Second Party System [1828–1854] III Flashcards
(31 cards)
Review - Timeline: Antebellum Idealism and Reform Impulses, 1820-1860
1827: American Temperance Society is formed. 1830: Joseph Smith founds ‘Church of the Latter Day Saints’. 1831: Nat Turner leads slave rebellion. 1833: William Lloyd Garrison founds American Anti-Slavery Society. 1841: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendentalism and his essay ‘Self-Reliance’. 1848: Supporters of women’s rights gather at Seneca Falls. 1854: Henry David Thoreau publishes ‘Walden’ (or, ‘Life in the Woods’). 1855: Most northeastern states “go dry” by prohibiting alcohol.
Review - Timeline: Cotton is King - The Antebellum South, 1800-1860
1794: Eli Whitney patents cotton gin. 1803: U.S. purchases Louisiana Territory from France. 1811: Charles Deslondes leads slave revolt in Louisiana. 1831: Nat Turner leads slave rebellion. 1845: United States annexes Texas. 1850: John C. Calhoun’s “Disquisition of Government” is published. 1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’. 1854: Ostend Manifesto is made public. 1855: William Walker conquers Nicaragua and legalizes slavery.
Antebellum Commercial Revolution - Explain why the North and South developed such different economies.
In the Antebellum Era, differences in the economies of North and South became sharper as the West took over food production and the South became more dependent on slaves and cash crops, while the Northeast focused its efforts on industrialization. By 1850, the value of industrial output surpassed the value of agriculture, with most of it occurring in the North - signaling a second commercial revolution. The output of goods and services in America increased twelvefold between the turn of the century and the start of the Civil War; two-thirds of these goods and 70% of the workers who made them hailed from factories in the Northeast. Geography played a role, with the climate of the South being conducive to cash crops, and the fast-moving rivers of the North powering machinery.
Antebellum Commercial Revolution - Identify Charles Goodyear and Samuel Morse as well as name their inventions.
In the two decades between 1830 and 1850, the number of successful patent applications nearly doubled. For example, Charles Goodyear invented the process of vulcanizing rubber, which keeps it strong even when heated. It had many uses, especially for the eventual development of the automobile industry. Samuel Morse invented the electric telegraph and Morse code around 1838. It revolutionized communication by allowing messages to be passed almost instantly over long distances. Within 16 years, telegraph wires crisscrossed the East Coast and reached as far west as the Mississippi River.
Antebellum Commercial Revolution - Summarize why the South disliked the tariffs passed to protect American industries.
The changes brought about by Northern industrialization began to divide the country even further when the government passed protective tariffs to support American manufacturing. These taxes raised the cost of imported goods, making domestic goods more competitive. Praised by industrial regions of the nation, tariffs were a disaster for Southern cotton-growers since the tariffs not only raised prices, they also lowered Britain’s ability to buy American cotton. The economic controversy was a more important political issue than slavery at the time, nearly causing a civil war in the 1830s when South Carolina threatened to secede over the so-called ‘Tariff of Abominations.’
Antebellum Commercial Revolution - Describe the rise of the corporation.
New business models like the corporation became commonplace with the rise of industrialization. After being chartered by a state, a corporation raises capital from many different investors. Each of them earns a share of the profits while only risking the amount of their original investment.
Antebellum Commercial Revolution - Describe the demographic changes that took place because of the Industrial Revolution.
In 1821, Francis Lowell began hiring young women from nearby farms to work in his textile factories, heralding a shift of the American workforce from the countryside to the cities. While initially a better way for these women to make money, by midcentury a majority of factory girls were replaced by lower-paid immigrants. In terms of rural and urban demographics, while the nation’s total population grew by about a third, the population of towns and cities of 8,000 or more increased by 90%. By 1860, about one in seven Americans lived in a city.
Urbanization in the North - Define urbanization and understand its causes.
Urbanization refers to the population shift from rural areas to urban areas, the gradual increase in the proportion of people living in urban areas, and the ways in which each society adapts to this change. It is predominantly the process by which towns and cities are formed and become larger as more people begin living and working in central areas. It is caused by industrialization and specialization, which requires workers to be centralized in one location. By 1860, there were 45 cities with a population of 20,000 people or more, compared to just two when the nation was born.
Urbanization in the North - Discuss the negative effects of urbanization.
