Temat: Describe the three Americas (i.e., the three distinctive...

Mid-century America was predominantly rural. But the situation was changing. The population of the north and the Northwest was growing (migration from Europe to escape famine, war, and poverty). Progress (rails, telegraph) and prosperity in the North and the Northwest territory called for reform. Technological and social changes, as well as a deepening sensitivity to the slavery question among white southerners, tended to isolate the South. In the North the movement against slavery resembled a crusade.

1. THE NORTH
- In the decades before the Civil War, the Northeast and the old Northwest territory (the North) were transformed by rapid growth and technological change.
- Advances in manufacturing, transportation and communications (identified as the Industrial Revolution) created a dynamic, rapidly industrialized economy.
- At the same time the controversy over slavery grew in the North.
- Early population (1820-1830) growth was due chiefly to native-born, by 1850 12% of the population was foreign-born – mainly from Great Britain (unsatisfactory labor conditions), Ireland (famine) and Germany (political revolutions and economic depression). Most of the immigrant settled in the North (few in the South).
- Urban growth – most of the cities of the Northeast doubled in population mainly because of the decline of the farming population + sharp increases in foreign immigrants.
- The emergence of industrial areas, mass production of goods (textiles, woolen&iron goods, shoes, guns, sewing machines) lowered their prices but the quality of goods was not necessarily improved.
- Higher competition caused the worsening of working conditions (extending the workday) as a conequence some unions were formed in the 1950s.
- Innovations in transportation were crucial to the industrial expansion of the North (railroad but river and canal transport continued to be significant).
- In agriculture new farming methods were introduced (improvements in land fertilization, crop rotation, and scientific stockbreeding), mechanization became increasingly vital because it helped increase farm production.


2. THE SOUTH
- Economic and social development in the South had been shaped from the earliest settlements by large-scale plantation agriculture almost totally dependent upon the forced labor of slaves.
- The decline of crop production after the American Revolution led many to question the need of retaining a slave economy, but after the opening of the southwestern frontier, the institution was perceived differently.
- The opening up of rich new lands in the southwest territory and the Louisiana Purchase magnetized thousands, the promise of quick profits from cotton production and the large amounts of uncultivated land on which the plant could be grown also brought a rise in the demand of black slaves, the slave population grew rapidly between 1820-1860.
- “COTTON IS KING” by mid-century southern planters were producing 75% of the world’s annual harvest of raw cotton (more than 50% of the nation’s total income from exports) – cotton formed the nation’s leading business sector prior to the Civil War.
- According to the 1860 census 75% planters of white families, held no slaves at all. Of those who owned slaves, most (some 88%) owned fewer than 20. But it was the small group the large planters that dominated the politics, wrote the laws, and definied the social standards of the old South. They preferred to see themselves and their society as distinct from the commercial, industrializing North.
- The planter society aspired to the aristocratic, “cavalier” ideals which, despite the harsh realities of life in the South, remained powerful social forces.
- Wealth and standing in the planter’s society were measured in terms of political and social influence, family connections and of course the amount of land and number of slaves one owned, this group of planters maintained authority over the white majority by skillfully manipulating their racial and economic fears by promoting the planter ideal, to which many small holders and farmers aspired.
- The institution of slavery was defended as a sound and humane basis of social organization in the South.
- Southern congressmen demanded that the northern abolitionists’ literature be banned from the mails. In 1936 they succeeded in persuading the House of representatives to refuse to hear antislavery petitions that were regularly sent to Congress. The rule was finally abolished in 1844 , as a result of the persistence of a small group of northern congressmen led by John Quincy Adams and Joshua Giddings.
- The South’s insistence on a tough new escapee slave law in the agreements that formed the Compromise of 1850 confirm this.
- There were some 250,000 free blacks in the South. Many of them had beed freed by their masters for acts of nobility or faithful service. They existed independently, held property(some owned slaves), but were denied civil rights. Like the slaves, their lives were regulated by the slave codes in the years before the Civil War.



