The arrival of falciparum malaria in the late seventeenth century had set the colonies in the south and north on diverging trajectories, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century the differences between the two regions had become stark. Enslaved African labor was a crucial part of the southern plantation economy, whereas the north’s growing manufacturing sector relied on free labor from Europe; this led to very different understandings of liberty.[85] In the northern states, freedom implied resistance to the southern slave states that had dominated national politics since the revolution.
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