Quiz 4 1301

20. Secession - why, first state, why did some delay

*1850 tighter regulation over fugitive slave act *dred scott decision *fighting in kansas over slavery *Nationalism,regionalized -Slavery is the main cause of civil war For all their differences, southern whites agreed that they had to defend slavery. John Smith Preston of South Carolina spoke for the overwhelming majority when he declared, "The South cannot exist without slavery." They disagreed about whether the mere presence of a Republican in the White House made it necessary to exercise what they considered a legitimate right to secede. The debate about what to do was briefest in South Carolina; it seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860. By February 1861, the six other Lower South states marched in South Carolina's footsteps. In some states, the vote was close. In general, slaveholders spearheaded secession, while nonslaveholders in thePiedmont and mountain counties, where slaves were relatively few, displayed the greatest attachment to the Union. In February, representatives from South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas met in Montgomery, Alabama, where they celebrated the birth ofthe Confederate States of America. Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis became president, and Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who had spoken so eloquently aboutthe dangers of revolution, became vice president. In March 1861, Stephens declared that the Confederacy's "cornerstone" was "the greattruth thatthe negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition."

4. Manifest Destiny

1. John O'Sullivan, 1845 "Our manifest destiny [is] to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions" Most Americans believed that the superiority of their institutions and white culture bestowed on them a God-given right to spread their civilization across the continent. They imagined the West as a howling wilderness, empty and undeveloped. Ifthey recognized Indians and Mexicans at all, they dismissed them as primitive drags on progress who would have to be redeemed, shoved aside, or exterminated.TheWest provided young men especially an arena in which to "show their manhood." The sense of uniqueness and mission was as old as the Puritans, but by the 1840s the conviction of superiority had been bolstered by the United States' amazing success. Most Americans believed that the West needed the civilizing power ofthe hammer and the plow, the ballot box and the pulpit, which had transformed the East. In 1845, a New York political journal edited by John L. O'Sullivan coined the term manifest destiny as the latestjustificationforwhite settlers to take the land they coveted. O'Sullivan called on Americans to resist any foreign power — British, French, or Mexican — that attempted to thwart "the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions . . . [and] for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federative selfgovernment entrusted to us." Almost overnight, the magic phrase manifest destiny swept the nation and provided an ideological shield for conquering the West As important as national pride and racial arrogance were to manifest destiny, economic gain made up its core. Land hunger drew hundreds of thousands of average Americans westward. Some politicians, moreover, had become convinced that national prosperity depended on capturing the rich trade ofthe Far East. To trade with Asia, the United States needed the Pacific coast ports that stretched from San Diego to Puget Sound."The sun of civilization must shine across the sea: socially and commercially," Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton declared. The United States and Asia must"talk together, and trade together. Commerce is a great civilizer." In the 1840s, American economic expansion came wrapped in the rhetoric of uplift and civilization.

5. Mormon exodus

1. Joseph Smith: -Exodus and Brigham Young -Annexation of Utah, 1850 Not every wagon train heading west was bound for the Pacific Slope. One remarkable group of religious emigrants halted near the Great Salt Lake in what was then Mexican territory. The Mormons deliberately chose the remote site as a refuge. After years of persecution in the East, they fled west to find religious freedom and communal security. In 1820, an upstate New York farm boy named Joseph Smith Jr. had begun to experience revelations that were followed, he said, by a visit from an angel who led him to golden tablets buried near his home. With the aid of magic stones, he translated the mysterious language on the tablets to produce The Book of Mormon, which he published in 1830. It told the story of an ancient Hebrew civilization in the New World and predicted the appearance of an American prophet who would reestablish Jesus Christ's undefiledkingdominAmerica.Converts,attracted to the promise of a pure faith in the midst of antebellum America's socialturmoil and rampant materialism, flocked to the new Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons). Neighbors branded Mormons heretics and drove Smith and his followers from New York to Ohio, then to Missouri, and finally in 1839 to Nauvoo, Illinois, where they built a prosperous community. But a rift in the church developed after Smith sanctioned "plural marriage"(polygamy). Non-Mormons caught wind of the controversy and eventually arrested Smith and his brother. On June 27, 1844, a mob stormed the jail and shot both men dead. The embattled church turned to an extraordinary newleader,Brigham Young,who oversaw a great exodus. In 1846, traveling in 3,700 wagons, 12,000 Mormons made their way to eastern Iowa, then the following year to their new home beside the Great Salt Lake. Young described the region as a barren waste, "the paradise of the lizard, the cricket and the rattlesnake." Within ten years, however, the Mormons developed an irrigation system that made the desert bloom. Under Young's stern leadership, the Mormons built a thriving community using cooperative labor, not the individualistic and competitive enterprise common among most emigrants. In 1850, the Mormon kingdom was annexed to the United States as Utah Territory. The nation's attention focused on Utah in 1852 when Brigham Young announced that many Mormons practiced polygamy. Although only one Mormon man in five had more than one wife (Young had twenty-three), Young's statement caused a popular outcry that forced the U.S. government to establish its authority in Utah. In 1857, 2,500 U.S. troops invaded Salt Lake City in what was known as the Mormon War. The bloodless occupation illustrated that most Americans viewed the Mormons as a threat to American morality, law, and institutions. The invasion did not dislodge the Mormon Church from its central place in Utah, however, and for years to come, most Americans perceived the Mormon settlement as strange and suitably isolated.

6. Texas independence

Annexation, 1845 Mexican-American War, 1846-1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

7. California

Another consequence of the Mexican defeat was that California gold poured into American, not Mexican, pockets. In January 1848, just weeks before the formal transfer of territory, James Marshall discovered gold in the American River in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Marshall's discovery set off the California gold rush, one of the wildest mining stampedes in the world's history.Between1849and1852,morethan250,000 "forty-niners,"as thewould-beminerswereknown, descended on the Golden State. In less than two years,Marshall'sdiscoverytransformedCalifornia from foreign territory to statehood. Gold fever quickly spread around the world. A stream of men of various races and nationalities, all bent on getting rich, remade the quiet California world of Mexican ranches into a raucous, roaring mining and town economy. Only a few struck it rich, and life in the goldfields was nasty, brutish, and often short. Men faced miserable living conditions, sometimes sheltering in holes and brush lean-tos. They also faced cholera and scurvy, exorbitant prices for food (eggs cost a dollar apiece), deadly encounters with claim jumpers, and endless backbreaking labor. An individual with gold in his pocket could find only temporary relief in the saloons, card games, dogfights, gambling dens, and brothels that flourished in the mining camps. By 1853, San Francisco had grown into a raw, booming city of 50,000 that depended as much on gold as did the mining camps inland. Like the towns that dotted the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys, it suffered from overcrowding, fire, crime, and violence. But enterprising individuals had learned that there was money to be made tending to the needs of the miners. Hotels, saloons, restaurants,laundries, and stores of all kinds exchanged services and goods for miners' gold In 1851, the Committee of Vigilance determined to bring order to the city. Members pledged that "no thief, burglar, incendiary or assassin shall escape punishment, either by the quibbles ofthe law,the insecurity of prisons,the carelessness or corruption of the police, or a laxity of those who pretended to administer justice." Lynchings proved that the committee meant business. In time, merchants, tradesmen, and professionalsmade the citytheirhomeandbrought their families from back east. Gunfights declined, but many years would pass before anyone pacified San Francisco. Establishing civic order was made more difficult by California's diversity and Anglo bigotry. The Chinese attracted special scrutiny. By 1851, 25,000 Chinese lived in California, and their religion, language, dress, queues (long pigtails), eating habits, and recreational use of opium convinced many Anglos that they were not fit citizens of the Golden State. In 1850, the California legislature passed the Foreign Miners' Tax Law, which levied high taxes on non-Americans to drive them from the goldfields, except as hired laborers working on claims owned by Americans. The Chinese were segregated residentially and occupationally and made ineligible for citizenship. Along with blacks and Indians, Chinese were denied public education and the right to testify in court. As early as 1852, opponents demanded a halt to Chinese immigration. Chinese leaders in San Francisco fought back. Admitting deep cultural differences, they insisted that "in the important matters we are good men. We honor our parents; we take care of our children; we are industrious and peaceable; we trade much; we are trusted for small and large sums; we pay our debts; and are honest, and of course must tell the truth." Their protestations offered little protection, however, and racial violence grew. Anglo-American prospectors asserted their dominance over other groups, especially Native Americans and the Californios, Spanish and Mexican settlers who had lived in California for decades. Despite the U.S. government's pledge to protect Mexican and Spanish land titles after the cession of 1848, Americans took the land of the rancheros and through discriminatory legislationpushedHispanicprofessionals,merchants, and artisans into the ranks of unskilled labor. Mariano Vallejo, a leading Californio, said ofthe forty-niners, "The good ones were few and the wicked many." For Indians,the gold rush was catastrophic. Numbering about 150,000 in 1848, the Indian population of California fell to 25,000 by 1854. Starvation, disease, and a declining birthrate took a heavy toll. Indians also fell victim to wholesale murder. The nineteenth-century historian Hubert Howe Bancroft described of plains, deserts, and almost impossible mountains" from the rest of the Union. Some dreamers imagined a railroad that would someday connect the Golden State with the thriving agriculture and industry of the East. Others imagined a country transformed not by transportation but by progressive individual and institutional reform.

