[BroJoeK]

x: "The few Southerners who believed industrialization was the way ahead tended to be in favor of tariffs and national banks and public works projects and government subsidies and even government-owned enterprises.
They were the heirs of Hamilton and the Whigs."

Well said, another great post, recommend to all.

[x]

I don't think the North and South were so far apart in the early years of the republic. New Englanders had poor soil and a poor climate. They couldn't produce much agriculturally so they wanted support for fisheries and shipping and then industry. Pennsylvanians were much more productive agriculturally, but they had mineral resources they wanted to develop.

Virginians had exhausted the soil and were facing increasing agricultural and financial problems. Virginia was the largest state in the beginning, and Virginians weren't opposed to maintaining that advantage by developing manufactures. Even George Washington wanted that canal to the interior built. North Carolinians were middling folk stuck between the aristocrats of Virginia and South Carolina and looking for a role to play. Kentuckians wanted to build roads and support their hemp-growing.

There was much room for cooperation between the regions. Then Cotton became King and every compromise or accommodation that happened earlier came to look like a betrayal of the cotton states and a theft from the wildly profitable plantation economy. Measures that were generally accepted in the early days as strengthening the national economy came to be seen as assaults on the cotton states' cash cow.