Tracking the Economic Divergence of the North and the South

Abstract

Questions relating to the distinctiveness of the American North and South have intrigued historians and the public for generations. In fact, these questions and broader related controversies have proven among the most long-lived and provocative in the literature of American history. Travelers visiting British North America in the eighteenth century, for example, often commented on the differences between the northern and southern colonies. Such travel commentary grew in both abundance and verve in the first half of the nineteenth century, with Tocqueville's Democracy in America being the most notable case in point. Questions relating to regional distinctiveness gained even greater currency with the approach of the Civil War, and many historians since that time, perhaps taking their cue from William Seward's famous irrepressible conflict speech of 1858, have sought to interpret the rupture between North and South in schematic, dichotomous terms: a split between two distinct economies, societies, and, at times, even civilizations. It is much easier, after all, to impart meaning to the 620,000 lives lost during the Civil War by arguing that those who died did so in defense of beliefs and values under attack by people with antithetical worldviews. Despite the power of this appeal to difference and to the idea of the irrepressibility of sectional conflict, this interpretation has not gone unchallenged. In the 1940s and 1950s, a number of Civil War historians sought to downplay differences between North and South by arguing that the war was repressible and targeting one group in particular for blame: the blundering generation of politicians holding office in the decades prior to the war. To these revisionists, political fallibility rather than distinctive beliefs and values, chance and circumstance rather than inevitability, best explain the coming of war. Scholars emphasizing difference quickly pointed out that the qualitative differences between the sections far outweighed their similarities, however numerous, and that even if the North and South were more similar than different, it does not necessarily follow that war was repressible. The Civil War revisionists never completely rebutted these arguments, and their interpretation is currently out of favor. Today, most scholars once again stress the differences rather than the similarities between the North and the South, even as they disagree among themselves over the details.(1) While political historians would doubtless offer alternative chronologies, economic historians commonly trace the roots of regional difference and distinctiveness back to the seventeenth century. The North and the South began to diverge as early as the mid-to-late seventeenth century when the formalization of racial slavery, the production of a staple crop (tobacco), and the rise of a nascent plantation sector set the South down a path never followed in temperate colonies in the North. These divergences were due largely to differences in climate, profit possibilities, and what classical economists called land--or natural resources--rather than to any stark contrasts in settlers' backgrounds, culture, or worldviews. Once the South embarked upon this path, inertial forces--what economists call lock-in mechanisms associated with path dependence, or path influence--worked to keep the region on a developmental route distinct from those followed in the North.(2) Not surprisingly, the materialist argument for path dependence or influence goes against the view that attributes economic differences between North and South predominantly to cultural differences between the dominant groups in the two regions. To downplay the importance of culture and cultural difference as independent variables is not to suggest that from the start the European settlers in the southern colonies were just like those in the northern colonies. Nor is it to privilege in any absolute or universal sense material concerns above all others. …