3. THE SOUTHWESTERN AND WESTERN FRONTIERS
- The process of territorial expansion along the western frontier became a shaping event in the formation of the American nation, as important as the political experiment incorporated in the Constitution.
- The immensity of the American frontier, largely unsettled except for some tribes, as well as the requirenments of American politics, caused the U.S. to identify and achieve its continental ambitions.Territorial expansion was soon perceived as a remedy for nation’s ills: a safety place for the unfortunate and defeated people, a unifying formula for political victory. But on the other hand it also provided the means for the nation’s social disorder, the institution of slavery – to revive and flourish.
- Some Americans persisted in the belief that the boundaries of the U.S should extend to extermities of the continent.The majority embraced the idea expressed in 1845 by democratic journalist John L. O’Sullivan: it was Amrica’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent ... for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
- The debate over the proposed annexation of Texas and Oregon was hot.
- TEXAS-the Mexican province declared its independence on March2, 1836. The area had been largely colonized by emigrants from the U.S. (from Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana). Many immiggrants came to establish plantations and brought black slaves with them; this trend continued even after Mexico had eliminated slavery in 1829. Mexico permitted migration from the U.S, but it soon became alarmed at the rapid increase of Anglo-Americans and in 1830 prohibited new immigration. This caused grievances because:
1. the immigrants wanted self-government in Texas
2. disliked Mexican laws cutting land cotracts, imposing duties on imported goods, and forbidding foreigners to enter the province
3. feared that Mexico would enforce its religious requirenment (Roman Catholicism) and take steps to free their slaves
- the movement for provincial autonomy in Texas quickly developed into a war for independence, but even after the victory the Mexican government refused to honor texan independence.
- Nevertheless, the new republic formally applied for admission to the union, majority desired annexation, but there was also a strong opposition especially in the northern states, particularly among antislavery groups, which claimed that southern slaveholders would desire to create several states out of Texas in order to strenghten southern control of the federal government.
- The annexation of Texas became the chief policy goal of the Tyler administration, the resolution passed the Congress just3 days before the end of Tyler’s term. Texas accepted the terms of annexation and by December 1845 had drafted a constitution under which it was admitted to the union as a new state.
- OREGON – British and Americans claimed rights to the territory, that’s why in 1818 both countries agreed to a 10-year period of joint occupation, which was renewed in 1827 for an indefinite period.
- In his 1st annual message, in December 1845, President Polk(a firm believer in manifest destiny) asked Congress for authorization to suspend the joint occupation. In 1846, he agreed to a treaty that divided Oregon. The northern boundary of the United States was fixed at the 49th parallel of latitude.
- CALIFORNIA – President Polk was aware of the strategic value of California and of Great Britain’s growing interest, therefore he increased diplomatic and military pressure on Mexico for territorial concessions.
- After the U.S. had annexed Texas Mexico had cut off diplomatic relations accusing the U.S of stealing the territory.
- Hostile attitude toward the U.S, Mexico demanded war. When Polk learned that Mexican forces had crossed the Rio Grande River, he informed Congress that a state of war existed as a cosequence of Mexico’s action (May 11, 1846)
- The western and southern states responded enthusiastically, but the northeast was apathetic.
- The treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in February 1848. under this agreement Mexico agreed:
1. to recognize the Rio Grande river as the southern boundary of Texas
2. to cede New Mexico and California to the U.S. in return for $15 million
- An enormous territorial expanse gained by the U.S. from Mexico extended the nation’s boundaries to the Pacific.
- After gold had been discovered in the Sacramento Valley in 1849, a huge migration to the Pacific Coast began.
- California, having drafted and retified a constitution in 1849, requested admission into the union as a free state.
- Disputes arose over whether slavery should be prohibited or permitted in the new territories.
- Northern Democrats in the House of Representatives asserted their free-soil principles and pushed for the exclusion of slavery from any territory acquired from Mexico. The resolution reflected the growing resentment of northern Democrats


