North And South Essay, Research Paper
Brad Carolan
Ryan Hamilton
Melissa Mills
Whitney Rice
The North and the South:
An American Legacy (Outline)
The Pre-dawning of an American Tragedy
Economic, Social and Political Institutions
The Eastern regions of the United States experienced tremendous economic and social growth during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Encouraged by waves of work-hungry immigrants, business-friendly laws, and the promises of a resource-rich land, businessmen invested mightily in their schemes and plans for settling the new country before them.
The American economy enjoyed unprecedented growth for much of the 1800s. Capital, resources, land, and foreign labor were plentiful, and all these factors combined to engender fertile economic conditions for new generations of entrepreneurs and businessmen. Economic growth was also aided by the country’s emerging legal system, which was fiercely protective of private property and determined to enforce contractual agreements.
As the nineteenth century progressed, two distinct economic systems emerged in the North and South. In the North, the opening of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company in Massachusetts in 1823 marked the introduction of the English factory system to America. This triggered the rapid development of a manufacturing-based economy in the North, an economy that was further buoyed by improved transportation options and increased harvesting of raw materials. Fledgling labor organizations began to sprout up as well in the latter part of the 1830s.
In the early 1800s, the nation’s woeful road system quickly gave way to water transportation. The latter option was aided immeasurably by the construction of the Erie Canal (1817-1825), which linked the New York canal system to Lake Erie at Buffalo and opened the Great Lakes region to commerce, as well as the development of the St. Lawrence Sea way, a series of canals, dams, and locks along the U.S.-Canadian border which allowed travel from the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the Atlantic to the Great Lakes. Thousands of miles of canals were built throughout the first half of the nineteenth century; most of them financed by state and local governments. The canal and river systems, though, eventually gave way to the “Iron Horse”-the locomotive. Railway lines proliferated and became the preferred mode of delivery. Railroads also proved essential to the development of the nation’s ever-expanding western borders, and railroad hubs in cities such as Chicago were quickly established to transport crops of the plains back to eastern markets. By 1860 more than thirty thousand miles of railroad track had been laid–nearly as much as in the rest of the world combined.
In the South, meanwhile, the region’s economy was fused to the institution of slavery. Agricultural in nature, Southern business interests relied on slaves to harvest the cash crops (especially cotton) that were sold to customers in urban and industrial markets. As abolitionist pressures from the North grew, slave-holders grew increasingly concerned.
Two issues dominated American politics in the first part of the nineteenth century: expansion and slavery. Perhaps inevitably, the two issues became tangled together over time, a development that contributed to the slide toward war that nearly tore the nation apart.
After America’s ill-fated attempt to annex Canada, the country turned its expansionist attention to the west. In the 1840s America wrested the republic of Texas and another large region (which included modern-day California, Nevada, Utah, and most of New Mexico and Arizona) away from Mexico. The mountains, deserts, and forests that comprised these territories were hundreds of miles away from the eastern United States, but their acquisition nonetheless had a tremendous impact on the relationship between the established Northern and Southern states.
As the United States continued its expansion, it became increasingly difficult for it to maintain its balancing act between the North and the South regarding slavery. As new states and territories joined the nation, debate over whether they should be admitted as “slave states” was furious. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which secretary of state and future president John Quincy Adams perceptively called the “title page to a great tragic volume”), the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 were all engineered in the hopes of satisfying both sides, but these legislative efforts ultimately failed. Abolitionists continued to rage against the enslavement of blacks, while Southern states felt that the balance of power in Congress between slave and non-slave states was being gradually eroded. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision (1857) further heightened tensions between the North and South.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, political parties evolved in accordance with patterns of ethnicity, religion, region, and economic class. Leading political parties included the Jeffersonian (National) Republicans, who favored high tariffs and the institution of a national bank; the Whigs, a party that grew out of the National Republican Party and several smaller political factions; and the Jacksonian Democrats–named after party giant Andrew Jackson–who held sway from 1829 to the dawn of the Civil War.
The issue of slavery, however, finally caused the Democrats, traditionally a coalition of various economic and ethnic groups, to splinter. The two groups each fielded a candidate for the 1860 presidential election, but the anti-slavery Republicans of the North were able to push Abraham Lincoln to the presidency despite the fact that he won only 39 percent of thepopular vote (and only two counties in all of the South). His election further convinced the South that separation from the Union was necessary.