Life in port cities was difficult because the infrastructure couldn’t handle explosive growth. Overcrowded wooden apartment buildings frequently led to deadly fires. Diseases like cholera, typhoid, and yellow fever also spread rapidly due to overcrowding and sanitation problems. There were no sewers, animal waste covered the streets, and in some cities aquifers and wells were polluted with sewage. Other types of air and water pollution also lowered life expectancy and quality. Anthracite coal became the primary fuel source for industrial power, but burning so much coal led to poorly understood environmental and health consequences. Similarly, rivers were often polluted by industrial waste, but regulations to ensure clean air and water didn’t exist until after the Civil War.
Urbanization in the North - Summarize working conditions in the cities and why ‘turn-outs’ didn’t always work.
In general, factories exploited their workers, with excessively high work hours, dangerous working conditions, monotonous tasks, and no sick leave or vacation time. Workers would sometimes form unions and strike for better conditions, but results usually depended on how specialized their work was, as there was always a large supply of fresh immigrants (usually for Ireland and Germany) to replace them. Southerners often referred to such economic exploitations as wage slavery, insisting that their model was better since they at least paid to feed and house their workers.
Nativism
The policy of protecting the interests of native-born or established inhabitants against those of immigrants. Or a return to or emphasis on traditional or local customs, in opposition to outside influences. It most often has a strong racist component. In scholarly studies, nativism is a standard technical term. The term is typically not accepted by those who hold this political view, however. Dindar (2009) wrote “nativists… do not consider themselves as nativists. For them it is a negative term and they rather consider themselves as ‘Patriots’”.
Urbanization in the North - Describe some of the nativists’ violent actions.
Nativists were anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic Americans who resented competition from these groups in the job market. Riots became problematic in some cities, such as Philadelphia, causing death and property damage. In the same way, many whites resented the free blacks in the cities who also competed for jobs. Though Baltimore had a larger African American population, Philadelphia was a hotbed of racist riots, harassment and even disenfranchisement.
Urbanization in the North - Describe some of the nativists’ violent actions - ‘Know-Nothings’
Nativist clubs sprang up throughout the Northeast in the 1840s with strict admission requirements: typically white, American-born, male, and Protestant. Members of New York City’s secretive ‘Order of the Star Spangled Banner’ were also called the ‘Know-Nothings’ because they refused to admit any knowledge of the organization. Eventually, they organized into a political entity called the American Party, which ran former president Millard Fillmore as its candidate in 1856. These groups gave speeches, published magazines, and even resorted to violence.
*The Economics of Cotton*
In the years before the Civil War, the South produced the bulk of the world’s supply of cotton. The Mississippi River Valley slave states became the epicenter of cotton production, an area of frantic economic activity where the landscape changed dramatically as land was transformed from pinewoods and swamps into cotton fields. Cotton’s profitability relied on the institution of slavery, which generated the product that fueled cotton mill profits in the North. When the international slave trade was outlawed in 1808, the domestic slave trade exploded, providing economic opportunities for whites involved in many aspects of the trade and increasing the possibility of slaves’ dislocation and separation from kin and friends. Although the larger American and Atlantic markets relied on southern cotton in this era, the South depended on these other markets for food, manufactured goods, and loans. Thus, the market revolution transformed the South just as it had other regions.
Life in the South - Discuss the Southern economy and how its attitudes were shifting during the Antebellum period.
During the Antebellum years (1812-1860s), the South became increasingly more dependent on slave labor since the invention of the cotton gin. It became more reliant on productivity and population based around cotton grown in the Gulf Coast states/territories, than it was on tobacco, sugar, grains, and rice in the original colonial states. By 1860, 2/3rds of all U.S. annual exports were cotton. Many Southern attitudes towards slavery shifted from a ‘necessary evil’, to Southern statesmen, such as John C. Calhoun, defending it as a ‘positive good’. Additionally, many Southerners felt that their own paternalistic attitude towards slaves was more humane than the ‘wage slavery’ of industrial economies.
Life in the South - Explain how Southern industry was intertwined and how this impacted what society wanted.
The South only had 19% of the nations factories, with most of their goods staying in the South for consumption, barely registering as exports in terms of value to the economy. Southern banks were often required by state charters to engage in other business pursuits, thus the network of agriculture, industry, banking, commerce, and services were economically intertwined. The plantation system was so profitable and so much capital was tied up in land and slaves that little cash was available for investing. What’s more, the society of the South was committed to romantic ideals of chivalry, leisurely rural lifestyle, maintaining order in society to preserve stability, and aspirations for a planter class lifestyle.
