Why the South Lost the Civil War – II

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: In the middle of the nineteenth century, the economy of the Southern United States, was in large part a brilliant creation of the Industrial Revolution. The principle of division of labor had established in the South a ready source of raw materials which were then transformed into fabricated products in Northern and European factories. Thus, the South's prosperity was based on its supply of staple crops: cotton, rice, tobacco and sugar to industry elsewhere. For all its cultural and social brilliance, the South before the Civil War was very similar to a developing economy in the twentieth century. In a pre-scientific agricultural era, its increasingly depleted fields supplied raw materials to factories in England and the North. With the coming of disunion the economic inequity became quickly apparent.