School children across America are taught that the Civil War began at Fort Sumter, South Carolina in 1861. Fort Sumter was the physical beginning of the Civil War, however the reasons as to why Confederate forces attacked that day (and even why there were Confederate forces) goes back into the very beginning of American history. The problems between the North and the South dominated the national discourse almost from the time there was a national discourse in America. As far back as the drafting of the Constitution the North and the South were fighting to be the primary voice shaping what America would be. Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 is an early example of the need for compromise between the North and the South. Since representation for the House of Representatives was going to be based on population, it behooved the states to count everyone who lived within their state boundaries. The South wanted to count slaves. The North, who wanted to be the dominant region, did not want slaves counted. Oddly, the debate put the South in the position of arguing that slaves were people under Federal law, and the North fighting against this concept. The rise of the abolitionist movement in the coming decades would soon flip this argument. Out of this debate came the Three-Fifths Compromise, which allowed each slave to be counted as 3/5's of a person. The North had also used slaves to build its economy. However, the landscape of the North lent itself more easily to smaller farms that did not require large workforces. The North also industrialized earlier and faster than the South, and slavery became less and less common. The last decades of the 18th century also saw slavery becoming less popular in the South. This changed with Eli Whitney's cotton gin. The cotton gin allowed what previously been a fairly unprofitable crop, cotton, to become massively profitable.