*Wealth and Culture in the South*
Although a small white elite owned the vast majority of slaves in the South, and most other whites could only aspire to slaveholders’ wealth and status, slavery shaped the social life of all white southerners in profound ways. Southern culture valued a behavioral code in which men’s honor, based on the domination of others and the protection of southern white womanhood, stood as the highest good. Slavery also decreased class tensions, binding whites together on the basis of race despite their inequalities of wealth. Several defenses of slavery were prevalent in the antebellum era, including Calhoun’s argument that the South’s “concurrent majority” could overrule federal legislation deemed hostile to southern interests; the notion that slaveholders’ care of their chattel made slaves better off than wage workers in the North; and the profoundly racist ideas underlying polygenism (a theory of human origins which posits the view that the human races are of different origins. This view is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity).
Life in the South - Analyze how classes and slavery affected Southern society.
At the highest rung of Southern society were the planters - genteel, strong, and proud. Below them were independent yeoman farmers, very few of whom owned slaves. Next were a class of whites who lived in abject poverty and, finally, slaves. Large cotton plantations had field hands work in the gang system, while rice plantations used the task system. There were also slaves in homes and towns, though using slaves for skilled labor declined throughout the century.
*African Americans in the Antebellum United States*
Slave labor in the antebellum South generated great wealth for plantation owners. Slaves, in contrast, endured daily traumas as the human property of masters. Slaves resisted their condition in a variety of ways, and many found some solace in Christianity and the communities they created in the slave quarters. While some free blacks achieved economic prosperity and even became slaveholders themselves, the vast majority found themselves restricted by the same white-supremacist assumptions upon which the institution of slavery was based.
Slavery in America - Trace the history of how slavery started in America.
Slavery slowly became institutionalized over a period of centuries, beginning around the 1660-1670s, marked by a court ruling on Anthony Johnson. Compared with Native Americans, African slaves had previous experience and knowledge working in sugar and rice production, immunity from diseases due to prolonged contact over centuries, and low escape possibilities because they did not know the land, had no allies, and were highly visible because of skin color.
Slavery in America - Explain how slavery spread throughout America, particularly with the advent of the cotton gin.
The Chesapeake Bay colonies (Virginia and Maryland) had large tobacco plantations; it became the center of the domestic slave trade. The Carolinas and Georgia had large rice and cotton plantations. So, slavery became well entrenched in the lifestyle and economy there. Then the cotton gin, invented in 1793 by Eli Whitney, made cotton the most important cash crop in the U.S. Cotton, and its reliance on slave labor, spread from Virginia to the South and West until it filled the Southern U.S. In 1860, 25% of all Southerners owned slaves and, of this, only 1% owned 100 or more slaves. Those who owned 20 or more slaves, about 3% of the entire white population, controlled the social, political, and economic power of the South.
Slavery in America - Describe how slaves were brought in, sold, and punished, as well as how they lived.
African slaves found themselves in the New World by being captured in Africa by enemy tribes and later by African slave traders and packed tightly into slave ships. The ships followed the Middle Passage of the Triangle Trade. Most African slaves landed in Brazil, with very few landing in North America. They were auctioned off, then processed for work. Slaves were purposely kept uneducated and ‘slave codes’ were enforced, which meant they could not leave their home without a pass, carry a weapon, gather in groups, own property, legally marry, defend themselves against a white person, or speak in court. Slaves sometimes resisted by running away, absenteeism, refusal to reproduce, and covert action to disrupt the slavery system.
Slavery in America - Summarize the slave revolts led by Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner.
There were four major slave revolts: The Stono Rebellion was a failed revolt in South Carolina in 1739; Gabriel Prosser led a failed revolt in Virginia in 1800; Denmark Vesey led a failed revolt in South Carolina in 1822; Nat Turner killed 60 white people in Virginia in 1831. Denmark Vesey in 1822 was a freed slaved that planned a slave rebellion that would have been second to none, but his plan was leaked, and he and his followers were executed. Nat Turner and his followers in 1831 revolted and killed 60 whites before being put down - it was the largest uprising before the Civil War.
*Addressing Slavery*
Contrasting proposals were put forth to deal with slavery. Reformers in the antebellum United States addressed the thorny issue of slavery through contrasting proposals that offered profoundly different solutions to the dilemma of the institution. Many leading American statesmen, including slaveholders, favored colonization, relocating American blacks to Africa, which abolitionists scorned. Slave rebellions sought the end of the institution through its violent overthrow, a tactic that horrified many in the North and the South. Abolitionists, especially those who followed William Lloyd Garrison, provoked equally strong reactions by envisioning a new United States without slavery, where blacks and whites stood on equal footing. Opponents saw abolition as the worst possible reform, a threat to all order and decency. Slaveholders, in particular, saw slavery as a positive aspect of American society, one that reformed the lives of slaves by exposing them to civilization and religion.