14. Southern economy

By 1830 supplied the world's cotton In the first half of the nineteenth century, millions of Americans migrated west. In the South, the stampede began after the Creek War of 1813-1814, which divested the Creek Indians of 24 million acres and initiated the government campaign to remove Indian p eop l e l iv ing eas t o f the Mississippi River to the West (see chapters 10 and 11). Harddriving slaveholders seeking virgin acreage for new plantations, striving farmers looking forpatches of cheaplandfor small farms,herders and drovers pushing their hogs and cattle toward fresh pastures — anyone who was restless and ambitious felt the pull of Indian land. But more than anything it was cotton that propelled Southerners westward. South of the Mason-Dixon line, climate and geography were ideally suited for the cultivationof cotton. Cotton's requirements are minimal: two hundred frostfree days from planting to picking, and plentiful rain, conditions found in much of the South. By the 1830s, cottonfields stretched fromtheAtlantic seaboard to central Texas. Heavy migration led to statehood for Arkansas in 1836 and for Texas and Florida in 1845. Production soared from 300,000 bales in 1830 to nearly 5 million in 1860, when the South produced three-fourths of the world's supply. The South — especially that tier of states from South Carolina west to Texas called the Lower South — had become the cotton kingdom (Map 13.1). The cotton kingdom was also a slave empire. The South's cotton boom rested on the backs of slaves, most of whom toiled in gangs under the direct supervision of whites. As cotton agriculture expanded westward, whites shipped more than a million enslaved men and women from the Atlantic coast across the continent in what has been called the "Second Middle Passage," a massive deportation that dwarfed the transatlantic slave trade to North America. Victims of this brutal domestic slave trade marched hundreds of miles southwest to new plantations in the Lower South. The earliest arrivals faced the hardest work, literally cutting plantations from forests. One observer noted that young male slaves in Alabama who were no more than nineteen or twenty looked twice their age. Cotton, slaves, and plantations moved west together. The slave population grew enormously. Southern slaves numbered fewer than 700,000 in 1790, about 2 million in 1830, and almost 4 million by 1860. By 1860, the South contained more slaves than all the other slave societies in the New World combined. The extraordinary growth was not the result of the importation of slaves, which the federal government outlawed in 1808. Instead, the slave population grew through natural reproduction; by midcentury, mostU.S. slaveswerenative-born Southerners. In comparison, Cuba and Brazil, slave societies that kepttheir slave trades open untilthemid-nineteenthcentury, had more African-born slaves and thus stronger ties to Africa. As important as slavery was in unifying white Southerners, only about a quarter of the white population lived in slaveholding families. Most slaveholders owned fewer than five slaves. Only about 12 percent of slave owners owned twenty or more, the number of slaves that historians consider necessary to distinguish a planter fromafarmer.Despite their smallnumbers,planters dominated the southern economy. In 1860, 52 percent ofthe South's slaves lived and worked on plantations.Plantation slaves produced more than 75 percent of the South's export crops, the backbone of the region's economy. Slavery was dying elsewhere in the New World (only Brazil and Cuba still defended slavery at midcentury), but slave plantations increasingly dominated southern agriculture The South's major cash crops — tobacco, sugar, rice, and cotton — grew on plantations (Map 13.2). Tobacco, the original plantation crop in North America, had shifted westward in the nineteenth century from the Chesapeake to Tennessee and Kentucky. Large-scale sugar production began in 1795, when Étienne de Boré built a modern sugar mill in what is today New Orleans, and sugar plantations were confined almost entirely to Louisiana. Commercial rice production began in the seventeenth century, and like sugar, rice was confined to a small geographic area, a narrow strip of coast stretching from the Carolinas into Georgia Tobacco, sugar, and rice were labor-intensive crops that relied on large numbers of slaves to do the backbreaking work. Most phases oftobacco cultivation—planting,transporting,thinning,pickingoff caterpillars, cutting, drying, packing — required laborers to stoop or bend down. Work on sugarcane plantations was particularly physically demanding. During the harvest, slaves worked eighteen hours a day, and so hard was the slaves' task that one visitor concluded that"nothing but 'involuntary servitude' could go through the toil and suffering required to produce sugar." Working in water and mud in the heat of a Carolina summer regularly threatenedslaves engaged in rice production with malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases. But by the nineteenth century, cotton was king of the South's plantation crops. Cotton became commercially significantin the 1790s after the invention of a new cotton gin by Eli Whitney dramatically increased the production of raw cotton (see chapter 9). Cotton was relatively easy to grow and took little capital to get started — just enough to purchase land, seed, and simple tools. Thus, small farmers as well as planters grew cotton. But planters, whose fields were worked by gangs of slaves, produced three-quarters of the South's cotton, and cotton made planters rich. P lantat ion s lavery a lso enriched the nation. By 1840, cotton accounted for more than 60 percent ofAmericanexports.Most ofthe cotton was shipped to Great Britain, the world's largest manufacturer of cotton textiles. Much of the profit from the sale of cotton overseas returned to planters, but somewenttonorthernmiddlemen who bought, sold, insured, warehoused, and shipped cotton to the mills in Great Britain and P lantat ion s lavery a lso enriched the nation. By 1840, cotton accounted for more than 60 percent ofAmericanexports.Most ofthe cotton was shipped to Great Britain, the world's largest manufacturer of cotton textiles. Much of the profit from the sale of cotton overseas returned to planters, but somewenttonorthernmiddlemen who bought, sold, insured, warehoused, and shipped cotton to the mills in Great Britain andP lantat ion s lavery a lso enriched the nation. By 1840, cotton accounted for more than 60 percent ofAmericanexports.Most ofthe cotton was shipped to Great Britain, the world's largest manufacturer of cotton textiles. Much of the profit from the sale of cotton overseas returned to planters, but somewenttonorthernmiddlemen who bought, sold, insured, warehoused, and shipped cotton to the mills in Great Britain and elsewhere. As one New York merchant observed, "Cotton has enriched all through whose hands it has passed." As middlemen invested their profits in the booming northern economy, industrialdevelopment receiveda burst ofmuch-needed capital. Furthermore, southern plantations benefited northern industry by providing an important market for textiles, agricultural tools, and other manufactured goods. The economies oftheNorthandSouthsteadily diverged. While the North developed a mixed economy — agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing —the South remained overwhelmingly agricultural. Year after year, planters funneled the profits they earned from land and slaves back into more land and more slaves. With its capital flowing into agriculture, the South did not develop many factories. By 1860, only 10 percent of the nation's industrial workers lived in the South. Some cotton mills sprang up, but the regionthatproduced100percent ofthenation's cotton manufactured less than 7 percent of its cotton textiles.. Without significant economic diversification, the South developed fewer cities than the North and West (Map 13.3). In 1860, it was the least urban region in the country. Whereas nearly 37 percent of New England's population lived incities,less than12 percent of Southerners were urban dwellers. Southern cities were mostly port cities and were busy principally with exporting the agricultural products of plantations in the interior. Urban merchants provided agriculture with indispensable services, such as hauling, insuring, and selling cotton, rice, and sugar, but they were the tail on the plantation dog. Because theSouthhadso fewcitiesandindustrial jobs, it attracted small numbers of European immigrants. Seeking economic opportunity, not competition with slaves (whose labor would keep wages low), immigrants steered northward. In 1860, 13 percent of all Americans were born abroad. But in nine of the fifteen slave states, only 2 percent or less ofthe population was foreign-born Not every Southerner celebrated the region's commitment to cotton and slaves. Critics bemoaned what one called the "deplorable scarcity" of factories. Diversification, reformers promised, would make the South economically independent and more prosperous. State governments encouraged economic development by helping to create banking systems that supplied credit for a wide range of projects and by constructing railroads, but they failed to create some of the essential services modern economies required. By the mid- nineteenth century, for example, no southern legislature had created a statewide public school system. Planters failed to see any benefit in educating the childrenof smallfarmers, especially with their tax money. Despite the flurry of railroad building, the South's mileage in 1860 was less thanhalfthat oftheNorth.Moreover,whereas railroads crisscrossed the North carrying manufactured goods and agricultural products, most railroads in the South were short stretches of track that ran from port cities back into farming areas in order to transport cotton. Northerners claimed that slavery was a backward labor system, and compared with Northerners, Southerners invested less of their capital in industry, transportation, and public education. But planters' pockets were never fuller than in the 1850s. Planters' decisions to reinvest in agriculture ensured the momentum of the plantation economy and the political and social relationships rooted in it.

