Being of religious nature, these people brought with a system of moral guidelines and expectations. These hard working people immediately began to thrive in their small communities, and continued to develop as more and more immigrants from Europe came seeking opportunity.
In the South, an entirely different brand of people began to populate the new American colony. These people were mostly aristocrats seeking fortune in the new land. Most set up plantations to grow the exotic crops that would bring the owners their fortune. These plantations were usually large, and required a generous number of people to properly attend to them. To the aristocrats, paying indentured servants a wage to work the land would simply be too much, so most bought slaves from Africa, drastically limiting the economic opportunities in the South for the common laborer, and therefore setting the slow pace for Southern expansion.
Shortly before the civil war, it was quite evident that the Northern United States' economy was much more powerful than the Southern economy, and the gap between the two economies was going to do nothing but grow. The largely capitalist North was rapidly producing and exporting, generating large sums of money all while expanding at an almost frantic pace. It contained many factories and raw materials, and was more or less self-sufficient concerning food and other fundamental materials. With over 20 million people, the Northern economy was clearly the superlative to any other region in the United States, and therefore would command the most political authority.
The Southern economy, on the other hand, was not fairing as well as the North's. Being primarily agrarian, the South mostly grew exotic crops like tobacco, cotton and indigo on large plantations for export. Although the crops generated plenty of money for the aristocratic owners of the plantations, it was doing little else to further the Southern economy, and besides, demand for the crops was shrinking because new sources in the Far East had began opening up the market.
