Paul Newkirk –
It was all about basic economics. The 2000 or so plantation owners in the South had gotten to be the wealthiest people in the Country, by far, by shipping on hundreds of ships, huge quantities of raw cotton to the state-of-the-art textile mills in Britain, where they just could not get enough of the stuff.
Since the raw cotton had been produced by utilizing wage-free slavery, its cost of production was artificially low, so its selling price to the Brits was also relatively low. For them, this was a sweetheart deal to get cheap raw material.
Which meant that the Brits could also get rich by producing excellent, very popular, finished cloth at reasonable selling prices and selling it to the whole world.
Once the ships unloaded their cargo of cotton in Britain, they were highly motivated to get back to the USA to pick up yet another load of cotton because of the demand for it was so high.
But these were sailing ships which do not sail well when empty. They had a choice of loading up with English rocks just for the weight and then dumping them somewhere in the USA, or they could take on a cargo of all kinds of British manufactured goods instead of the rocks, and sell them in the USA for whatever price they could get. A break-even price was just fine for them since what they really wanted was to empty their cargo holds so they could refill them with raw cotton and then get back to Britain.
Now, remember, the only people in the South who had the cash to buy stuff with were those wealthy, but few in number, plantation owners, since all the available jobs in the agrarian economy of the South were already taken up by millions of slaves who had never even seen a pay envelope. So the returning ships stopped first in Northern ports since the people there all had at least some small pay envelopes to buy stuff with.
The newly developing factories in the North found that whatever they could produce, a similar imported Brit product was offered for sale at a price they could not match.
All these imports had to pay an import tax, so the Government was making out okay. The only ones who were NOT benefiting from this situation were the factories in the North, both the owners and the wage-earning workers; which represented two-thirds of the population of the Country.
The Northerners were not happy at being left out of the whole exchange, so they politicked constantly for increased tariff taxes on those imports, to create the effect of increasing the selling prices of imported goods, so the Northern-produced goods could compete. And they were very well aware that it was the wage-free slavery that made it all possible, to begin with.
Eliminate slavery or increase the tariffs, and the problem equalizes itself, by itself. But with either alternative, the plantation owners would no longer make the huge profits that they were accustomed to.
And THAT is why the North and the South were not getting along.
Economics 101.
America, the Principle 