American law and interpretations of justice underwent dramatic transformation in the first half of the nineteenth century. American law was based in large measure on English common law, but U.S. politicians, lawyers, and communities shaped and altered that foundation to address uniquely American issues such as land settlement.
The country’s fledgling court system showed little inclination to use law as a device to enforce Christian concepts of morality, instead devoting its attention to the issues of property, business, and commercial contracts. As judicial decisions proliferated, they formed a body of case law that often addressed questions not yet discussed by the country’s legislative arms. “Instead of upholding the ideal of a stable and balanced social order,” noted the authors of The Great Republic, “the law gave increasing priority to economic growth,” encouraging individual enterprise, initiative, and competition.
Several legal decisions rendered during the first half of the nineteenth century had an enduring impact on both the nature of the American legal system and the sociological landscape of thecountry. In 1803 the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Marbury v. Madison, authored by Chief Justice John Marshall, established the judicial branch’s authority to invalidate federal laws that it deemed unconstitutional, a power that has been invoked with significant effect in the ensuing two centuries of America’s history. Other Supreme Court decisions (such as McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819 and Cohens v. Virginia in 1821) asserted the sovereignty of federal law over state law, thus strengthening the hand of Congress and confirming the power of the Constitution.
Another landmark legal decision reflected America’s struggle with the issue of slavery. The 1857 Dred Scott decision, which denied the appeal of a slave who petitioned for freedom on the grounds of his extended stints in “free” territory, further inflamed passions concerning the subject, and many scholars argue that the decision made the Civil War inevitable.
The sociological make-up of the American people underwent a dramatic transformation in the first half of the nineteenth century. The first Americans–overwhelmingly British and Protestant–were joined by an ever-widening range of emigrants from Poland, Germany, Ireland, and other European countries with different political views and religious faiths. These newcomers embraced the uniquely American vision of the young country as a place of opportunity and possibility. Most of these immigrants settled in the cities of the North, where factories were an increasing presence in theeconomy. The Irish, who accounted for more than 40 percent of the immigrants to America in the 1840s, were forced to contend with sometimes violently anti-Catholic feelings in their new land, but they nonetheless managed to accumulate significant political power in major Northern cities. By 1860 eight cities had swelled to populations of more than 150,000; only seven cities in all of England were of that size. Despite the surge in immigrants, however, most Americans continued to live in rural areas; this was especially true in the South. In 1860 four out of five Americans lived on farms or in communities of less than 2,500. The influx of immigrant families, coupled with the growing size of American family units, resulted in a nation in which children were seemingly everywhere. By 1830, nearly one-third of the country’s white population was under the age of ten.
Other events during this period had an enduring impact on American society as well. In 1848 more than two hundred women and men met at Seneca Falls, New York, to hold a conference on women’s rights. This convention, which charged that women should have the same rights as men in the realms of voting, education, employment, and property ownership, is commonly regarded as the birthplace of the American women’s movement.
Native American tribes east of the Mississippi River, meanwhile, saw their cultures uprooted and discarded by the steadily encroaching white population. Some tribes were housed on reservations located on unfamiliar land, while others fled in search of land where they might be left undisturbed. Even tribes that sought to adopt “civilized” ways were swept away. A notorious example of this was the removal of the Cherokee nation to Oklahoma during the winter of 1838-39. This journey, in which many members of the tribe perished, became known as “The Trail of Tears.” But all the Indian nations were victimized. Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole from the South and northern tribes such as the Ottawa, Huron, and Miami were all dislocated. These refugees eventually met on the western side of the Mississippi, land of the proud Plains Indians.
The American medical establishment continued to look to Europe for guidance in understanding the human body, but individual Americans did provide notable contributions. Philip Syng Physick is generally acknowledged as the man who established surgery as a specialty in America, while Daniel Drake was a tremendously influential educator. In addition, the author Oliver Wendell Holmes was the first to recognize that puerperal (childbed) fever was a contagious malady.
Both European and American physicians of the early nineteenth century supported general regimens of “diet, exercise, rest, baths and massage, bloodletting, scarification, cupping, blistering, sweating, emetics, purges, enemas, and fumigations,” according to Medicine: An Illustrated History. “There were multitudes of plant and mineral drugs available, but only a few rested on sound physiological or even empiric foundations.”
The threat of diseases such as yellow fever (which killed thirteen thousand people in the Mississippi Valley in 1843), cholera, and smallpox continued to terrorize the American people, but these maladies proved even more deadly to Native Americans who came into contact with whites. Smallpox epidemics decimated entire tribes of Indians, whose immune systems were particularly vulnerable to such unfamiliar diseases.
