"A house divided against itself cannot stand."

Abraham Lincoln said that in 1858, after accepting the Illinois Republican Party nomination for the U.S. Senate. He would go on to lose that election, to the incumbent, Stephen A. Douglas. But Lincoln's June 16 speech in Springfield, along with his arguments made in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates that punctuated the Senate race that year, proved to be a bit of prophecy, for in 1861, the Civil War began, cleaving the Union in two. Officially, during the war, it was North versus South. That idea was an old one, stretching back to the earliest days of the formation of the 13 Colonies and then the United States. The economic, political, religious, and social beliefs of people who otherwise professed themselves to be Americans differed so sharply in many cases that compromise no longer was an option or even a desirable outcome. During four long and bloody years, North and South fought against each other, striving to maintain two very different ways of life. In the end, only one was left standing.

Beginnings
Farming was a way of life for most of America's earliest colonists. As more and more people worked the land and looked for new places to settle, more and more industry grew. North and South were alike in one respect: they both had powerful economies. The Northern economy, as it grew, ran on the back of the engines of progress and finance. The New England Colonies were largely farming and fishing communities. The people made their own clothes and shoes. They grew much of their own food. Crops like corn and wheat grew in large numbers, and much was shipped to England. Foods that didn't grow in America were shipped from England. Boston was the major New England port. The Middle Colonies were part agriculture, part industrial. Wheat and other grains grew on farms in Pennsylvania and New York. Factories in Maryland produced iron, and factories in Pennsylvania produced paper and textiles. Trade with England was plentiful in these colonies as well. By contrast, the Southern economy ran on the back of the field and the plantation. Southern plantations grew tobacco, rice, and indigo, which they sold to buyers in England and elsewhere in America.

One key difference between North and South was in the freedom of those doing the work. It was in the northern colonies that manufacturing became more of a dominant way of life; while the southern colonies continued to depend on agrarian interests, modernizing as the times allowed. This economic split became more pronounced as the new nation acquired new territories and employed new means of travel and transportation. Most of the financial centers of the country were in northern cities and states. Shipbuilding enterprises dotted the coasts from north to south. Manufacturing certainly existed in southern cities and states, but it was the farms and fields and plantations that powered the Southern economy and the mills and factories that powered the Northern economy. The largest part of the Southern labor force was African slaves.

Slave labor
The White Lion, a Dutch trading ship, arrived at Point Comfort on Virginia's James River on August 20, 1619. It left behind nearly two dozen West Africans who would become the first slaves in North America. Not long afterward, the Treasurer, an English ship, arrived, with more slaves for trade.

It wasn't long before the number of enslaved Africans increased dramatically. These people were thought of as a commodity, to be traded for things, like money or goods. The slave trade made up one part of the Triangular Trade that existed between Great Britain and its North American colonies in the centuries between the establishment of the Jamestown colony and the Revolutionary War. After the American victory in that war, traders in the new nation the United States carried on the slave trade.

At first 12 of the 13 Colonies allowed slavery. (Georgia founder James Oglethorpe was opposed to it and wouldn't allow when he set up the Georgia colony.) Gradually, the economies of the Southern states depended more and more on slave labor to continue to thrive.

Estimates are that the number of enslaved Africans sent to America from the early 16th Century to the mid-19th Century was more than 12 million, aboard nearly 35,000 ships. As many as 15 percent died during the journey across the ocean. These people died from a variety of causes. For a start, they were tightly packed into the hold of a ship. Men were often chained to the walls or floor of the hold, sometimes chained in pairs. Women were often kept separate from men and not usually chained. They spent the vast majority of their time down below, where they had to hunch over because the hold wasn't tall enough for many of them to stand. Food was brought to them, sparingly. The captain was tasked with transporting potential labor and so had to maintain a semblance of strength in the source of that labor. Those who were lucky enough to survive the voyage could look forward to more suffering in their new "homes."

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