ss well of American industry provided the basis for the formation of the enterprising American character. Indeed, Cooke cites the term "the American system" to describe a whole range of specific and general shifts in the structure of industry in America and Europe. As well, his discussion includes reference to the confrontation of Northern and Southern American values, enacted in the war, and the consequences associated with the fact that it was in the North that the values of the Industrial Revolution seem to have been equated with the values of America itself.
It led to the Colt revolver and the sewing machine and the flour mill and the card making machine. It marked the turning point, for the Northern states, between handicrafts and industry. It germinated all the fruits, and the ills, of mass production; and it revolutionized the conception of human labor in the Western world and in our century in Africa and Asia as well.
But that, as they say, is our problem. The historic fact is that, while the South was spreading cotton and sugar and tobacco and expanding the empire of slavery, the North was committing itself to men and machines and spreading them through the Northwest Territories. Eli Whitney's nagging ingenuity gave a tragic guarantee that the North would welcome the Industrial Revolution and the South would reject it, that the North would go one way and the South another and that sooner or later they would collide (Cooke, 1974, p. 197 8).
The Industrial Revolution led to a permanent reshaping of the American economic landscape, with machines supplanting manual labor to one degree or another from the introduction of interchangeable parts onward. Urbanization was another aspect of this reshaping, as agricultural America shifted into industrial America. The power of the Revolution appears to have developed something of a life of its own, particularly when scientific proofs
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