted the North on regional issues. If the North gained control of the Senate, by even one vote, they would use it to pass legislation harming southern regional interests, including the abolition of slavery and raising tariffs.
Because the landed elites ran the South (as usual—money talks), slavery was a major factor in every regional dispute in Congress. The northern states banned slavery by 1860. There was a virtual tie in the Senate between slave states and free states, and the South recognized maintaining the balance as new states came into the Union was vital, otherwise, they could not protect their regional interests. The Mexican-American War and the following land acquisitions made the problem acute. The timing and method of allowing states into the Union created a “perfect storm” where compromise broke down.
Another problem was the emotional nature of the slavery issue. Southerners wanted the North to go away and leave them alone. Why should northerners be able to order them around? Why were the northerners so adamant about ending an institution not in their area and causing them no harm? Northern propaganda concerning mistreatment of slaves galled the South. Why would slave owners mistreat their property? Would they mistreat their horses? Northerners must know slaves were valuable, and mistreatment caused their value to decrease. The southerners believed that just because families might endure separation at slave sales or some slaves required physical punishment to keep them in line was no cause for concern on behalf of those not owing