Pre Civil War Issues

  Until the early 1800s (as late as 1815) Americans made, in their homes, everyday necessities.  Clothes were made by the females from cloth they had spun or woven themselves, food was grown and harvested or slaughtered on family farms, and houses and structures were built using materials obtained from local sawmills or brickyards.  Local blacksmiths and craftsmen, who owned their shops and worked with a few journeymen and apprentices, made specialized equipment the family could not make themselves.  Items were not normally sold more than twenty miles from where they were made.
   This way of life began to change in 1815 with the expansion of overland transportation and the beginning of what historians have called the transportation revolution.  With the advent of the canal systems, macadamized roads, and eventually the railway, the cost and viability of shipping goods overland dramatically changed the American producer/consumer culture.
   Travel and shipment times were reduced from, for example, Cincinnati to New York from fifty days to five.  This dramatically reduced the wholesale price of merchandise and enabled workers and famers to sale their goods to vast markets, previously inaccessible.  With the money they made selling their product, they were then able to buy food and supplies they had previously had to make or grow—often times these products were manufactured elsewhere and shipped in by boat or railway.     
    In the North, as the skilled craftsman’s abilities were replaced by factory machines and workers, they were forced to become hourly laborers.  Entrepreneurs used their organization skills to create assembly-line operations that produced a large volume of products in a relatively short amount of time.  They used specialized labor, improved efficiency, and hired wage workers with narrow skill sets, using power driven machinery, to pump out a large quality of manufactured goods at a lower cost.  
   As a result, in the years from 1810-1850, the percentage of the labor force working in non-agricultural areas grew from 21 percent to 45 percent.   German and Irish immigrants inundated the US after 1830, and filled many of these wage labor positions.  This idea of a man working for another as purely a laborer, restricted by his employee’s rules and regulations, hours, and assessment of a fair wage created a separate, unequal class system.  For example, in the largest American cities in the 1840s, the wealthiest 5 percent of the population owned about 70 percent of the taxable property and the poor owned almost nothing. 
   Many of the skilled craftsmen of the pre-capitalistic era resented being replaced by machinery and unskilled labor.  Moreover, many Americans insisted that the very idea of a man being dependent upon wages robbed him of his independence and liberty.   They contended that the boss was like a slave owner; determining effort, pace, hours and wages. 
   Southerners grabbed hold of this idea and used it as an argument for slavery.  They held firm to the idea that slave labor freed the white man from the bondage of wage labor and allowed him to pursue more noble enterprises such as:  arts, literature, hospitality, and public service.  Due to slave labor the southern white man would be educated, a land owner, and live in the true spirit of freedom and liberty--eliminating class conflict. 
   The southern states production of raw cotton doubled each decade after 1800 with the use of slave labor and provided nearly three-fourths of the world’s supply.  The southern state’s agricultural output was also important to America’s economic growth-- providing three-fifths of all American exports
.  (McPherson, 1988, p 39).  Largely due to these economic factors, the political and economic machines of the time were hesitant to tamper with the use of slave labor in the south. 
  Hindsight certainly gives one a clearer view of mistakes; however if the government and legislators had put as much money and effort into the issues in the rural south as they did in the infrastructure of the north, slavery would have been abolished much sooner and without bloodshed.  The American political system fueled the rebel attitude of the southern states by adopting an “out of sight, out of mind” philosophy in regards to the way the south conducted its business. 
   America’s rapid economic and population growth coupled with its territorial expansion brought about changes in society that no one at the time could have foreseen—in both the north and the south; however, a more proactive approach by the government to its social economic  problems could have diffused the mounting sectionalism within the country.

The following link addresses the issues leading to the Civil War in a compact, easy to understand format. http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0215469/before_the_civil_war.htm