Political differences
- Since the days of the Confederation, the place of slavery in the constitutional order and its role in the future of the new nation had alarmed the national politics.
- When the rich lands of the Deep South opened up after the War of 1812, the future of the slave economy became very promising.
- During the 1st decades after the adoption of the Constitution, an equivalency of slaveholding and nonslaveholding states was maintained.
- Congress adopted the Missouri Compromise line, which prohibited slavery above 36 30’ latitude in the territory that composed the Lousitana Purchase. But how should the new territory won from Mexico be organized? The question dominated the congressional agenda for almost 4 years. Floor debate became increasingly bitter and by 1850 had taken on the appearance of a rethorical civil war.
- Both northerners and southerners recognized that slave economies could not take hold in the new western regions unless slaveholding was protected by law in the early stages of territorial settlement.
- After President Taylor recommended that California be admitted as a free state, southern threats of disunion began to be made with regularity.
- Thus 3 formulas had beed put in an effort to resolve the crisis:
1. The Missouri Compromise line to be extended to the Pacific
2. Congress to defer the question of slavery in the territories to the federal courts
3. the decicions on slaveholding to be made by the inhabitants of the territories when they began the procedure to apply for statehood
- Most southerners continued to argue that, since slaves were legal property, Congress had the responsibility to provide protection for the slaveholder if he chose to migrate to the new territories with slaves.
- In January 1850, as civil war became visible, Henry Clay returned to the Senate and attempted to calm down the sectional conflict and save the union. He introduced a series of resolutions, which became a basis of the settlement known as the Compromise of 1850, which offered sth for all. The most important parts provided for:
1. California to be admitted as a free state
2. the slave trade, but not slavery, to be abolished in the District of Columbia
3. Congress to enact a more effective fugitive slave law
4. territorial governments to be established in New Mexico and Utah (they could be admitted to the union with or without slavery, as they might determine).
- But Clay’s provisions went down in defeat in Senate in July 1850. Clay, exhausted and in poor ill, resigned and went back to Kentucky.
- The compromise measures were opposed by the South’s great spokesman and theorist Calhoun, the one measure southerners had insisted upon was the new and stricter Fugitive Law.
- However, the unionist movement was effective in strenghtening the sentimental bonds of union in both North and South. Politicians in both sections approved the compromise as the solution of the slavery question.
- But the sectional agreement was broken in 1854, when Senator stephen A. Douglas of Illinois introduced legislation to organize the region west of Iowa and Missouri.
- KANSAS AND NEBRASKA – the Nebraska region was above the Missouri Compromise line (36 30’) where slavery had been prohibited since 1820. Powerful senator Douglas of Illinois worked out a deal with southerners. He agreed to back a repeal of the Missouri Compromise so that the area west of Missouri would be open to settlement without any restriction against slavery, also devision of the region into Nebraska and Kansas territories, the latter would be setled by slaveholders. The Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) replaced the Missouri Compromise, which had been regarded as the final settlement of the slavery question in the territory of Louisiana Purchase. Douglas’ legislation called for the allowance the people of any new territory to decide whether or not they wished to legalize slavery within their boundaries. The legislation was supported by President Pierce and had been incorporated into the Compromise of 1850, to the level of national policy.
