antebellum america
DESCRIPTION
This presentation covers trends in antebellum life that gave way to some of the sectional tensions, between the North and the South, that will factor into the emergence of the American Civil War. It is the second in a series of textbook/lecture substitutes designed for students in a college seminar on the Civil War and Reconstruction.TRANSCRIPT
The Civil War & Reconstruction
Antebellum America
Understand the rapid changes in American life & culture during the antebellum period.FYI-antebellum simply means before war.Historians debate the origins of the period but for
our purposes, it spans the period from roughly 1800-1860.
Understand the sectional identifies, differences, & tensions that divide Americans.
Get a preview of how debates over slavery’s expansion into the western territories and the collapse of the second party system will exacerbate the sectional differences that lead to civil war.
This Lecture?
Historians have identified changes in American society during the 1830s-1850s as triggering some of the sectional strife that became the catalyst to civil war.
The advanced modernization of the northern states marked by immigration, industrialization, and urbanization and the continued agricultural focus of the southern states marked by slavery, historians argue, created not only very different ways of life but also very distinct regional identifications.
As we will see, this regional identification would manifest itself most in discussions about westward expansion, slavery, political parties, and the future of the country.
Antebellum America
Geographic ExpansionFrom 880,000 square miles (1783) to 3 million
square miles (1860)Demographic Boom
From 23 million to 31 millionHigher birthrates Immigration from Europe & Asia increases
UrbanizationNew towns, new cities
IndustrializationNew technology & better transportation
The First EmancipationsA growing free black population
The North, 1840s & 1850s
At the beginning of this period, the Northern States’ abolition of slavery will differentiate this region from the South.
Ira Berlin describes northern emancipation as a “slow and tortuous process” because they Enacted Gradual Emancipation Laws whereby enslaved people
who were born after a specific date were held to service for a period of time (18-25 years) and then freed. People born into bondage before the date would remain enslaved for life. Some states established apprenticeship riders to these laws which
allowed masters to keep these people in bondage after they reached the age specified in the law.
Replaced slavery with other racialized hardships, reflecting anti-black racism, including Rigid racial discrimination in employment. Denial of equal rights-(disfranchisement, segregation, property rights,
lack of due process, etc.). Sometimes free blacks are banned from entering newly established
northern states like Indiana and Illinois.
Northern End of Slavery
The Abolition of Slavery in the North
1777 Vermont prohibits slavery via constitutional convention
1780 Pennsylvania begins to abolish slavery gradually
1783 Massachusetts Supreme Court abolishes slavery
1784 Connecticut and Rhode Island pass gradual abolition legislation
1785 New Jersey and New York legislatures defeat efforts to pass gradual abolition laws
1799 New York legislature passes gradual abolition bill
1804 New Jersey enacts gradual abolition
Mostly from Germany, British Isles (Scotland), Ireland, Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden), & China.
More than 3 million arrive, most live in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West with few going to the South.
Ethnic & racial stereotypes arose as native-born Americans grew anxious over economic & political competition from new arrivals and from changes they made to the nation’s social and religious landscape.
New arrivals are blamed for the ills of the new society.
Immigration
Westward Expansion as nation acquires more land from Great Britain and Mexico.
Acceleration in crop production provides more food stuff & generates more wealth.
Farms, especially those with access to trading centers, become specialized enterprises participating in the national marketplace.
Other farms, those in isolated spaces, continue self-sufficient production.
Advances in technology increase production.
Agricultural Changes
Railroads grow, connecting the nation, speeding the movement of people, information, and goods.8,500 miles of railroad in 1850, 30,000 miles in
1860Maritime advancements occur
Water transportation is accelerated by discovery of new waterways, shipbuilding, and development of steam-boat technology
Atlantic CableTelegraph wire escalates communication
Southerners will also get this technology but they will embrace it much later and at a slower pace than their northern counterparts.
Transportation & Communication
Railroads
Steamboat
Atlantic Cable
Manufacturing BoomWork becomes more centralized and mechanized.Growth in cotton textiles, glass, paper, machine
tools, woodworking, etc.Americans’ & Europeans’ innovation increase
manufacturing.Factories grow in number and in size.Greater demand for manufactured goods.
The South will see a much slower manufacturing boom. Southerners quickly integrate slavery into their industrialization. For example, they will put enslaved people to work in tobacco and chemical factories and in salt mines.
Industrial Changes
Expansion of industry & transportation support the growth of cities.
Cities spring up around trade and access to transportation (by land or by sea).
Jobs bring people to the cities to work and to live, severing social ties of agrarian world.
Low wages, limited opportunity, crime, disease, etc. trigger chaos.
The South certainly has booming cities in Charleston, New Orleans, Mobile, Richmond, and Atlanta but there were fewer major cities in the region than there were in the North.
Urbanization
Class divisions widen as a result of economic development.