13. Number of slaves/percentage of slave owners in the South

By 1860, one in every three Southerners was black (approximately 4 million blacks to 8 million whites). In the Lower South states of Mississippi and South Carolina, blacks constituted the majority (Figure 13.1). The contrast with the North was striking: In 1860, only one Northerner in seventy-six was black (about 250,000 blacks to 19 million whites). The presence of large numbers of African Americans had profound consequences for the South. Southern culture — language, food, music, religion, and even accents — was in part shaped by blacks. But the most direct consequence of the South's biracialism was southern whites' commit menttowhitesupremacy.Northernwhitesbelieved in racial superiority, too, but their dedication to white supremacy lackedthe intensity andurgency increasingly felt by white Southerners who lived among millions of blacks who had every reason to hate them and to strike back, as Nat Turner had. After 1820, attacks on slavery — from blacks and a handful of white Southerners opposed to slavery and from Northern abolitionists — jolted southern slaveholders into a distressing awareness that they lived in a dangerous world. As the only slave society embedded in an egalitarian, democratic republic,theSouth made extraordinary efforts to strengthen slavery. In the 1820s and 1830s, state legislatures constructed slave codes (laws) that required the total submission of slaves. As the Louisiana code stated, a slave "owes his master . . . a respect without bounds, and an absolute obedience." The laws also underlined the authority of all whites, notjust masters. Any white could "correct" slaves who did not stay "in their place." Intellectuals joined legislators in the campaign to strengthen slavery.The South's academics, writers, and clergy employed every imaginable defense. They argued that in the South slaves were legal property, and wasn't the protection of property the bedrock of American liberty? History also endorsed slavery,they claimed. Weren't the great civilizations — such as those of the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans — slave societies? They claimed that the Bible, properly interpreted, also sanctioned slavery. Old Testamentpatriarchs ownedslaves,theyobserved, and in the New Testament, Paul returned the runaway slaveOnesimus tohismaster.Proslavery spokesmen played on the fears of Northerners and Southerners alike by charging that giving blacks equal rights would lead to the sexual mixing of the races, or miscegenation. Another of slavery's champions, George Fitzhugh of Virginia, attacked the North's freelabor economy and society. He claimed that behind the North's grand slogans lay a heartless philosophy: "Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost." Gouging capitalists exploited wageworkers unmercifully, Fitzhugh declared, and he contrasted the North's vicious free-labor system with the humane relations that he said prevailed between masters and slaves because slaves were valuable capitalthat masters sought to protect. But at the heart of the defense of slavery lay the claim of black inferiority. Black enslavement was both necessary and proper, slavery's defenders argued, because Africans were lesser beings. Rather than exploitative, slavery was a mass civilizing effort that lifted lowly blacks from barbarism and savagery, taught them disciplined work, and converted them to soul-saving Christianity. According to Virginian Thomas R. Dew, most slaves were grateful. He declared that "the slaves of a good master are his warmest, most constant, and most devoted friends." Whites gradually moved away from defending slavery as a "necessary evil"—thehalfhearted argument popular at the time of the American Revolution — and toward an aggressive defense 25% slave owners -Half own 5 or less 1% of slave owners -own 200 slaves

15. Slavery - elderly slaves, house servants, drivers, runaways,

Elderly - When slave boys and girls reached the age of eleven or twelve, masters sent most of them to the fields, where they learned farmwork by laboring alongside their parents. After a lifetime of labor, old women left the fields to care for the small children and spin yarn, and old men moved on to mind livestock and clean stables. The overwhelming majority of plantation slaves worked as field hands, and most grew cotton. Cotton had a long growing season, and work never stopped, from the clearing of the fields in January and February to the planting and cultivating in the spring and summer until the picking in the fall. Planters sometimes assigned men and women to separate gangs, the women working at lighter tasks and the men doing the heavy work of clearing and breaking the land. But women also did heavy work. "I had to work hard," Nancy Boudry remembered, and "plow and go and split wood just like a man." The backbreaking labor and the monotonous routines caused one ex-slave to observe that the "history of one day is the history of every day." A few slaves (about one in ten) became house servants. Nearly all ofthose (nine out often) were women. They cooked, cleaned, babysat, washed clothes, and did the dozens of other tasks the master and mistress required. House servants enjoyedsomewhatlessphysicallydemandingwork than field hands, butthey were constantly on call, with no time that was entirely their own. Since no servant could please constantly, most bore the brunt ofwhite frustrationandrage.Ex-slaveJacob Branch of Texas remembered, "My poor mama! Every washday old Missy give her a beating." Rarest of all slave occupations was that of slave driver. Probably no more than one male slave in a hundred worked in this capacity. These men were well named, for their primary task was driving other slaves to work harder in the fields. In some drivers' hands, the whip never rested. Ex-slave Jane Johnson of South Carolina called her driver the "meanest man, white or black, I ever see." But other drivers showed all the restraint they could. "Ole Gabe didn't like that whippin' business," West Turner of Virginia remembered. "When Marsa was there, he would lay it on 'cause he had to. But when old Marsa wasn'tlookin', he never would beatthem slaves." Running away was a common form of protest, but except along the borders with northern states and with Mexico, escape to freedom was almost impossible. Most runaways could hope only to escape for a few days. Seeking temporary respite from hard labor or avoiding punishment, they usually stayed close to their plantations, keeping to the deep woods or swamps and slipping back into the quarter at night to get food. "Lying out," as it was known, usually ended when the runaway, worn-out and ragged, gave up or was finally chased down by slave-hunting dogs. 1. hide in crates being shipped off 2. Pose as an owner/slave