- The measure ended the sectional truce on the slavery issue and divided the Congress – southern Whigs and democrats supported it, northern Whigs opposed it, northern democrats were divided on the question. To the North and free states, repeal of the Missouri Compromise represented a violation of a sacred agreement that had the moral force of a constitutional provision. It was clear that the South was engaged in a “Slave power conspiracy”, to make slavery legal in all territories or even throughout the settled states. It was also clear that northern settlers would avoid settling in areas that permitted slaveholding.
- The cosequences of the Kansas-Nebraska Act were far-reaching. Anti-Nebraska Democrats and Whigs drifted into a new coalition, The Republican party, organized upon a principle of opposition to the expansion of slavery. The Democratic party was inceasingly dominated by the South. The Whigs ceased to be a national political party.
- Kansas became a battleground, the normal process of settlement changed into a contest of opposing ideologies (antislavery and proslavery forces wanted to gain control of the territorial government)Tensions within territory led to civil war in 1856. Although the free-state supporters were in overhelming majority President Buchanan recommended that Kansas be admitted as a slave state. This was approved in the U.S. Senate but defeated in the House of representatives. Meanwhile, the free-state majority gained control of the territorial legislature and in direct referendum held in January 1858 Kansas entered the union in 1861 as a free state, after several southern states had seceded.
- Again slavery controversy: a famous case of Dred Scott (1857), a slave residing in Missouri who fought for freedom. The decision of the court was against the slave. It was ofcourse denounced in the North. It delighted the South, which now saw slavery protected by constitutional quaratees in every part of the federal territories. The fact that 5 of the 9 justices were residents of slave states seemed to confirm the Republicans’ charge that the “slave power” had gained control over the federal government.
- The election of 1860 and the victory of Lincoln gave the Republican party control of the presidency and the House of Representatives. Democrats still had a majority in the Senate, and the Supreme Court retained its proslavery bias. There was no immediate threat to slavery in the South. The decision for secession and war was inevitable. The South, however, was increasingly islolated from the rest of the nation by economic developments and cultural differences.
- The South Carolina reacted to the election of Abraham Lincoln by withdrawing from the Union (December 20, 1860). In less than 6 weeks, the other 6 states of the lower South (Mississippi. Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Lousiana, and Texas) had also seceded.
- Southern “Nationalism” -During 1850s the idea that the South had its own destiny and the capacity to exist as a separate nation gained increasing acceptance. Southern nationalists argued that their section would prosper more outside the Union once free of the taxes and tarrifs that increased the cost of their goods to foreign purchasers. They also argued that necessity would pressure economic diversification in an independent South. Southern nationalism grew as political events diminished the section’s influence within the Union.
- Southern fears- the extension of “free soil” not only closed possible avenues for southern expansion but raised general fears in the South for the future. The South believed that its loss of voting power in Congress, and consequently reduction in influence in the federal government, caused a risky situation. Southerners perceived in the growing strengt of abolitionism a direct threat to their way of life. The victories of the Republican party, which elected Lincoln without carrying a single southern state in 1860 was disastrous.. In the election of 1860, the Republicans had also championed a protective tariff, a homestead act, and a railroad to connect the Pacific Coast with the old northwest – measures that the South viewed hostile to its economic interests and plantation agriculture.
- President Lincoln cosidered secession to be illegal.