More working class women enter the workplace.More working class workers (men and women)
form associations to protect their interests.Rise of cities exposes more Americans to
hardship & triggers rise of an underclass.Economic crisis of 1857 reveals the limitations
of the advances in technology and transportation.
All of this triggers a series of reform movements designed to address the social ills.
Social Anxiety
Education
Seen as a way to
level the
socioeconomic
playing field.
Also viewed as a
way to train the
workforce.
Primary and
Secondary
Schools increase.
Seminaries for
women open.
Temperance
Organized efforts
to:
Educate
Americans on the
harmful effects
of “demon rum.”
Enact legislation
to protect
individuals,
families, &
communities.
Decrease alcohol
consumption.
Women
mobilize to
fight being
denied human
rights
property
rights
(couverture),
disfranchisem
ent as well as
discrimination
in employment
and wages.
Women’s Rights
Anti-slavery
societies spring
up- support
gradual abolition
of slavery and
colonization.
Rise of
abolitionism-
support immediate
abolition.
Antislavery in
some circles
comes to mean
anti-southern.
Anti-slavery Movement
The painting of the 1840 Anti-Slavery Convention at Exeter Hall.
Newspapers and journals Increased from 1200 in 1835 to 2,526 in 1850. Increased power of the press to shape opinion and policy.Connects Americans and reduces the space between
individuals, ideals, political beliefs, and events, which some historians argue will factor significantly into the hostility that we see leading up to the war.
Literary WritersLongfellow, Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson
capture the concerns of the time.New women writers, like Stowe, capture concerns
affecting the family and women’s oppression.The South will have similar cultural developments but
they will be slower in their advancement & smaller in their numbers.
Cultural Developments
Modern.Industrious.Support for tariffs, ship subsidies, and internal
improvement bills that supported railroads, public education, etc.
More reform minded to address the ills of society.More supportive of industry and urbanization.Some are opposed to slavery for moral, economic,
and political reasons but most believe that blacks and certain immigrants are inferior.
Believed the U.S. was a place where every man could succeed.
White Northern Identity
The South experienced many of same changes as the North.It had a very diverse population; it experienced great
new settlement; some parts of the South were booming (inland) while some were in decline (seaboard).
It started to catch up to the North in terms of modern innovation—factories, cities, newspapers, telegraphs, and political machines.
The South, however, was very different.It remained mostly agricultural and rural; it had a
smaller white population; it was dominated by a planter aristocracy; its family arrangements gave men more patriarchal authority.
The South, 1830s-1850s
Production of agricultural cash crops (hemp, tobacco, rice, cotton, sugar, indigo, wheat) at the center of southern economy and life. In the Chesapeake region (DL, MD, D.C., VA), selling surplus slaves
into the Deep South (AL, LA, MS, KY, MO, etc.) was a booming business.
The slaveholding plantation is the ideal life for most whites. The hierarchy of white southern males involved planters,
yeomen farmers, and landless whites. 30-50% of white farmers owned no land and no slaves-- they were
renters, tenant farmers, and day laborers who scratched out an existence.
Of the slaveholders, the majority owned less than 20 slaves. The dream of many of these men was to become wealthy by owning
slaves.The dominance of planters and slavery varied by region even
within the same state.
The South, 1830s-1850s
By 1860 there were only 393,967 slaveholders out of a total U.S. white population of 8 million.
¾ of southern families owned no slaves.Owners of more than 50 slaves numbered fewer than
8,000 (only 3% of the population). In other words, only 35% of the population owned a
slight majority of all of the enslaved people.Median slaveholding in the antebellum period was 4-
6 slaves/master.Only a very small portion of slaveholders were black
and most of these people bought their relatives out of slavery and could only legally free them if the laws of their states permitted them to do so.
The South, 1830s-1850s
The Southern Resurgence of Slavery Cotton Gin was created by Eli
Whitney and patented in 1793. The gin freed enslaved laborers to pick the cotton and use the gin to separate the seeds. Cotton is easier to produce in massive amounts as a result of this invention.
Short staple cotton (with a shorter growing season) becomes “king” among the antebellum cash crops produced by enslaved people.
Though other crops (sugar in LMV) and industries (mining, factories, lumber) use slave labor, cotton becomes the foundation of antebellum slavery.
The Southern Resurgence of SlaverySugar cane cultivation in
Louisiana region grows.Refugees from Saint-
Domingue (Haiti) bring skills and desire to rebuild.
Sugar becomes a major cash crop.
Intensifies demand for slave labor in the region and pushes it from a “society with slaves” to a “slave society.”
The Southern Resurgence of SlaveryAs Americans move
west, so does slavery.Northern and
Chesapeake slaveholders sell surplus slaves further south and west, creating a new “cash crop” of people.
According to Walter Johnson, more than 1.5 million people transported in the domestic slave trade.
