The nation's economic conditions were changing. Steamboats and railroads were speeding up westward expansion as well as commerce and trade. The United States was poised on the brink of the Industrial Revolution and the resulting machinery would eventually have made slavery obsolete.

The Northern elite wanted more federal government to facilitate economic expansion and greater industrial growth. Satisfied with life as they were living it, the Southern elite opposed a more powerful federal government and believed emphatically in states' rights. Slavery symbolized these basic differences and became the point on which there was no compromise.