Economic differences
- After 1850 expansionist activity, however, was no longer a remedy for the nation’s ills. In fact, it now became a cause for division. Any initiative directed toward southern climes was suspected in the North as a trick by southerners to secure additional territory for its slave economy.
- Antislavery groups opposed the South which proposed the idea that the U.S. would be justified “by every human and divinine” in seizing Cuba. Southerners, on the other hand, fearing the implications for the sectional balance, opposed renewed efforts to annex Canada. They also blocked a treaty that would have provided for the admission of Hawaii into the union (without slavery).
- In the early 1850s pressures were increasing in Washington for the federal government to suppotr the construction of a transcontinental railroad to link the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
- Southern and northern interests competed intensively to secure the location of the transcontinental railroad both aware of the great economic benefits.
- Reduced demand for American foodstuffs in Europe after the settlement of the Crimean War (1854-56) led to an economic decline. Republican politicians effectvely used the business depression, which became evident soon after Buchanan became a President, to discredit and blame Democratic polices. Manufacturers argued that the low-tarrif policy of the Democrats had failed to protect them agains British competition. Thus, in the congressional election of 1858 in Pennsylvania, every Democratic congressman was turned out of office.


Social differences
- northern society incorporated the powerful changes that were at work in the world, the South, however, stood aside from all this. It clung to a much older social structure – of ruler and ruled, of the few over the many – that had not changed since the ancient times. That and its dependence on large-scale agriculture and the labor of black slaves set it apart from the rest of the nation, and indeed, from most of the world.
- By mid-century the contrasts between the South and the rest of the nation could not be ignored or viewed as simple cultural variation.
- By the late 1850s the slavery controversy was widely present in writings. The war of words had been initiated by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)
- On the other hand, The Pro-Slavery Argument (1852), a compiliation of writings, provided the southern audience with defenses. In his Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (1854) and Cannibals All! (1857) George Fitzhugh from Virginia went on the attack. He condemned the factory system of the North for reducing workers “to separate, independent but conflicting monads, or human atoms.” Southern slavery was presented as a benign social welfare state.
- Antislaveryrepresentatives argued that slavery worked against the interests of small farmers and workers.
- John Brown’s attempt to launch a slave insurection in the upper South (1859), his trial and finally death, showed how the South was sensitive to slave uprisings. Moreover the Brown’s trial revealed hat his activities had been funded in part by donations from abolitionists. Brown was transformed into a hero and martyr in the cause of freedom by northern abolitionists and intellectuals, even by writers such as Emerson and Thoreau.


CONCLUSION
The opinion about the reasons of the outbreak of the Civil War is still very different among historians. The most common point of view is that the institution of slavery was the turning point. But it worth mentioning that the slavery debate was very tightly connected with moral, economic and political aspects. Some claim that it was the overall crisis in the 1850s that contributed to the War; the split among party system (Whigs ceased to exist), and later an overhelming victory of republican party led to the conflict. The Civil War revealed very deep economic, social and cultural divisions which proved to be as powerful as political crisis. As a result the compromise was no longer possible and thus the conflict between the Northand the South unavoidable.



US History Part I

4. From the establishment of colonies in the North America by the British to the Civil War, give what you think were the three most significant events that defined this period of American history. Make an argument defending your choices.

The Great War for Empire 1754-1763, known as The French and Indian War or as European called it The Seven Years War became one of the turning points of American History. Although it involved revelry and then struggle between Britain and France, however its outcomes directly affected future of British colonies and their inhabitants. As a result of the War the British were given Canada and the territory west of the Appalachians all the way to the Mississippi. With the area of the British Empire more than doubled, the problems of governing it were very serious. The war had left the British government with serious burden of debt so the British King and parliamentary leaders began a program of imperial reform.
1.Regular troops were now to be stationed permanently in the colonies, and the colonists were to assist in provision and maintenance of them. And, by the Stamp Act of 1765, the colonists were required to pay a tax on every legal document, every newspaper, almanac, or pamphlet. These policies threatened, in some degree, the welfare of almost all Americans. The long - term effect would be to confine the enterprising spirit of the colonists and condemned them to a fixed or even a declining standard of living. The tax fell upon all Americans, of whatever region, colony or class. In particular it hit merchants and lawyers, tavernkeepers, and printers. The Virginia House of Burgesses sounded a “trumpet of sedition” that aroused Americans almost everywhere. They resolved that the only taxes payable in the colony were those that they themselves approved. The riots, petitions and boycotts of English goods made the English Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act in 1766. However, the next year Parliament tried different kind of taxation. It imposed the so-called Thownshend duties on colonial imports of glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea. Meanwhile the British government had set up a board of customs commissioners in Boston to stop the smuggling there. Then the government sent troops to protect the commissioners from workingmen whom Samuel Adams had organized as the Sons of Liberty. On the night of March 5, 1770 British soldiers fired into the crowd of protesters in front of custom house killing five of them (later known as the Boston Massacre).
As a result of protests and boycotts, after three years, Parliament repealed all the Townshend duties except the tea tax 1773 that gave East India Company the right to sell tea directly to America without paying any of the usual fees except the tea tax while American merchants had to pay heavy duty buying tea supplies from England. The merchants feared that they would be driven out of business undertook widely spread action of preventing a giant monopoly from landing its cargoes in colonial ports (by dumping them into the sea). The action called “Tea Party” was immediately punished by the Parliment with four Coercive Acts in 1774. These closed port of Boston, reduced the colony’s powers of self-government, permitted the British troops to quarter in the colonist’s barns and houses. The limitation of colonial liberties and rights of self-governing became the main cause of coming American rebellion against motherland of England. The above historical evidence shows explicitly that the outcomes of the Seven Years war had significant influence on the events that soon advanced the creation of American States.

