[2][3] Regional tensions came to a head during the War of 1812, resulting in the Hartford Convention which manifested New England's dissatisfaction with a foreign trade embargo that affected its industry disproportionately, as well as dilution of Northern power by new western states, and a succession of Southern Presidents.
Southerners defended slavery in part by claiming that Northern factory workers toiled under worse conditions and were not cared for by their employers.
Historians have debated whether economic differences between the industrial Northeast and the agricultural South helped cause the Civil War.
[6][7] Members and politicians of the newly formed Republican Party were extremely critical of Southern society and argued that the system of free labor in place in the North resulted in much more prosperity.
[8] Southerners argued that it was the North that was changing and was prone to new "isms", while the South remained true to the historic republican values of the Founding Fathers (many of whom owned slaves, including Washington, Jefferson, and Madison).
[10] The Western United States was also growing due to the innovations of the railway system and the massive boom in the steel industry.
In the north, the Canadian government had given the indigenous Inuit peoples throughout the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut a certain amount of self-governance, allowing them to maintain their cultural practices.