In the same country, with almost nothing in common other than their location, the North and the South were polar opposites. Through these differences they found away to work together because one could not function properly without the other. The North needed the South’s agriculture and crops and the South needed the North to manufacture their goods. Although, it took quite some time for the war to begin the outbreak was inevitable. Eventually, their need for one another was not sufficient to keep them together and enough to ignore the troubles at hand that had been swept under the rug for so long, and so began the Civil war in 1861. The economy was at its peak before the Civil war, The North was more industrialized than the South and depended on exportation to make profit and fuel the economy but the exportation could not occurred if not with the help of the South which contributed the agriculture that they could manufacture and export. The South, on the other hand, depended on their use of forced labor to produce crops such as cotton. The North and South worked together so that the economy would prosper, because one could not work well without the other.
Perhaps the most important difference that led to the outbreak of the Civil War was the social difference, where the south deemed it acceptable and legal to utilize Africans as slaves and the North saw it as inhuman and unacceptable. The North constantly tried to abolish slavery in the South, by attempting to attain more power in the federal government to therefore abolish the use of Africans as slaves. “[In the North] society evolved as people of different cultures and classes had to work together. On the other hand, the South continued to hold onto an antiquated social order”(Martin) In the south where there was a three-part social structure aristocrats were at the top followed by the middle class farmers and at the bottom were the slaves. As opposed to the North where everyone was relatively equal.
When Missouri submitted its constitution in hopes of being admitted into the union as a slave state the North was outraged feeling that admitting Missouri as a slave state would create an imbalance in Congress therefore tipping the scales in favor of the South. The government resolved to admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state to maintain the balance in Congress between the North and the South all while drawing a geographical line of division known as the Mason Dixon Line, which divided the North and the South. Any state above the Mason Dixon Line was a free state and any below was a slave state, a compromise known as the Missouri Compromise. To this compromise Thomas Jefferson responded that “for the moment being considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and