This book-length project explores how economic creativity became central to the debates over slavery. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, invention and innovation became an increasingly important part of the northern economy.  Toward that end, northerners supported a number of government policies and institutions to encourage creativity: widespread public education, an open and enforceable patent system, and a network civic institutions that encouraged the diffusion of information. Southerners, on the other hand, supported top-down models of economic modernization that opposed policies such as the provision of public education. The resulting sectional divide over creativity led to bitter political conflict: northerners such as Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley believed that slavery threatened the creative core of their economy, while southerners sought to extend slavery at all costs. Well after the Civil War, the South continued to lag far behind in terms of education, invention, and innovation, suggesting their legacy of slavery, racism, and inequality was a long-standing deterrent to economic creativity.