The northern colonies and later states did not have the climate and soil for vast commercial farming, and so had always been a society of small farms and towns with more manufactories than the South. The North needed grain from the Mid-Atlantic region, which needed the business of the North for it's grain production, but the South was self-sustaining in food production. The big business of the South was tobacco farming until the invention of the cotton gin, and then cotton became an economically viable mass product.
