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Industrialization and Sectionalism
Contributing teacher:
Brenda Santos
Time period: 1820–60
Overview
This simulation will help students understand the complex and increasingly hostile relationship between the North and the South during the antebellum period (1820–60). Students probably have a sense of the tensions that existed between North and South owing to differences in their regional economies, based as they were on divergent systems of free and slave labor. What students may not fully appreciate is the growing economic interdependence of the North and South. The purpose of this activity is to impress on students this irony. As the industrial revolution increased the economic interdependence of the North and South, it also contributed to the tension and growing gaps between the social and cultural realities of the two regions.
The Assignment
This simulation will take two days in most high-school settings, or one day where a block schedule is in place. The class should be familiar with both the slave system in the South and industrialization in the North. On the first day, the class will review the first wave of American industrialization (1820–60) and the different ways it affected various regions of the United States. I have found it helpful to begin this class session with an activity that allows the students to fully internalize the idea of sectional differences. Begin by asking students about their travel to different parts of the country. Then ask them to share with the class what differences and similarities they noticed. (Accents, architecture, music, food, and styles of dress are usually discussed.) Ask the students which of the similarities would not exist without mass communication and advertising. This opening activity illustrates that most of the similarities we find across the country today did not exist in earlier times, when regions were far more isolated from one another. The nation was far more homogeneous in population in the 19th century, but culturally it was home to disparate traditions.
Now create for the students a sense of time and place. Facilitate a class discussion of antebellum sectionalism, emphasizing the economic organization and cultural mores of the North, the Old Northwest (the Midwest today), and the South. Ask a student volunteer to identify these regions on a large classroom map. Conclude this discussion by asking students to record two sectional differences, as well as one way in which two or more sections supported each other economically.
 You can read a teacher essay on Early Industrialization from the Lemelson Centerpieces Web site.
For homework, students will prepare to take part in the simulation activity the following day. The class should be split into five groups, and each group should be assigned one of the following roles: southern plantation owner, southern slave, northern factory owner, northern factory worker, and northern merchant. Students will complete this homework assignment individually: After researching the suggested resources listed below, students should write a journal entry describing a typical day. Include at least one difficulty encountered in the course of that day that illustrates their role in the economy. Students should be encouraged to be as imaginative (yet true to history) as possible, and to consider gender roles, location, and economic status. Also listed below are the descriptions of each of the character's basic positions. These are provided to aid the teacher and should not be given to the students, as the students' research should lead them to reach their own conclusions about the reality and perspective of their characters.
On the second day of this activity, the students will work in two different groups. First, they will meet with those students who wrote from the same perspective. The students will take a few minutes to read their entries aloud to one another. After discussing the experiences their characters share, they will compile a list of grievances or of difficulties they face that result directly or indirectly from industrialization. Each student must have his or her own copy of the list.
Discussion Questions
The next portion of the activity requires that the students are "jigsawed," meaning that they will meet in new groups composed of one member of each of the first set of groups. In other words, each of these new groups will contain one person to represent each point of view. (This process is easily facilitated by handing each student a card with a number on it during the first portion of the class session, thus creating new groups that include one member of each of the previous groups.) In their new groups, the students will discuss in character the nature and implications of industrialization. The goal of these new groups is to come to some conclusion about interdependence and sectionalism. To facilitate this process, explain to the students that they will be participating in a mock "town meeting" convened to discuss the state of the nation and the changes, both positive and problematic, that have resulted from the recent transformation of the American economy. They will be answering questions such as the following:
- What similarities did you find between the complaints of slaves and the complaints of factory workers?
- What significant differences did you find between the experiences of factory workers and slaves?
- On what points might a factory owner and planter agree? Disagree? In what ways do they both benefit from industrialization?
- In what ways are factory owners and their laborers, and planters and slaves, culturally compatible?
- How do the various problems brought up by all five groups of people reflect the different needs of the two sections?
- In what ways are the North and the South interdependent?
- How are the positions of the northern factory owner and the northern merchant similar? How are they different?
