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