From the implementation of the Constitution of the United States, States held the belief that they should be able to decide what type life they should live under state law in accordance with the wishes of the state's populace, and that the federal government should not interfere. There was more loyalty towards one's state than to the federal government. This was true for both those living in the North and in the South(Perman, 18).
During the first half of the 19th Century, zealous firebrands of North and South broadcast abuse on economics, politics, and morality of the other until no reasoning between them could be heard. History books say the war began April 12, 1861, when forces under Confederate General Pierre Beauregard fired on Ft. Sumter in Charleston, SC. In reality, the war between the beliefs of the North and the South began many years prior to this date. Ft. Sumter was the opening of Pandora=s box (Levine, Foner, 12).
At the beginning of the United States in 1789, the South was an important part of the country, which was already different from the mid-Atlantic states and New England due to the differences in colonial immigration patterns and the economic domination of the region by the plantation system of agriculture. Slavery existed in both North and South before the Revolutionary War. Freedom from slavery probably began in 1775, when Rhode Island gave freedom to any child born of a slave mother. In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance barred slavery from lands north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River. As of January 1, 1808, Federal Law made it illegal to import Negroes (Perman, 34).
Depending on the labor of slaves, the plantations were both homes and business enterprises for a white, southern elite. They were the largest, the most commercialized, and on the whole, the most efficient and specialized agricultural enterprises of their day, producing the bulk of the South's staple crops of tobacco, cott...