1. Factories and manufacturing

Changes in manufacturing arose from the nation's land-rich, labor-poor economy. European countries had land-poor, labor-rich economies; there, meager opportunities in agriculture kept factory laborers plentiful and wages low. In the United States, western expansion and government land policies buoyed agriculture, keeping millions of people on the farm — 80 percent of the nation's 31 million people lived in rural areas in 1860 — and thereby limiting the supply of workers for manufacturing and elevating wages. Because of this relative shortage of workers, American manufacturers searched constantly for ways to save labor. Mechanization allowed manufacturers to produce more with less labor. In general, factory workers produced twice as much (per unit of labor) as agricultural workers. The practice of manufacturing and thenassembling interchangeable parts spread from gun making to other industries and became known as the American system.Standardized parts produced by machine allowed manufacturers to employ unskilled workers, who were much cheaper and more readily available than highly trained craftsmen. A visitor to a Springfield, Massachusetts, gun factory in 1842 noted, for example, that standardized parts made the trained gunsmith's "skill of the eye and the hand, [previously] acquired by practice alone . . . no longer indispensable." Even in heavily mechanized industries, few factories had more than twenty or thirty employees. Manufacturing and agriculture meshed into a dynamic national economy. New England led the nation in manufacturing, shipping goods such as guns, clocks, plows, and axes west and south, while southern and western states sent commodities such as wheat, pork, whiskey, tobacco, and cotton north and east. In the 1840s, mines in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and elsewhere began to produce millions of tons of coal for industrial fuel, accelerating the shift to steam power. Between 1840 and 1860, coal production multiplied eightfold, cutting prices in half and permitting coal-fired steam engines to power ever more factories, railroads, and ships. Even so, by 1860 coal accounted for less than a fifth of the nation's energy consumption while, in manufacturing, people and work animals provided thirty times more energy than steam did. American manufacturers specialized in producing for the gigantic domestic market rather than for export. British goods dominated the international market and, on the whole, were cheaper and better than American-made products. U.S. manufacturers supported tariffs to minimize British competition, but their best protection from British competitors was to strive harder to please their American customers, most of them farmers. The burgeoning national economy was further fueled by the growth of the railroads, which served to link farmers and factories in new ways.

2. Free-labor

During the 1840s and 1850s, leaders throughout the North and West emphasized a set of ideas that seemed to explain why the changes under way in their society benefited some people more than others. They referred again and again to the advantages of what they termed free labor. (The word free referred to laborers who were not slaves. It did not mean laborers who worked for nothing.) By the 1850s,free-labor ideas described a social and economic ideal that accounted for both the successes and the shortcomings of the economy and society taking shape in the North and West. Spokesmenfor the free-labor ideal celebrated hard work, self-reliance, and independence. They proclaimed that the door to success was open not just to those who inherited wealth or status but also to self-made men such as Abraham Lincoln. Free labor, Lincoln argued, was "the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all." Free labor permitted farmers and artisans to enjoy the products oftheir own labor, and it also benefited wageworkers."The prudent, penniless beginner intheworld,"Lincolnasserted, "labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him." Wage labor, he claimed, was the first rung on the ladder toward self-employment and eventually hiring others. The free-labor ideal affirmed an egalitarian vision of human potential. Lincoln and other spokesmen stressed the importance of universal education to permit"heads and hands [to] cooperate as friends" (Figure 12.1). Throughout the North and West, communities supported public schools to make the rudiments of learning available to young children. By 1860, many cities and towns had public schools that boasted that up to 80 percent of children ages seven to thirteen attended school at least for a few weeks each year. In rural areas, where the labor of children was more difficult to spare, schools typically enrolled no more than half the school-age children. Lessons included more than arithmetic, penmanship, and a smattering of other subjects. Textbooks and teachers — most of whom were young women — drummed into students the lessons of the free-labor system: self-reliance, discipline, and, above all else, hard work. "Remember that all the ignorance, degradation, and misery in the world is the result of indolence and vice," one textbook intoned. Both in and outside school, free-labor ideology emphasized labor as much as freedom

24. Emancipation

EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION Slaves, not politicians, became the most insistent force for emancipation. By escaping their masters by the tens of thousands and running away to Union lines, they forced slavery on the North's wartime agenda. Runaways made Northerners answer a crucial question: Were the runaways now free, or were they still slaves who, according to the fugitive slave law, had to be returned to their masters? At first, Yankee military officers sentthe fugitives back. But Union armies needed laborers. At Fort Monroe, Virginia, General Benjamin F. Butler refused to turn them over to their owners, calling them contraband of war, meaning "confiscated property," and put them to work. Congress made Butler's practice national policy in March 1862 when it forbade returning fugitive slaves to their masters. Slaves were still not legally free, but there was a tilt toward emancipation Lincoln had, too. In July 1862, the president told twomembers ofhis cabinetthathehad "about come to the conclusionthatwemustfree the slaves or be ourselves subdued." A few days later, before the entire cabinet, he read a draft of a preliminary emancipation proclamation that promised to free all the slaves in the seceding states on January 1, 1863. Lincoln described emancipation as an "act ofjustice," butitwas the lengthening casualty lists that finally brought him around. Emancipation, he declared, was "a military necessity, absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union." Only freeing the slaves would "strike atthe heart ofthe rebellion." On September 22, Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation promising freedom to slaves in areas still in rebellion on January 1, 1863. The limitations of the proclamation — it exempted the loyal border states and the Unionoccupied areas of the Confederacy — caused some to ridicule the act. The Times (London) observed cynically, "Where he has no power Mr. Lincoln will set the negroes free, where he retains power he will consider them as slaves." But Lincoln had no power to free slaves in loyal states, and invading Union armies would liberate slaves in the Confederacy as they advanced. By presenting emancipation as a "military necessity," Lincoln hoped he had disarmed his conservative critics. Emancipation would deprive the Confederacy of valuable slave laborers, shorten thewar, and thus save lives.Democrats, however, fumed thatthe "shrieking and howling abolitionist faction" had captured the White House and made it "a n**ger war." Democrats made political hay out of Lincoln's action in the November 1862 elections, gaining thirty-four congressional seats. House Democrats quickly proposed a resolution branding emancipation "a high crime againstthe Constitution." The Republicans, who maintained narrow majorities in both houses of Congress, barely beat it back Aspromised, on NewYear'sDay1863,Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation. Later in 1863 at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Lincoln famously confirmed the war's new purpose: "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." In addition to freeing the slaves in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation also committed the federal government to the fullest use of African Americans to defeat the Confederate enemy.

