Machine industry and mechanized factory production, more productive than hand textiles, caused the North to break its economic dependence upon and come into political war with the South.  Up until the Civil War, the North, vastly more populous in free, voting-age white males, was continually out-voted by the slave-owning South and its Northern supporters who directly benefited from buying selling, shipping, breeding, and working to death Black people by the millions.  As a result, the South had a monopoly on political power in the country: the presidents, senate, house, supreme court, (executive, judiciary, and legislative branch) all were dominated by the South and slave economics through the constitutional provision that enslaved Black People counted as 3/5 of a person for appropriating representation in Congress but they could not vote---the pack of murderous enslavers voted for them. Legislation was necessary to the growth of industry in the North and the west, but not in the interests of the slave-owning agricultural South it was not passed for nearly one hundred years. The Northwest/North attempted to develop economic intercourse between the towns and the countryside. This demanded that more land be set aside for the production of food rather than export crops. It demanded that factories be built and railroads created to carry their production.  The South-dominated Senate, Supreme Court and Presidency refused to pass harbor, road-building, swamp-draining, railroad, tariff, canal, and tax appropriations.

Increasingly from 1830-1860, the South needed fresh tracks of land out west, and a lot of it.  They would used exhausted land to breed Africans, steal their children and sell them into slavery out west.  The goal of the white ruling class was to create a separate, Southern nation based on slavery, but with social, economic and cultural institutions that benefited all whites. Then all whites could be constrained to defend them.   The model for these parasitic whites was the Greek and Roman slave "democracies" where most of the population (3/4 to 4/5) was enslaved, and the white ruling enslavers lived off of them.  This path had only a limited future when in less than two generations tractors, harvesting machines, and mechanical pickers and planters were to become far more productive.   

The new industrial productive forces in the North came into conflict with the productive relations of slavery in the South.  As these economic crises became political war, fought not in governmental chambers but on land with guns and swords, the South militarily attacked the North.  They strategized that this would bring a relatively soft/slavery-benefiting North back under its governmental control. Its aim was to reorganize the entire country and eventually the entire hemisphere on the basis of slavery, with whites in charge, poor whites defending the system and Blacks being bred, bought, sold, and worked to death producing profits on land being stolen from Chechimecans/Indians. This was their formula for victory, this was their vision outlined as the Confederate States of America. 

After months of vacillation, coddling, compromising, pleading, and groveling, the Northern whites responded by fighting a defensive war to bring renegade states back into the Union, but with the North in charge and leading the government.  Its aim was to convert the South into a massive collection of agricultural plantations for the mass production of food, and fiber raw materials to feed the factory machines of the industrializing North where white workers would engage in wage-labor for capitalist profit.  The North could not defeat the South so long as the South had the vast manpower reserve of enslaved Africans.  So these Northern whites initially fought the Southern whites and captured Black people from the South as contraband.   This was the North's definition of Black freedom: Black contraband.

Many people in the North were unwilling to fight for the Union against slavery; thousands of whites rioted against Blacks; not knowing where the North's wealth came from, they advocated letting the South secede.  The industrial wealth of the North was founded on the cotton, tobacco, sugar cane, indigo, rice, yams, and other staples of the South. It was not in the interest of the capitalist investors/financiers of the North to abolish slavery. Their aim was to abolish the supremacy of the Southern slave military/political power, and take over the national governmental organs of power.  Initially, they did not understand that they could not end slave political power without first ending slave economic power by ending slavery itself.  Then they would have to seize national governmental control, then reinstitute slavery as sharecropping with the North in political/military control and the South as a junior partner: South control of North to North control of south; agriculture over manufacturing to manufacturing over agriculture; plantation and country-side over city to city over plantation; slave capital over finance/industrial capital to finance/industrial capital over slave capital; manual labor over mechanical labor to mechanical labor over manual---wealth centralized in the South to wealth centralized in the North. 

The South was 75% richer than the North at the beginning of the war. At the end of the war, the North was 75% richer than the South as its economic foundation came under direct and indirect control of Northern financial interests. Just as the southern region through slavery, the 3/5^th rule, control of the supreme court, legislatures, and presidency had been the political base for the control of the rest of the country by the slaveowners, it now became the base for the control of the country by the northern capitalists/financiers.  Black people would still be at the bottom of everything, no equality, no justice, no reparations---nothing but the ability to work as a sharecropper slave as opposed to a chattel slave. 

North generally accepted and protected enslavement of Blacks as long as it did not infringe upon white land, wealth, and tax privileges.  Black people who escaped to free states in the North, created a press, produced flyers and pamphlets, they set up speakers bureaus, organized safe houses, created food banks, set up make-shift schools and forged organizations devoted to abolition, freedom and equality. They fought on all fronts to secure these objectives: end slavery, become equal. They created the underground railroad---although headed north and away from Africa. This was understandable at that time given that west Africa was essentially a backwards hunting-ground for the capture, kidnapping and mass transporting of Black folk to the western hemisphere in the first place.  They appealed to the churches in Europe to enforce Christian morality on the churches in America. This split the churches in America on the issue of slavery. In time, and along with the fundamental technological and economic changes, Black abolitionists became the driving force behind the anti-slavery movement that made the Civil War unavoidable.

At the end of the war, there was widespread seizure of abandoned and vacant land by the land-hungry freedmen. The Freedmen's Bureau was hypothetically set up to facilitate the transition from slave to independent farmers, as was the Southern Homestead Act of 1866. Actually these bureaus were set up to round up and deflect the desires/drives/hopes of the freedmen to take land from the defeated and temporarily politically/militarily impotent white enslavers.  Study what the institutions did, not what they said they were doing.  Some Blacks were paid off as Buffalo soldiers and sent out west to kill Chechimecans, steal their land for whites, and ultimately they end up with nothing.  Others ran for political office until the whites joined together terrorized them out of office and kept Blacks from voting with lynchmob law for nearly 100 years after reconstruction.  Northern white investors had invested billions into Southern agriculture and were not about to give it up with emancipation.