South-North Similarity

The South and North’s geographical sizes were roughly the same.

White southerners shard a heritage of heroes and ideology from the
era of the American Rev. with the northerners.

Southerners spoke the same language and worshipped the same
Protestant God as northerners.

Southerners lived under the same Constitution as the northerners, and
they shared a common mixture of nationalism and localism in their
attitudes toward the government.

The South shared in the nation’s economic booms and busts during
the thirty years before the Civil War, such as the Panic of 1837. The
distribution of wealth and property in the two sections was almost
identical by the eve of the Civil War in 1860 (i.e. 50% of free adult
males owned only 1% of real and personal property, while the richest
1% owned 27% of the wealth).

Even if their wealth was invested in different kinds of property,
both North and South had ruling classes.

Southerners and northerners shared an expanding capitalist economy

Entrepreneurs (a person who organizes and operates a business or
businesses) in both sections sought their fortunes in an expanding
market economy.
South-North Dissimilarity

The South’s climate and longer growing season gave it a rural and
agricultural density.

The southerners came to the conclusion that as a biracial society,
the liberty of one race directly depended on the enslavement of
another, in this case, white wealth on top of black labor.

Cotton growers spread out over as large an area as possible 
population density was low.

The population density in the nonslaveholding states east of the
Mississippi River was roughly three times higher.

The southerners were strongly committed to their churches and
some believed universities were crucial, but such institutions were
far less developed than the North.

Factories were rare because planters invested most of their capital
in slaves.

The largest southern industry was lumbering, and the largest
factories used slave labor to make cigars. Even with this, the
South was slower than the North in developing a unified
market economy and a regional transportation network: the
South had only 35% of the nation’s railroad mileage in 1860.

Because of a lack of jobs, the South did not attract as many
immigrants as the North did with its many various occupations.

Southern evangelicalism was distinct from its northern practice:
unlike the North, in the South, Baptists and Methodists
concentrated on personal rather than social improvement.
South-North Dissimilarity
con.
 The South tended
to focus more on the
“agricultural industry”
unlike the North.
The South was far
behind the North
in nearly any
measure of industrial
growth.