William A.

Campbell

Professor Miller-Edwards

HIS 121-61B

10 December 2018

Sectional Division and Technological Innovation

The Antebellum era in the United States is characterizable as the gradual establishment of

sectional divisions between the aggregates of the northern and southern states. For this

establishment, the effect of technology is nontrivial. Because of climactic variations between the

two sections, whereas the southern states committed to an economy dependent on primary sector

activity in the form of agricultural products cultivated by a large slave population, the northern

states committed to economies dependent on secondary and tertiary sector activities. As history

progressed, the degree of their commitments was only to increase. Contributing to these

commitments were three types of technological innovation that furthered this sectional division

by decreasing the economic interdependence between them through the Mississippi River trade

route and further increasing the share of post-primary economic commitments in northern states

through their entry into the Industrial Age.

The first type of technological innovation is related to transportation. There are the two

types of water-based transportation innovation: steamboats and canals. Despite land-based

transportation costing 100x more than water-based transportation, there is one limitation:

upstream movement in rivers. If ships cannot exert enough power to move upstream against

gravity and current, then water-based transportation is limited to downstream product/factor

logistics. Steamboats overcome this limitation and reduce the price of water travel and freight by

90%. Of course, there is another limitation: water-based transportation where there is no water. If

there is no water, then there is no water-based transporation. It is that simple. Fortunately, canals

overcome this limitation and further reduce the cost of freight, especially in the Great Lakes

region with the Erie Canal and subsequent regional waterworks development due to its success.

Together, steamboats and canals overall reduced the price of water-based transportation of

products, factors, and people and the Erie Canal further provided an affordable trade route that

both connected producers in northern states on the eastern seaboard with consumers in the

burgeoning frontiers of western states and offered a substitute to the Mississippi River trade

route.

The second type of technological innovation is also related to transportation. There is a

relevant type of land-based transportation innovation: railroads. Despite the marginal cost of

water-based transportation in comparison, the limitation of the presence of water is too difficult

for the demands of transcontinental logistics and the state of early- to mid-nineteenth century

engineering. Nevertheless, railroads possess the comparative advantage of speed. Moving at a

top speed of 20mph, locomotives were 2x faster than coach and 4x faster than steamboat. Like

the Erie Canal, railroads helped not only to provide an affordable trade route from the northern

United States to its western frontier markets but also helped to offer a substitute to the

Mississippi River trade route itself and through bimodal logistical solutions.

The third type of technological innovation is related to production. There are four factory

innovations: the steam engine, centralization, standardized procedures, and interchangeable

parts. For clarification, the steam engine is not only a feature of production-related but both of

the transportation-related innovations. Nevertheless, the centralization of manufacturing into a

single physical space with steam-powered machines arranged into series of standardized

procedures for the production of interchangeable parts was pharmacological.1 Like the Erie

Canal and railroads, the factory contributed to the economic transformation of the northern states

and furthered sectional divisions with the agrarian economies of the southern states.

Steamboats, canals, railroads, the steam engine, centralization, standardized procedures,

and interchangeable parts: innovations in both transportation and industrial technology

contributed to sectional division. Given the economic opportunity the new western markets

presented as opposed to the centuries-old logistical networks of existing markets where the

impact of these new transportation technologies would be lesser in degree, the growth of these

transportation networks was predominantly longitudinal. Further, while the northern states were

hardly if at all dependent on slave labor due to a climate unamenable to the growth of cash crops

on a large scale, the new industrial technologies further shifted their base from primary sector

activities versus the southern states. Together, the promise of manifest destiny and the

transformations of the Industrial Age contributed to the sectional divisions between the North

and the South through the technologies central to their manifestation.

For the Antebellum era, the effect of technology is nontrivial. A country sent westbound

by the promise of new lands, there were material needs to be fulfilled and innovations in

transportation technology helped to do just that. One part of the country at the precipice of the

modern era of production and another without alternative to trappings of agriculture, those

tremendous innovations in industrial technology served only to draw attention to the perilous

1
In terms of the normatively positive, it helped the United States enter and secure its position in the Industrial Age.
However, in terms of the normatively negative, it caused the alienation of labor from the means of production and
further caused the degeneration of working conditions—longer hours, harder work—due to recent and ongoing
labor market expansions (women, western European immigrants) increasing labor substitutability without organized
labor countervailing the competitive forces inherent to the capitalist logic in the form of either labor unions or
otherwise.
gulf widening between them. Undoubtedly, the effect of technology was to further sectional

division.