8. Gold Rush

Gold Rush Mining towns Racism

27. General Sherman's strategies

In Washington, General Grantimplemented his grand strategy for a war of attrition. He ordered a series of simultaneous assaults from Virginia all the way to Louisiana. Two actions proved particularly significant. In one, General William Tecumseh Sherman, whom Grant appointed his successor to command the western armies, plunged southeast toward Atlanta. In the other, Grant, who took control of the Army of the Potomac, went head-to-head with Lee in Virginia for almost four straight weeks Simultaneously, Sherman invaded Georgia. Grant instructed Sherman to "get into the interior of the enemy's country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their War resources." In May, Sherman moved 100,000 men south against 65,000 rebels. Skillful maneuvering, constant skirmishing, and one pitched battle, at Kennesaw Mountain, brought Sherman to Atlanta, which fell on September 2 Intending to "make Georgia howl," Sherman marched out of Atlanta on November 15 with 62,000 battle-hardened veterans, heading for Savannah, 285 miles away on the Atlantic coast. One veteran remembered, "[We] destroyed all we could not eat, stole their n****rs, burned their cotton & gins, spilled their sorghum, burned & twisted their R. Roads and raised Hell generally." Sherman's March to the Sea aimed at destroying the will of the southern people. A few weeks earlier, General Philip H. Sheridan had carried out his own scorched-earth campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, complying with Grant's order to turn the valley into "a barren waste . . . so that crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their provender [food] with them." When Sherman's troops entered an undefended Savannah in mid-December, the general telegraphed Lincoln that he had "a Christmas gift" for him. A month earlier, Union voters had bestowed on the president an even greater gift. The capture of Atlanta in September turned the political tide in favor of the Republicans. Lincoln received 55 percent of the popular vote, but his electoral margin was a whopping 212 to McClellan's 21(Map 15.4). Lincoln's party won a resounding victory, one that gave him a mandate to continue the war until slavery and the Confederacy were dead.

21. Fort Sumter

Major Robert Anderson and some eighty U.S. soldiers occupied Fort Sumter, which was perched on a tiny island at the entrance to Charleston harbor in South Carolina. The fort with its American flag became a hated symbol of the nation that Southerners had abandoned, and they wanted federal troops out. Sumter was also a symbol to Northerners, a beacon affirming federal sovereignty in the seceded states. .. Lincoln decided to hold Fort Sumter, but to do so, he had to provision it, for Anderson was running dangerously short of food. In the first week of April 1861, Lincoln authorized a peaceful expedition to bring supplies, but not military reinforcements, to the fort. The president understood that he risked war, but his plan honored his inaugural promises to defend federal property and to avoid using military force unless first attacked. Masterfully, Lincoln had shifted the fateful decision of war or peace to Jefferson Davis... On April 9, Davis and his cabinet met to consider the situation in Charleston harbor. The territorial integrity of the Confederacy demanded the end of the federal presence, Davis argued. But his secretary of state, Robert Toombs of Georgia, pleaded against military action. "Mr. President," he declared, "at this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet's nest which extends from mountain to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death." But Davis sent word to Confederate troops in Charleston to take the fort before the relief expedition arrived. Thirtythree hours of bombardment on April 12 and 13 reduced the fort to rubble. Miraculously, not a single Union soldier died. On April 14, with the fort ablaze, Major Anderson offered his surrender and lowered the U.S. flag. The Confederates had Fort Sumter, but they also had war. On April 15, when Lincoln called for 75,000 militiamen to serve for ninety days to put down the rebellion, several times that number rushed to defend the flag. Democrats responded as fervently as Republicans. Stephen A. Douglas, the recently defeated Democratic candidate for president, pledged his support. "There are only two sides to the question," he said. "Everymanmustbe for theUnited States or against it. There can be noneutrals inthiswar, only patriots — or traitors." But the people of the Upper South found themselves torn.

12. Nat Turner rebellion

Nat Turner was born a slave in Southampton County, Virginia, in October 1800. People in his neighborhood claimed that he had always been different. His parents noticed special marks on his body, which they said were signs that he was "intended for some great purpose." His master said that he learned to read without being taught. As an adolescent, he adopted an austere lifestyle of Christian devotion and fasting. In his twenties, he received visits from the "Spirit," the same spirit, he believed, that had spoken to the ancient prophets. In time, Nat Turner began to interpret these things to mean that God had appointed him an instrument of divine vengeance for the sin of slaveholding. In the early morning of August 22, 1831, he set out with six trusted friends — Hark, Henry, Sam, Nelson, Will, and Jack — to punish slave owners. Turner struck the first blow, an ax to the head of his master, Joseph Travis. The rebels killed all of the white men, women, and children they encountered. By noon, they had visited eleven farms and slaughtered fifty-seven whites. Along the way, they had added fifty or sixty men to their army. Word spread quickly, and soon the militia and hundreds of local whites gathered. By the next day, whites had captured or killed all of the rebels except Turner, who hid out for about ten weeks before being captured in nearby woods. Within a week, he was tried, convicted, and executed. By then, forty-five slaves had stood trial, twenty had been convicted and hanged, and another ten had been banished from Virginia. Frenzied whites had killed another hundred or more blacks — insurgents and innocent bystanders — in their counterattack against the rebellion. Virginia's bewildered governor, John Floyd, struggled to understand why Turner's band of "assassins and murderers" assaulted the "unsuspecting and defenseless" citizens of "one of the fairest counties" of the state. White Virginians prided themselves on having the "mildest" slavery in the South, but sixty black rebels on a rampage challenged the comforting theory of the contented slave. Nonetheless, whites found explanations that allowed them to feel safer. They placed the blame on outside agitators. In 1829, David Walker, a freeborn black man living in Boston, had published his Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World, an invitation to slaves to rise up in bloody rebellion, and copies had fallen into the hands of Virginia slaves. Moreover, on January 1, 1831, in Boston, the Massachusetts abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison had published the first issue of the Liberator, his fiery newspaper (see chapter 11). White Virginians also dismissed the rebellion's leader, Nat Turner, as insane. "He is a complete fanatic, or plays his part admirably," wrote Thomas R. Gray, the lawyer who was assigned to defend Turner. In the months following the insurrection, the Virginia legislature reaffirmed the state's determination to preserve black bondage by passing laws that strengthened the institution of slavery and further restricted free blacks. A professor at the College of William and Mary, Thomas R. Dew, published a vigorous defense of slavery that became the bible of Southerners' proslavery arguments. More than ever, the nation was divided along the Mason-Dixon line, the surveyors' mark that in colonial times had established the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania but half a century later divided the free North and the slave South. Black slavery increasingly molded the South into a distinctive region. In the decades after 1820, Southerners, like Northerners, raced westward, but unlike Northerners who spread small farms, manufacturing, and free labor, Southerners spread slavery, cotton, and plantations. Geographic expansion meant that slavery became more vigorous and more profitable than ever, embraced more people, and increased the South's political power. Antebellum Southerners included diverse people who at times found themselves at odds with one another — not only slaves and free people but also women and men; Indians, Africans, and Europeans; and aristocrats and common folk. Nevertheless, beneath this diversity, a distinctively southern society and culture were forming. The South became a slave society, and most white Southerners were proud of it. Slaves did not suffer slavery passively. They were, as whites said, "troublesome property." Slaves understood that accommodation to what they could not change was the price of survival, butin a hundred ways they protested their bondage. Theoretically, the master was all-powerful and the slave powerless. But sustained by their families, religion, and community, slaves engaged in day-to-day resistance againsttheir enslavers. The spectrum of slave resistance ranged from mild to extreme. Telling a pointed story by the fireside in a slave cabin was probably the mildest form of protest. But when the weak got the better of the strong, as they did in tales of Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox (Br'er is a contraction of Brother), listeners could enjoy the thrill of a vicarious victory over their masters. Protest in the fields was riskier and included putting rocks in their cotton bags before having them weighed, feigning illness, and pretending to be so thickheaded that they could not understand the simplest instruction. Slaves broke so many hoes that owners outfitted the tools with oversized handles. Slaves so mistreated the work animals that masters switched from horses to mules, which could absorb more abuse. Although slaves worked hard in the master's fields, they also sabotaged his interests Running away was a common form of protest, but except along the borders with northern states and with Mexico, escape to freedom was almost impossible. Most runaways could hope only to escape for a few days. Seeking temporary respite from hard labor or avoiding punishment, they usually stayed close to their plantations, keeping to the deep woods or swamps and slipping back into the quarter at night to get food. "Lying out," as it was known, usually ended when the runaway, worn-out and ragged, gave up or was finally chased down by slave-hunting dogs. Although resistance was common, outright rebellion — a violent assault on slavery by large numbers of slaves — was very rare. The scarcity of revolts in the South is not evidence of the slaves' contentedness, however. Rather, conditions gave rebels almost no chance of success. By 1860, whites in the South outnumbered blacks two to one and were heavily armed. Moreover, communication between plantations was difficult, and the South provided little protective wilderness into which rebels could retreat and defend themselves. Rebellion, as Nat Turner's experience showed (see pages 393-394), was virtual suicide.

