Basically, the Industrial Revolution was a period of change in the way people also determined where they lived and even how they waged war. It began in England in about 1750, and by 1850 it was over. It was characterized by new inventions that transformed society from rural and agricultural into a society in which people began to move into cities and used machines to do the work formerly done by hand.While both North and South were essentially rural and agricultural, Southern farm life was somewhat easier in that the growing seasons were longer. The North, with a hard-scrabble farming economy, positively inhaled the savings inherent in machine labor that were made possible by the Industrial Revolution. The South, with an agricultural/ slave/people-based economy primarily devoted to profitable cotton, never really saw the need to integrate industry into its comfortable plantation life. The South rejected the factories and the move into cities. When the Civil War began, each section followed its own interests: The South clung to its "King Cotton" economy, confident that it could win any war in which cotton was a player. The North had spent the previous 60 years in industrialization. Factories in the state of New York alone produce more goods than the entire South. The Northern transportation system was fully integrated: It had canals criss-crossing the region and a rail system with common trackage that ran no fewer than four lines from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi River.
Historically, the Civil war was caused by the incompatibility between northern and southern wealth. The industrial revolution in the North caused machines to be built which relied on wage laborers and not slaves
