History of the United States I / Unit 17 USH1 2429 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Two Migrations Compared
The idea
Set the two against each other. The voluntary migration brought over five million people from Europe, overwhelmingly to the North and the cities, where industry and wage labour were. The forced migration moved enslaved people within the country, overwhelmingly to the Deep South, where cotton was. Both were driven by demand for labour. Only one of them let the people moved choose the destination, keep the wage, or remain with their families.
In practice
Two labour migrations of comparable scale running in the same decades, sorting the country's population into two regions with two labour systems.
Where people slip
The comparison explains the sectional crisis better than any single cause does. By eighteen sixty the North had the people, the cities and the industry, and the South had the cotton and the enslaved population that produced it. That is why the arithmetic at Unit 14 entry 2012 worked as it did, with the North alone able to elect a president. Demography is not a background condition here. It is the mechanism.
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