il, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the southern United States. In an era that celebrated liberty and equality, the slaveholding Southern states appeared backward and repressive. This drew most Northerner’s into the abolitionist movement not so much for the behalf of slaves, but how slavery made the United States look.Despite this, the slave economy grew rapidly, enriched by the spectacular increase in cotton cultivation to meet the growing demand of Northern and European textile manufacturers. Southern economic growth, however, was based largely on cultivating more land. The South did not undergo the industrial revolution that was beginning to transform the North; the South remained almost entirely rural. In 1860 there were only five Southern cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants (only one of which, New Orleans, was in the Deep South); less than 10 percent of Southerners lived in towns of at least 2500 people, compared to more than 25 percent of Northerners. The South also increasingly lagged in other indications of modernization, from railroad construction to literacy and public education. For these reasons, many Southerners felt that slavery was all too necessary because their agrarian economy was based around it. Many feared that the abolition of slavery would result in a Southern economic collapse.The biggest gap between North and South, however, was ideological. In the North, slavery was abolished and a small but articulate group of abolitionists developed. In the South, white spokesmen, from politicians to ministers, newspaper editors, and authors, rallied around slavery as the bedrock of Southern society. Defenders of slavery developed a wide range of arguments to defend their cause, from those based on race to those that stressed economic necessity. They made heavy use of religious themes, portraying slavery as part of God's plan for civilizing a primitive, heathen people. For a white Southerner to go against slave...