Louisiana Purchase

Louisiana, France’s largest colony in the New World, defined the wastern United States border along the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico to present-day Minnesota. It had been ceded to Spain in 1763 at the end of the Seven Year’s War. Jefferson shared with other Americans the believe that the United States was destined to expand its “empire of liberty.” Since the first days of American independence, Louisiana had held a special place in the young nation’s expansionist dreams. By 1800, hundreds of thousends of Americans in search of land had trekked into the rich Mississippi and Ohio valleys to settle, intruding on Indian Lands. Down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to New Orleans they floated their farm goods for export. Thus, whoever controlled the port of New Orleans had a hand on the throat of the American economy. As long as Spain owned Louisiana, Americans did not fear.
Rumors of the transfer of Louisiana to Napoleonic France proved true in 1802, and France threatened to rebuild its empire in the New World. The acquisition, claimed Jefferson, “works most sorely” on the United States. “Every Eye in the United States,” Jefferson wrote to the American Minister in Paris Robert R. Livingston, “is now focused on the affairs of Louisiana.” Fears intensified even more in October 1802, when Spanish officials, on the Eve of ceding control to the French, violated the Pinckney’s Treaty by denying Americans the privilege of storing their products at New orleans prior to transshipment to foreign markets. Westerns farmers and eastern merchants complained for closing the port and talked war. To relieve the pressure for war and to prevent westerners from joining Federalists in opposition to his administration, Jefferson simultaneously prepared for war and accelerated talks with the French. In January 1803 he sent James Monroe to France to join Robert Livingston in negotiating to buy New Orleans. Arriving in Paris in April, Monroe was astonished to learn that France had already offered to sell all 827,000 squere miles of Louisiana to the United States for $15 million. On April 30 Monroe and Livingston signed a treaty to purchase a territory, whose borders were undefined and whose land was uncharted.
The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the nation and opened the way for westward expansion across the continent. The acquisition was single most popular achievement of Jefferson's ’residency. It promised fulfillment of his dream of a continental nation reaching to the Pacific coast, “with room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation.” It offered to resolve Indian-settler conflict on the frontier by providing land to which eastern tribes, North and South, could be removed. It also enabled western farmers and eastern merchants to float their goods freely down the Mississippi River to New Orleans and trade them oversees extending American economy.


The American Civil War – in the name of maintaining the Union

Secession dramatically changed the nature of the political crisis confronting Americans in the winter of 1860-1861. Political sectionalism had developed around the problem of extending slavery into western territories. This question, of course, involved the larger issue of slavery’s future in the nation. But national unity replaced slavery as the central problem of the day when secession threatened the continued existence of the United States as a single nation. Southerners took their states out of the Union, formed Confederate States of America, and prepared to use military force to defend their new nation. During the war southerners proudly called themselves “rebels" even while insisting that they were not in rebellion. On the contrary, they claimed they were merely defending the constitutional exercise of their states’ rights. To emphasize this view they began, after the war was over, to call it the “War between the States.” From the North point of view, southerners were engaged in treason and revolt when they seceded and created the Confederacy. The official name given the conflict of 1861-1865 by the Union Government was the “War of the Rebellion.” The great struggle was and is most commonly known as the “American Civil War.”
Although the purpose of the struggle from the North’s point of view was to preserve the Union, the nature , size, and duration of the conflict had many other Far-reaching results. By ending slavery, the war began an enormous social revolution in American life. Union victory strengthened the authority of the central government . It also stimulated and intensified loyalty to the national Union; after the war the Supreme Court declared that the Union was “indestructible.”