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The Civil War

 

These bills of exchange would have to be brought to northern cities like Philadelphia or New York in order to be traded for ready cash, sometimes at a considerable interest. The fact that the Northern broker assumed a risk in giving the planter ready money in exchange for a future claim was overlooked. .
             Influential publications of the time, such as De Bow's Review increased the tension and resentment some southerners held. These publications published articles (fortified with statistics and data) to show that the South was the part of the country responsible for producing wealth and the basis for manufacture, while the North, like an "economic leech", consumed the wealth of the South upon which it depended for raw materials to manufacture into finished goods. American commerce, according to this view, whether incoming or outgoing, drew deeply from the South. The South was responsible for the majority of exported product and it was the South which bought the bulk of imported goods. Northern manufactures rested upon the production of Southern materials, yet the North managed to earn the majority of profits. .
             Northern businessmen complained that the South dominated the national government. Southern votes had been chiefly responsible for the low Walker tariff of 1846 , and the South further supported the still tariff of 1857, which was even lower than the previous one. During the Age of Jackson, the South voted second Bank of the United States, thereby destroying that institution. This deprived the nation of central financial direction, something the South later clamored for. Southern Congressmen rejected or severely impeded funding needed for internal improvements. Southern resentment prevented federal money from going into projects intended for the construction of a transcontinental railroad that would have linked Chicago or St. Louis with the Pacific coast.
             The issue of slavery, although it is now seen to be a moral one, was primarily economic during the Civil War era.


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