From the angle that I have been looking at things for the last couple of years, I think that is exactly what the North was afraid of. No, they'd rather keep all the economic control and power, thank you very much!
If you start to look at this thing as a fight over money and control, a lot of stuff starts to make sense that didn't make any sense before.
I don’t agree.
It wasn’t, at least from the industrialization baron standpoint, that the North had the ability or desire to step on the South to prevent industrialization.
Much of that early industrialization of the South was being done by Yankees!
It wasn’t seen as competition (at this time, the real competitor was Europe, mostly Great Britain). Is was seen as expansion.
Economically, real progress could have been made across the country, all making the titans of early industry even richer.
But blast it all! That Yankee Eli Whitney just had to invent the cotton gin, which propelled an already dying slavery into new life.