In the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, manufacturing in factories and on ports became large industries in which scores of economically disenfranchised people moved to the urban areas to work in factories for incredibly long hours and incredibly low pay. In the South, the invention of the cotton gin mechanized the production of cotton, which made the textile industry in the northeast large and more efficient in a capitalist sense. The invention of the cotton gin made the growing and production of cotton even more profitable and actually increased the demand for land and enslaved black people to toil in the fields and pick the cotton. Worker exploitation, child labor, horrific housing and labor conditions, and an ever increasing wealth gap became especially prominent in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions. In the West, railroad companies brought industrialization westward as immigrant labor painstakingly built the railroads that further colonized the West and displaced indigenous peoples from their homelands.
To understand the effects of the industrial revolution on "each region," let's divide the nation into the four cardinal directions and consider major developments.
The South benefited from Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin, and cotton became a major crop as the South remained largely agrarian in this period, both before and after the Civil War.
In the North, the industrial revolution created an economy based on manufacturing. Eli Whitney's cotton gin and the development of interchangeable parts enabled the North to dominate manufacturing.
The East, particularly the Northeast, became the center of textile production during the early years of the industrial revolution; this is in part due to the extensive river system in this region that provided water power for the mills.
In the West, the completion of the transcontinental railroad by the joining of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific lines enabled mass transit of both passengers and freight to move industrialization west.
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