How did the North and South Compare Economically Going into the Civil War

Maelstrom is a political novel about the Civil War.  It is also a sequel to Tempest at Dawn, my novel about the Constitutional Convention. Tempest at Dawn was about framing a nation and Maelstrom is about testing the tensile strength of the Framers work. Although both books stand alone, they share style and structure and some of the Framers descendants make brief appearances Maelstrom.

I read stacks of books to get alternative perspectives on the players and events. One is The Impending Crisis in The South written in 1857 by Hinton Rowan Helper. Nothing like getting the skinny from someone who lived in the period.

Helper begins his book with startling statistics. He compares the economies of slave and non-slave states at the time of the Framing of the Constitution to just prior to the Civil War. Here are some of his statistics comparing New York and Virginia.

                                                               New York                             Virginia

1790 Population                                        340,120                              748,308

1850 population                                     3,097,661                            1,421,661

1791 Exports                                         $2,505,465                         $3,130,865

1852 Exports                                        $87,484456                         $2,724,657

 

Helper didn’t have 1790 numbers for some economic indicators, but provided contemporaneous comparisons for imports, manufacturing, real and personal property, and farms.

                                                               New York                         Virginia

1853 Imports                                     $178,270,999                          $399,004

1850 Manufacturing                          $237,597,249                      $29,705,387

1850 Property (Incl. slaves)           $1,080,309,216                     $391,646,438

1850 Farms                                       $576,631,568                      $223,423,315

 

Helper then compares Massachusetts versus North Carolina and Pennsylvania versus South Carolina. The results are similar. North and South Carolina were in the lead at the time of the Constitutional Convention, and woefully behind by the mid-nineteenth century.

For the six states Helper examines, slaveholding states were far stronger in 1787 than their northern counterparts, but after sixty years, the free states' explosive growth had left the South far behind. It was like the South was in a footrace wearing concrete boots. Hinton Helper, a southerner, identifies that concrete as slavery.

The political implications are interesting. The South was controlled by a single party, and they retained power by keeping the general population uneducated, poor, and dependent. Upward mobility? Almost unknown. Income disparity was of feudal dimensions, social norms insisted on conformity, and politicians and the press constantly demonized the North while telling the lower classes that they lived in a morally superior society.

During this massive economic transition, slaveholders managed to keep political power tilted in their direction. How? By cultivating a political party that had a stranglehold in the South and a major presence in the North. By combining their strengths in the North and South, the Democratic Party became a political juggernaut.