19. Dred Scott decision

Political debate over slavery in the territories became so heated in part because the Constitution lacked precision on the issue. In 1857, in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court announced its understanding of the meaning of the Constitution regarding slavery in the territories. The Court's decision demonstrated that it enjoyed no special immunity from the sectional and partisan passions that were convulsing the land. In 1833, an army doctor bought the slave Dred Scott in St. Louis, Missouri, and took him as his personal servant to Fort Armstrong, Illinois, and then to Fort Snelling in Wisconsin Territory. Back in St. Louis in 1846, Scott, with the help of white friends, sued to prove that he and his family were legally entitled to their freedom. Scott based his claim on his travels and residences. He argued thatliving in Illinois, a free state, and Wisconsin, a free territory, had made his family free and thatthey remained free even after returning to Missouri, a slave state. In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who hated Republicans and detested racial equality, wrote the Court's decision. First, the Court ruled in the Dred Scott decision that Scott could not legally claim violation of his constitutional rights because he was not a citizen of the United States. When the Constitution was written, Taney said, blacks "were regarded as beings of an inferior order . . . so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Second, the laws of Dred Scott's home state, Missouri, determined his status, and thus his travels in free areas did not make him free. Third, Congress's power to make "all needful rules and regulations" for the territories did not include the right to prohibit slavery. The Court explicitly declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, even though it had already been voided by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Taney Court's extreme proslavery decision outraged Republicans. By denying the federal government the right to exclude slavery in the territories, it cut the legs out from under the Republican Party. Moreover, as the New York Tribune lamented, the decision cleared the way for "all our Territories . . . to be ripened into Slave States." Particularly frightening to African Americans in the North was the Court's declaration that free blacks were not citizens and had no rights. The Republican rebuttal to the Dred Scott ruling relied heavily on the dissenting opinion of Justice Benjamin R. Curtis. Scott was a citizen of the United States, Curtis argued. At the time ofthe writing ofthe Constitution, free black men could vote in five states and participated in the ratification process. Scott was free. Because slavery was prohibited inWisconsin,the "involuntary servitude of a slave, coming into the Territory with his master, should cease to exist." The Missouri Compromise was constitutional. The Founders had meant exactly whatthey said: Congress had the power to make "all needful rules and regulations" for the territories, including barring slavery In a seven-to-two decision,the Court rejected Curtis'sarguments,thereby validatinganextreme statement of the South's territorial rights. John C. Calhoun's claim that Congress had no authority to exclude slavery became the law ofthe land. White Southerners cheered, but the Dred Scott decision actually strengthened the young Republican Party. Indeed, that "outrageous" decision, one Republican argued, was "the best thing that could have happened," for it provided dramatic evidence ofthe Republicans' claim that a hostile "Slave Power" conspired against northern liberties.

16. Compromise of 1850

Southern slaveholder Zachary Taylor entered the White House in March 1849 and almost immediately shocked the nation by championing a free-soil solution to the Mexican cession. Believing that he could avoid further sectional strife if California and New Mexico skipped the territorial stage, the new president encouraged the settlers to apply for admission to the Union as states.Predominantly antislavery,the settlers began writing free-state constitutions. "For the first time," Mississippian Jefferson Davis lamented, "we are about permanently to destroy the balance of power between the sections." Congress convened in December 1849, beginning one of the most contentious and most significant sessions in its history. President Taylor urged Congress to admit California as a free state immediately and to admit New Mexico, which lagged behind a few months, as soon as it applied. Southerners exploded. A North Carolinian declared that Southerners who would "consentto be thus degraded and enslaved, ought to be whipped through their fields by their own negroes." Into this rancorous scene stepped Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, the architect of Unionsaving compromises in the Missouri and nullification crises (see chapters 10 and 11). Clay offered a series of resolutions meant to answer and balance "all questions in controversy between the free and slave states, growing out of the subject of slavery." Admit California as a free state, he proposed, but organize the rest of the Southwest without restrictions on slavery. Require Texas to abandon its claim to parts of New Mexico, but compensate itbyassuming itspreannexationdebt. Abolish the domestic slave trade in Washington, D.C., but confirm slavery itself in the nation's capital. Reassert Congress's lack of authority to interferewiththe interstate slave trade, andenact a more effective fugitive slave law. Both antislavery advocates and "fire-eaters" (as radical Southerners who urged secession from theUnionwerecalled) savagedClay'splan.Senator SalmonP. Chase ofOhio ridiculed it as "sentiment for the North, substance for the South." Senator Henry S. Foote of Mississippi denounced it as more offensive to the South than the speeches of abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass combined. The mostominousresponsecamefromJohnC.Calhoun, who charged that unending northern agitation on the slavery question had "snapped" many of the "cords which bind these states together in one common union." He argued that the fragile political unity of North and South depended on continued equal representation in the Senate, which Clay's plan for a free California destroyed. "As things now stand," he said in February 1850, the South "cannot with safety remain in the Union." After Clay and Calhoun had spoken, it was time for the third member of the "great triumvirate," Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts toaddress theSenate.LikeClay,Websterdefended compromise. He told Northerners that the South hadlegitimate complaints,buthe toldSoutherners that secession from the Union would mean civil war. He appealed for an end to reckless proposals and,tothedismayofmanyNortherners,mentioned by name the Wilmot Proviso. A legal ban on slavery in the territories was unnecessary, he said, because the harsh climate effectively prohibited the expansion of cotton and slaves into the new American Southwest."I would nottake pains uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance of nature, nor to reenact the will of God," Webster declared Free-soil forces recoiled from what they saw as Webster's desertion. Boston clergyman and abolitionist Theodore Parker could only conclude that "Southern men" must have offered Webster the presidency. SenatorWilliamH.SewardofNew York responded that Webster's and Clay's compromise with slavery was "radically wrong and essentially vicious." He flatly rejected Calhoun's argumentthat Congress lacked the constitutional authority to exclude slavery from the territories. In any case, Seward said, in the most sensational moment in his address, there was a "higher law than the Constitution" — the law of God — to ensure freedom in all the public domain. Claiming that God was a Free-Soiler did nothing to cool the superheated political atmosphere.. In May 1850, the Senate considered a bill that joined Clay's resolutions into a single comprehensive package, known as the Omnibus Bill because it was a vehicle on which "every sort of passenger" could ride. Clay bet that a majority of Congress wanted compromise and that the memberswould vote for the package, even though it might contain provisions they disliked. But the omnibus strategy backfired. Free-Soilers and proslavery Southerners voted down the comprehensive plan.. Fortunately for those who favored a settlement, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, a rising Democratic star from Illinois, broke the bill into its parts and skillfully ushered each through Congress. The agreement Douglas won in September 1850 was very much the one Clay had proposed in January. California entered the Union as a free state. New Mexico and Utah became territorieswhere slaverywouldbedecided by popular sovereignty.Texas accepted its boundary with New Mexico and received $10 million from the federal government. Congress ended the slave trade in the District of Columbia but enacted a more stringent fugitive slave law. In September, Millard Fillmore, who had become president when Zachary Taylor died in July, signed into law each bill, collectively known as the Compromise of 1850 (Map 14.2). Actually, the Compromise of 1850 was not a true compromise at all. Douglas's parliamentary skill, not a spirit of conciliation, was responsible for the legislativesuccess.Still,thenationbreathed a sigh of relief, for the Compromise preserved the Unionandpeace for themoment.Some recognized, however, that the Compromise scarcely touched thedeeper conflict over slavery.Free-SoilerSalmon Chase observed, "The question of slavery in the territories has been avoided. It has not been settled."

