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Aaron Thompson Period A-1 12/13/09 Term 2 test question Economies Why did the economies in the North and the South states develop so differently? There are several possible answers to this question. The most obvious is the fact that the southern states had slavery and the northern states had industry. Another reason is that the North had more people because of the opportunities of all of the available jobs, which comes back to the previous reason, the North had more jobs because they had industry. In the Northern states they didn’t have any land for large farms and plantations because the soil is not suitable for crops, but instead they had metal, and lots of it. They used this metal to form industries that made and sold things to support the economy. Things were much different in the South. In the Southern states they depended on large plantations run by a white family with many black slaves who worked the fields. A plantation is a huge farm that is passed down from father to son. The plantations often grew cash crops, crops that can be grown in large quantities and sold relatively cheap. This was how they made most of their money. Often the North would make the things the South needed to keep producing and selling their crops such as the cotton gin. This machine separated the seeds from the cotton at a much faster rate than by hand. The North had the materials and the factories to mass produce these types of machines and so had some control over the Southern economy, but never really affected it. In conclusion the South had a failing economy as soon as they began to depend on slavery. When Lincoln banned the selling of slavery the South was condemned, eventually slavery would burn itself out.