There is not doubt that slavery had made a huge impact in the way our society it built today. And there is no doubt that slavery was one of the major driving forces in the cause of the civil war. However, what many don’t necessarily realize and what historians are discovering is that slavery set much more of a precedence in the United States than we think. When reading “The Difference Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities” by William G. Thomas III and Edward L. Ayers, it was interesting looking at the whole situation of slavery from a historian point of view.

First, although slavery is an archaic and barbaric concept, its origins dates back to times when life was at its most archaic and barbaric, since the beginning of time. Slavery was thriving during the time of the Egyptians and the Roman Empire up until it was most prominent in the United States in the Southern states. However, as life became more modern and less dependent on people rather than machines and rights and validity of the human existence became more sacred for all humans; the need and moral standing for slavery started to stir in people’s minds. Slavery has set the foundation for many historical cities and landmarks to be made today. With that said, this article states that slavery did more in the Southern States than just help provide a fluid economy. Slavery created a cultural precedence and a social standing for the South.

In addition, there was this constant struggle between slavery and the institutions of modernity, which was what the Northern States were trying to accomplish. However, while the Southern states were reaching towards that, it became clear that Slavery was holding them back. This article focuses a great deal on the concept of Modernity, which can be best described by Robin Blackburn as:

the growth of instrumental rationality, the rise of national sentiment and the nation-state, racialized perceptions of identity, the spread of market relations and wage labour, the development of administrative bureaucracies and modern tax systems, the growing sophistication of commerce and communication, the birth of consumer societies, the publication of newspapers and the beginnings of press advertising, ‘action at a distance’ and an individualist sensibility.”

Some claim that this is the major factor for the start of the Civil War, however some would argue that the cultural tensions between the north and the south were beginning to rise swiftly and this was just the major factor that they needed. Despite the clear cultural and fundamental differences, Thomas and Ayers would argue that on many different levels the two states were more similar than we realized. While the concept of modernization has a clear definition, the extent of it’s meaning can lead to different interpretations depending on what your goal is. Which caused a lot of conflict for the North and the South. For example, the North embodied the characteristics of modern society-democracy, economic innovation, and social mobility where the South, still claiming their modernization, very much were against those characteristics. This also leads to the constant debate about slavery and contract labor in detail and in relationship to one another. In order to analyze the two in relation to the North and South conflicts, Thomas and Ayers turned to the Geographic Information Systems or the GIS. This helps in understanding the social structures and how they were arranged by developing certain bits of information. By developing all of the information they need the GIS allows them to understand how the social standing happened with the development of Slavery in the United States, as mentioned previously, during the rise up to the Civil War.