18. Uncle Tom's Cabin

The Compromise of 1850 began to come apart almost immediately. The thread that unraveled it was not slavery in the Southwest, the crux of the disagreement, but runaway slaves in New England, a part of the settlement that had previously received little attention. Instead of restoring calm, the Compromise brought the horrors of slavery into the North. Millions of Northerners who had never seen a runaway slave confronted slavery in the early 1850s. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel that vividly depicts the brutality of the South's "peculiar institution," aroused passions so deep that many found good will toward white Southerners nearly impossible. But no groundswell of antislavery sentiment compelled Congress to reopen the slavery controversy. Politicians did it themselves. Four years after Congress stitched the sectional compromise together, it ripped the threads out. With the Kansas-Nebraska Act, it again posed the question of slavery in the territories, the deadliest of all sectional issues. The spectacle of shackled African Americans being herded south seared the conscience of every Northerner who witnessed such a scene. But even more Northerners were turned against slavery by a novel. Harriet Beecher Stowe, a white Northerner who had never set foot on a plantation, made the South's slaves into flesh-and-blood human beings almost more real than life... A member of a famous clan of preachers, teachers, and reformers, Stowe despised the slave catchers and wrote to expose the sin of slavery. Published as a book in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life among the Lowly became a blockbuster hit, selling 300,000 copies in its first year and more than 2 million copies within ten years. Stowe's characters leaped from the page. Here was the gentle slave Uncle Tom, a Christian saint who forgave those who beat him to death; the courageous slave Eliza, who fled with her child across the frozen Ohio River; and the fiendish overseer Simon Legree, whose Louisiana plantation was a nightmare of torture and death. Mother of seven children, Stowe aimed her most powerful blows at slavery's destructive impact on the family. Her character Eliza succeeds in keeping her son from being sold away, but other mothers are not so fortunate. When told that her infant has been sold, Lucy drowns herself. Driven half mad by the sale of a son and daughter, Cassy decides "never again [to] let a child live to grow up!" She gives her third child an opiate and watches as "he slept to death." Northerners shed tears and sang praises to Uncle Tom's Cabin. The poet Henry Wadsworth Long fellow judged it"one of the greatest triumphs recorded in literary history." What Northerners accepted as truth, Southerners denounced as slander. The Virginian George F. Holmes proclaimed Stowe a member ofthe "Woman's Rights" and "Higher Law" schools and dismissed the novel as a work of"intense fanaticism." Although it is impossible to measure precisely the impact of a novel on public opinion, Uncle Tom's Cabin clearly helped to crystallize northern sentiment against slavery and to confirm white Southerners' suspicion that they no longer received any sympathy in the free states. Other writers — ex-slaves who knew life in slave cabins firsthand — also produced stinging indictments of slavery. Solomon Northup's compelling Twelve Years a Slave (1853) sold 27,000 copies in two years, and the powerful Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, as Told by Himself (1845) eventually sold more than 30,000 copies. But no work touched the North's conscience as did the novel by a free white woman. A decade after its publication,when Stowe visited Abraham Lincoln at the White House, he reportedly said, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war." Uncle Tom's Cabin Poster After Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe's outraged sister-in-law told her, "Now Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that will make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is." This poster advertising the novel Stowe wrote calls it "The Greatest Book of the Age." The novel's vivid characters gripped readers' imaginations and fueled the growing antislavery

25. Homestead Act

The Republicans' wartime legislation also aimed at integrating the West more thoroughly into the Union. In May 1862, Congress approved the Homestead Act, which offered 160 acres of public land to settlers who would live and labor on it. The Homestead Act bolstered western loyalty and in time resulted in more than a million new farms. The Pacific Railroad Act in July 1862 provided massive federal assistance for building a transcontinental railroad that ran from Omaha to San Francisco when completed in 1869. Congress further bound East and West by subsidizing the Pony Express mail service and a transcontinental telegraph.

22. Border States

The Upper South faced a horrendous choice: either to fight against the Lower South or to fight against the Union. Many who only months earlier had rejected secession now embraced the Confederacy. To vote against southern independence was one thing, to fight fellow Southerners quite another. Thousands felt betrayed, believing that Lincoln had promised to achieve a peaceful reunion by waiting patiently for Unionists to retake power in the seceding states. It was a "politician's war," one man declared, but he conceded that "this is no time now to discuss the causes, but it is the duty of all who regard Southern institutions of value to side with the South, make common cause with the Confederate States and sink or swim with them." One by one, the states of the Upper South jumped off the fence. Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina joined the Confederacy (Map 15.1). But in the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, Unionism triumphed. Only in Delaware, where slaves accounted for less than 2 percent of the population, was the victory easy. In Maryland, Unionism needed a helping hand. Rather than allow the state to secede and make Washington, D.C., a federalisland ina Confederate sea,Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, essentially setting aside constitutional guarantees that protect citizens from arbitrary arrest and detention, and he ordered U.S. troops into Baltimore. Maryland's legislature rejected secession. The struggle turned violent in the West. In Missouri, Unionists won a narrow victory, but southern-sympathizing guerrilla bands roamed the state for the duration of the war, terrorizing civilians and soldiers alike. In Kentucky, Unionists also narrowly defeated secession, but the prosouthern minority claimed otherwise. The Confederacy, not especially careful about counting votes, eagerly made Missouri and Kentucky the twelfth and thirteenth stars on the Confederate flag Throughoutthe border states, but especially in Kentucky, the Civil War divided families. Seven of Senator Henry Clay's grandsons fought: four for the Confederacy and three for the Union. Lincoln understood that the border states — particularlyKentucky—contained indispensable resources, population, and wealth and also controlled major rivers and railroads. "I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game," Lincoln said. "Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, . . . we would as well consent to separation at once." In the end, only eleven of the fifteen slave states joined the Confederate States of America. Moreover, the four seceding Upper South states contained significant numbers of people who felt little affectionfor theConfederacy.Dissatisfaction was so rife in the western counties of Virginia that in 1863 citizens there voted to create the separate state of West Virginia, loyal to the Union. Still, the acquisition of four new states greatly strengthened the Confederacy's drive for national independence.