Steadily accumulating knowledge did gradually translate into longer life spans. The cities of the East, though, were burdened by overcrowding and wretched sanitary conditions. They became breeding grounds for infectious diseases such as tuberculosis; in the late 1850s, American cities had the highest death rates in the world. Rural communities across the country, meanwhile, often relied on midwives for medical attention, especially in the area of child delivery. Women’s efforts to gain further medical education were thwarted at seemingly every turn, and few women were able to obtain advanced degrees. Finally, however, the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania–the first women’s medical school–was established in 1850.
Nineteenth-century America featured a wide array of religious faiths that served as a unifying element for communities across the country. The evangelical zeal that swept the country in the first part of the 1800s was especially evident in such regions as Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, home to pioneers who used religion as a central building block in the creation of communities. Fledgling Methodist and Baptist denominations proved adept at speaking to the common populace, and this ability vaulted them past older Protestant faiths to become the largest denominations in America by 1820.
As freedom of religion became entrenched as a core principle of the American idea, new religions without Old World ties popped up, and existing denominations continued to splinter. But while these faiths differed in various respects, they were unified in their passion for America and took pains to emphasize that the country was a nation inextricably intertwined with God.
As the century progressed, religious revivalism assumed ever-greater importance all across the nation. Religious practices, however, were shaped by regional interests and viewpoints. This led most Southern churches to deny that slavery was an immoral practice in Christian society; failure to defend the practice might, in fact, threaten a church’s very survival. Conversely, many leading abolitionists of the era were Quakers or other religious figures from the North who charged that the practice of slavery was an abominable violation of the tenets of the Christian faith. Free blacks, meanwhile, weary of discrimination in both the South and the North, formed their own “African” churches. These were primarily Baptist or Methodist denominations.
At the same time that this growth in religion was taking place, American audiences of the nineteenth century became fascinated by science and technological advancement, which they saw as key weapons in the battle to tame nature and construct better lives for themselves. Attempts to understand the human mind and other intangible aspects of existence received great attention as well. This interest contributed to the popularity of phrenology, a practice wherein a person’s character could allegedly be determined by an examination of the form and shape of the person’s head. The theory of evolution espoused in Englishman Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), meanwhile, set off a huge controversy on both sides of the Atlantic.
Inventions proved to be of tremendous importance as well. Steam locomotives chugged across the nation’s rail lines by the 1830s, accelerating the development of America’s transportation infrastructure, and 1839 marked the first appearance of vulcanized rubber, the invention of Charles Goodyear. Other notable inventions included Samuel Morse’s telegraph (1844), Elias Howe and Isaac M. Singer’s sewing machines (1846 and 1850), and the Bessemer method of steel production (1856) developed by English inventor and industrialist Henry Bessemer.
Perhaps no era in America history has left so indelible a mark on the nation’s psyche as the Civil War that tore through the country from 1861 to 1865. For years the Northern and Southern regions of the United States had crafted compromise legislation intended to patch up the lengthening philosophical rifts between the two sides, but by the 1850s many people on both sides felt that their differences on such issues as slavery could not be reconciled. The election of Abraham Lincoln to the country’s presidency in 1860 struck Southerners as a direct threat to their way of life, and they quickly embarked on a course of secession. Lincoln, though, was determined to preserve the Union by any means necessary. The result was war. “Entirely unimaginable before it began,” wrote Ric Burns and Ken Burns in The Civil War, “the war was the most defining and shaping event in American history-so much so that it is now impossible to imagine what we would have been like without it.”
By the middle of the nineteenth century, slavery was entrenched in the agriculture-based Southern economy (cotton, the South’s single biggest crop, accounted for three-quarters of all U.S. exports in 1850). Bondage had long been an institution in the South, but with the explosion of cotton production following the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, slavery became even more important. In addition, capital investment in slaves was a
central part of the South’s economic structure by the mid-1800s.
Many slaves were held on giant plantations, and some wealthy slave-holders owned hundreds of blacks. These families were able to lead lives of leisure up in the plantation house while their slaves toiled in the surrounding cotton fields. This dynamic spurred the birth of an aristocratic sort of lifestyle for rich whites. “The plantation ideal more than ever dominated the South,” wrote Arthur Charles Cole in The Irrepressible Conflict. “To become a large planter was the aspiration of every ambitious youth…. The planter-aristocrat on his broad acres represented a leisure class that was genial, picturesque