North and South

 

I stumbled upon these videos, that take the census of the country in the years 1790 and 1860. Something he talks about is the how much more urban the North is, and that despite Virginia being the most populated state at the end of the Colonial Era, had very little in the way of a large metropolitan area, or even what we would consider a small town today, and at the dawn of the Industrial Era, right before the Civil War, only two sizeable urban areas existed in the entire south. Much of their populations existed in plantations, which in many ways, resemble the feudal structure that make up most of the denizens of Medieval America. I decided to look into what the stats looked like in White's World. 

What should count for Northern or Southern, or be included at all, involved a couple of executive calls on my part. Firstly, I did not include Canada in the stats (Or at least Eastern Canada--the cities of Western Canada being too integrated with the entire west coast, and it probably wouldn't move the needle much anyways). I did include Maine and northern New England as part of the North's population, even though there are no major cities beyond Boston. I did not include any populations west of the Mississippi and north of Little Rock. Besides Missouri being a historically tough to categorize as North or South, in White's world the timeline has the area periodically razed by Barbarian hordes and resettled anyways. The inclusion of Louisiana is very significant, however, as we'll see later. Then we get to the border states--Slave States that did not secede during the Civil War; Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware. The latter two I included as Northern--the Maritime Unite States Empire seems to operate much more culturally and economically both today and in White's world, and the video seems to count them as such. (And of course, by "them" I mean mostly mean Maryland). It is still widely considered Southern, some may Kentucky is by far the trickiest to make a call on. Climate-wise, it's Southern--a tobacco growing region. However, like Maryland, it did not secede from the Union. And in White's maps, he includes it as part of the Midwest. However, I will consider it Southern for the purposes of this piece, but with a caveat that will also be significant later.

Ultimately, the North (the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, and Great Lakes States) in area of 500,000 square miles, and a population of 21 million, has an urban population of roughly 1 million (at least from the data I've mined). The urban population is something like 4%, upwards of 5%. The South, as I've reckoned with, with an area of 652,000 square miles, and a population of 23 million has an urban population of 915,000. Its population is something like 3.9%, and I think I will round it up to 4%. So roughly a 1% difference between the two. The North still remains more urban than the South, even with the diminishing of industry, and especially trans-continental trade, but it seems Jeffersonian distinction between the two has certainly waned. But some interesting things to consider. In the site of the old colonies, the urban population is something like 600,000 (Two thirds of the North's urban population, really), versus the South's 250,000. It's really once we get into the post-Revolutionary War territories that the South really starts to play catch-up. Also of note is there are three main "chains" of urban areas: The Eastern Seaboard, the Ohio River Valley, and the area where the Red River and Mississippi sort of meet, and all of them have urban populations of around 300,000. It is interesting that taking the entire state of Louisiana, which is relatively small and most of lying west of the Mississippi, would take a huge chunk of the South's urban population. Meanwhile, a few of the South's other bigger cities are located on the Ohio River, which directly border historically Northern states. So overall, much of the South's biggest urban aggregate lie in regions that are sort of sketchy on categorization. The combined states of Mississippi and Alabama, as well as the Piedmont, probably best mbody of the dream of a robustly populated, but not particularly urban society, in addition to, interestingly enough, the area between the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes.Unlike the Old South, these areas probably don't grow cash crops, but hearty, wholesome grain. A grain based plantation would probably be the sight to see.

For those interested, Western America has something like a 13% urbanization population, comparable to contemporary Papa, New Guinea, and only less than 5% less than Sri Lanka, a nation with an influential hip hop culture. Of course, Western America covers an incredibly wide, almost empty swath of land, but most of its people do live in cities.