- How do the North and the South differ economically, socially, and politically?
- On what ideological points do they disagree and agree?
After the students have attempted to answer the questions, discuss them as a class by allowing each group to lead the discussion of a question.
The simulation concludes with an assignment asking the students to individually assess the state of antebellum relations between the North and the South. Using the insight gained through the simulation and from outside sources, students should write an essay in response to the following question: What was the impact of industrialization on sectionalism in the antebellum United States? Some teachers may wish to modify this assignment, perhaps requiring students to write the essay in class. This approach ensures that students listen actively and take careful notes in their groups.
Historical Characters (5)
1. Southern Plantation Owner
America's early industrialization was driven in part by the advent of ready-made clothing that could be bought in a store. This in turn required greater volumes of cotton, which put pressure on southern planters to intensify their output and to purchase more slaves. While planters and capitalists were both concerned with managing labor and production quotas, they were equally dissimilar in their ideological and political views. These differences were lodged in the nature of labor organization. Planters saw themselves not just as producers for the market, but as the moral and physical guardians of an organic community, often referred to as "my people, black and white."
2. Enslaved Person in the South
Life changed for slaves as a result of industrialization. The value and demand for slaves increased in direct relation to industry's growing demand for cotton. This dynamic drove the removal of Indians from the lower South, and the resettlement of that region by white families who bought up slaves in Virginia and the Carolinas, where portions of the agricultural economy were flagging. Slave revolts and fear of slave insurrection, in turn, sparked a movement toward ameliorating the harsh conditions of slavery, even as pressures to produce more cotton continued unabated. Students should focus on the nature of the slave community: separation of families, the inheritance of slave status from a slave mother (so that mothers were in the position of giving birth to property), physical abuse, and dependence on the will of the planter.
3. Northern Factory Owner
Northern factory owners were one group of capitalists who benefited from industrialization, generally in the textile, shipbuilding, and construction industries. Factory owners faced the difficult task of maintaining a reliable labor force, much of it comprising young women, mothers, failed farmers, and Irish immigrants. As competition for labor increased, factory owners often found themselves with restless, undisciplined laborers who simply left the job when conditions were not to their liking.
4. Northern Factory Worker
As America's population increased after the American Revolution, family farms were no longer able to sustain generations of offspring. Younger siblings were forced to move west or to seek work either in cities such as New York and Boston or in the textile and shoe factories of upstate New York and New England. Girls and women generally worked in the latter, while native-born men and increasing numbers of immigrant laborers worked in the shipbuilding, construction, railroad, and printing industries. For most, labor was heavy and unsafe; there were no provisions for health care or workers' compensation. Bosses tended to be paternalistic, advocating temperance and religious instruction. In the cities, workers lived in crowded, unhealthy conditions and were subject to disease and fire. The only recourse to job dissatisfaction was to find another—and, for the most part, hardly better—employer.
5. Northern Merchant
Northern merchants were instrumental in the growth of America's industrializing economy, because they financed and organized the exchange of trade between regions of the United States and with overseas markets. Consequently, they relied on the proliferation of the factory system and wage labor in the North, as well as the intensification of plantation agriculture and slavery in the South, trends that led to increasing political and cultural differences between the two sections. By examining the merchant's perspective, students can fully appreciate the complexities of the sectional crisis that led to the Civil War. In New York City, for example, many merchants supported slavery and secession, fearing that the eradication of slavery would destroy the nation's economy.
Recommended Resources
American Social History Project. Who Built America? Vol. 1. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989.
Dublin, Thomas. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Eynon, Bret. Daughters of Free Men: Who Built America? Viewer's Guide, American Social History Project. New York: American Social Historical Productions, 1987.
Friedheim, William, et al. Freedom's Unfinished Revolution: An Inquiry into the Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: New Press, 1996.
Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Web sites
Africans in America
PBS Online
Documenting the American South
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Concluding Remarks
This simulation will help your students understand the set of complex and interconnected relationships that developed between the North and South in the years leading up to the Civil War.
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