Pro-slavery, some even supported re-opening the transatlantic slave trade;
Farmers were mostly Democrats; urban commercial & banking interests were Whigs; planters had been Whigs but they became Democrats in the mid-1830s;
Opposed the federal government’s tariffs, ship subsidies, and internal improvement bills;
Rise of southern nationalism comes in the 1830s;Cult of chivalry; public honor; loyalty to kin; white
racial superiority;Self-conscious identification with “southern way of
life.”
White Southern Identity
Nation starts to grow in Size and in Population with birth rates, influx of African slaves and European immigrants.
Urban North urbanized and modernized by technological advances in transportation & rise of factories.
Americans start migrating across the continent.Rural South remains static with less modernization,
beyond those that support slavery’s advancement.Concerns, anxiety about changes & new political
paranoia.A lot of the rhetoric bears signs of not only sectional
difference but also sectional strife.
Sectional Tensions-Political Paranoia
Proslavery southerners & Democrats decried what they called the “money power conspiracy.”Argued northern bankers, businessmen, and
industrialists controlled the credit were trying to rob “ordinary Americans” of their wealth & rob slaveholders of their human chattel so they could replace slaves with free white laborers.
Freedom couldn’t be extended to all men at once, so slavery or personal servitude allows for greater economic freedom for some.
Black slave labor preferable to “exploitable” white free labor.
Slavery paves the way toward progress for “all”.
Sectional Tensions-Political Paranoia
Anti-slavery northerners, Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans decried the “slave power conspiracy”Argued southern slaveholders and wannabe
slaveholders used their wealth to rob access to the land, depress wages of free laborers; were backwards and anti-progress.South lagged behind the North and the Western world
because of a single minded focus on slavery.Decaying towns, roads, infrastructure, sky high illiteracy
rates (excluding blacks), higher poverty rates (excluding slaveholding apparatus), less productive economy (slaveholders gobbled wealth and kept it for themselves), backwards—failure to urbanize.
Argued slaveholders wanted to “infect” the entire nation with slavery.
Sectional Tensions-Political Paranoia
Democrats Supported limited government. Opposed national policies
limiting local control and subverting the individual authority of whites.
Advocated states’ rights over national or federal rights.
Supported the territorial expansion of slavery.
Advocated patriarchy. It was a national party with
support in both regions. Support Native American
removal. Figures—Andrew Jackson, John
C. Calhoun, Stephen A. Douglas
Supported more expansive government to improve nation & grow economy.
Supported more religious influence on politics.
Opposed slavery’s expansion into the West.
Were more tolerant of women’s rights.
Became a mostly northern party. Will be divided by Know-Nothings
& Free Soilers and then supplanted by the Republican Party.
Figures—John Q. Adams, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln.
Political Landscape
Whigs
Although the narrative of a modernizing North and a slaveholding South is simple and therefore easy to follow and remember, it is important to understand that these differences alone did not lead to civil war.
It would take other factors—namely tensions about such constitutional questions as where slavery can and cannot exist and how much power the national government has v. that of states, as well as political questions of which party dominates the government—to ignite the American civil war.
Take Away
Railroads: http://www.listoid.com/image/219/list_479_219_20120401_200550_740.jpg Steamboats:
http://www.listoid.com/image/219/list_479_219_20120401_200550_740.jpg
Atlantic Cable: http://atlantic-cable.com/Maps/index.htm Horace Mann: http://www.ait.net/technos/tq_09/2eakin.php Temperance Movement: http://www1.assumption.edu/whw/old/narrativeguide.html. Women’s Rights: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/images/vc006195.jpg American Anti-slavery Society: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Slavery_Society. Louisiana Plantation: http://www.printsoldandrare.com/louisiana/159la.jpg . Cotton Gin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin . Sugar Cane: http://www.topnews.in/tree/Economy/Indian+Economy . Cutting the Sugar Cane: http://readinganthro.wordpress.com/. Domestic Slave Trade Map:
http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072963786/student_view0/chapter7/map_quiz.html
Images Accessed 6/1/2012 & 6/7/2012
David Herbert Donald, et al eds., The Civil War and Reconstruction Jeremy Atack & Fred Bateman, To Their Own Soil Richard Brown, Modernization Victoria Bynum, Unruly Women Catherine Clinton, Plantation Mistress Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders Walter Licht, Industrializing America Patricia Limerick, Legacy of Conquest Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds James Oakes, The Ruling Race Adam Rothman, Slave Country Betram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honors David Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis Charles Dew, Apostles of Disunion
Sources & Recommended Reading
Next?American Slavery
The Transatlantic Slave Trade;The “terrible transformation” to lifelong,
hereditary, race-based slavery;The growth of slavery as an American
institution;Northern v. Southern slaveryRural v. Urban v. Industrial slavery
Enslaved people’s lives and resistance to bondage;
The North’s abolition of slavery & the South’s expansion of it; and
The domestic slave trade