North Vs South Industrialization Analysis

Industrialization transformed the North in various ways economically, politically, and particularly socially. After the War of 1812, the South expanded its agricultural empire while the North invested in various internal improvements and became a more widely industrialized market society. Embracing economic progress, the North invested in domestic factories as well as commercializing agriculture to participate in the new market system emerging in the region rather than developing self-reliant farms as in the South. One of the largest factors contributing to the industrialization of the North were the various forms of transportation that increased the abilities and effectiveness of economic participation throughout Northern states. The formation

The South had less need for industrialization in transportation or business, making the political motives of the North very different. Henry Clay became an important figure of the North’s incentives of internal improvement and called for more heavily involved central government in order to help fund and promote these improvements. The incentives that characterized the North were the development of a national bank, federal subsidies for internal improvement, and tarifs. These differences were focused on the amount of government involvement in the nation's wealth and well being. Not only did these differences cause political separations but they could also be seen in the manners of life and leisure and the everyday motivations of Northern society versus Southern

The market economy also produced new ideals of family life and the roles of men, women, and children. This formation of gender and family roles created a sense of middle-class idealistic lifestyle where domestic responsibilities lay on women (the realms of home and caregiving roles within the family), while men were responsible in the public and economic realms of family. These ideas of domesticity created a decline in birth rates that no longer required many children to participate as part of an economic unit of family. While the ideal of separate spheres of social life expanded and redefined roles within the home, many families were unable to fulfill these ideologies due to financial necessity creating not only an economic gap, but social gap between working class and middle class families. The extreme gaps of wealth within the North also defined the differences between classes of working families and middle to upper class families. The working- class (a large percentage composed of immigrants searching for opportunity)experienced unlivable wages, crowded/unsanitary living conditions, and were exposed to disease in urban populations they occupied.