17. Fugitive Slave Act

The issue of runaway slaves was as old as the Constitution, which contained a provision for the return of any "person held to service or labor in one state" who escaped to another. In 1793, a federal law gave muscle to the provision by authorizing slave owners to enter other states to recapture their slave property. Proclaiming the 1793 law a license to kidnap free blacks, northern states in the 1830s began passing "personal liberty laws" that provided fugitives with some protection. Some northern communities also formed vigilance committees to help runaways. Each year, a few hundred slaves escaped into free states and found friendly northern "conductors" who putthem aboard the underground railroad, which was not a railroad at all but a series of secret "stations"(hideouts) ontheway t o C a n a d a. H a r r i e t Tubman,anescapedslave from Maryland, returned to the South more than a dozen times and guided more than three hundred slaves to freedom in this way. Furious about northern interference, Southerners in 1850 insisted on the stricter fugitive slave law that was passed as part of the Compromise. According to the Fugitive Slave Act, to seize an alleged slave, a slaveholder simply had to appear before a commissioner and swear that therun away was his.The commissioner earned $10 for every individual returned to slavery but only $5 for those set free. Most galling to Northerners,the law stipulated that all citizens were expected to assist officials in apprehending runaways. Abolitionist Theodore Parker denounced the law as "a hateful statute of kidnappers." In Boston in February 1851, an angry crowd overpowered federal marshals and snatched a runaway named Shadrach from a courtroom, put him on the underground railroad, and whisked him off to Canada. Three years later, when another Boston crowd rushed the courthouse in a failed attempt to rescue Anthony Burns, who had recently fled slavery in Richmond, a guard was shot dead. Martha Russell, a writer for the antislavery journal National Era, was among the angry crowd that watched Burns being escorted to the ship that would return him to Virginia. "Did you ever feel every drop of blood in you boiling and seething,throbbing and burning, until it seemed you should suffocate?" she asked. "I have felt all this today. I have seen that poor slave, Anthony Burns, carried back to slavery!" To white Southerners, it seemed that fanatics of the "higher law" creed had whipped Northerners into a frenzy of massive resistance. Actually, the overwhelming majority of fugitives claimed by slaveholders were re enslaved peacefully. But brutal enforcement of the unpopular law had a radicalizing effect in the North, particularly in New England. To Southerners it seemed that Northerners had betrayed the Compromise. "The continued existence of the United States as one nation," warned the Southern Literary Messenger, "depends upon the full and faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Bill."

3. Immigrants in the early 19 th century

The risks and uncertainties of free labor did not deter millions of immigrants from entering the UnitedStates during the 1840s and 1850s. Almost 4.5 million immigrants arrived between 1840 and 1860, six times more than had come during the previous two decades (Figure 12.2). By 1860, foreign-born residents made up about one-eighth ofthe U.S. population, a fraction that held steady well into the twentieth century. Nearly three-fourths of the immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1840 and 1860 came from either Germany or Ireland. The majority of the 1.4 million Germans who entered during these years were skilled tradesmen and their families. Roughly a quarter were farmers, some of whom settled in Texas. German butchers, bakers, beer makers, carpenters, shopkeepers, and machinists settled mostly in the Midwest, often congregating in cities. On the whole, German Americans were often Protestants and occupied the middle stratum of independent producers celebrated by free-labor spokesmen; relatively few worked as wage laborers or domestic servants. Irish immigrants, in contrast, entered at the bottom of the free-labor ladder and struggled to climb up. Nearly 1.7 million Irish immigrants arrived between 1840 and 1860, nearly all of them desperately poor and often weakened by hunger and disease. Potato blight struck Ireland in 1845 and returned repeatedly in subsequent years, spreading a catastrophic famine throughout the island. Many of the lucky ones crowded into the holds of ships and set out for America, where they congregated in northeastern cities. As one immigrant group declared, "All we want is to get out of Ireland; we must be better anywhere than here." Death trailed after them. So many died crossing the Atlantic that ships from Ireland were often termed "coffin ships." Roughly three out of four Irish immigrants worked as laborers or domestic servants. Irish men dug canals, loaded ships, laid railroad track, and did odd jobs while Irish women worked in the homes of others — cooking, washing and ironing, minding children, and cleaning house. Almost all Irish immigrants were Catholic, a fact that set them apart from the overwhelmingly Protestant native-born residents. Many natives regarded the Irish as hard-drinking, unruly, half-civilized folk. Such views lay behind the discrimination reflected in job announcements that commonly stated, "No Irish need apply." Despite such prejudices, native residents hired Irish immigrants because they accepted low pay and worked hard In America's labor-poor economy, Irish laborers could earn more in one day than in several weeks in Ireland, where opportunities were often scarce. In America, one immigrant explained in 1853, there was "plenty of work and plenty of wages plenty to eat and no land lords thats enough what more does a man want." But some immigrants wanted more, especially respect and decent working conditions. One immigrant complained that he was "a slave for the Americans as the generality of the Irish . . . are."Such testimony illustrates that the freelabor system, whether for immigrants or nativeborn laborers, often did not live up to the optimistic vision outlined by Abraham Lincoln and others. Many wage laborers could not realistically aspire to become independent, self-sufficient property holders, despite the claims of free-labor proponents.

26. Northern Draft Riots

When the Republican-dominated Congress enacted the draft law in March 1863, Democrats had another grievance. The law required that all men between the ages oftwenty and forty-five enroll and make themselves available for a lottery that would decide who went to war. What poor men found particularly galling were provisions that allowed a draftee to hire a substitute or simply to pay a $300 fee and get out of his military obligation. As in the South, common folk could be heard chanting, "A rich man's war and a poor man's fight." Linking the draft and emancipation,Democrats argued that Republicans employed an unconstitutional means (the draft) to achieve an unconstitutional end (emancipation). In the summer of 1863, antidraft, antiblackmobswent onrampages in northern cities. In July in New York City, Democratic Irish workingmen — crowded into filthy tenements, gouged by inflation, enraged by the draft, and dead set against fighting to free blacks — erupted in four days of rioting. The New York City draft riots killed at least 105 people, most of them black, and left the Colored Orphan Asylum a smoking ruin. Lincoln called Democratic opposition to the war "the fire in the rear" and believed that it was evenmore threatening tonational survival than were Confederate armies. The antiwar wing of the Democratic Party, the Peace Democrats — whom some called "Copperheads,"after thepoisonous snake—found their chief spokes man in Ohio congress man Clement Vallan digham. He argued that the Confederacy could never be conquered and that Lincoln's attempt had "made this country one oftheworst despotisms onearth." Vallandigham demanded: "Stop fighting. Make an armistice. . . . Withdraw your army from the seceding States." In September 1862, in an effort to stifle opposition to the war, Lincoln placed under military arrest any person who discouraged enlistments, resisted the draft, or engaged in "disloyal" practices. Before the war ended, his administration imprisoned nearly 14,000 individuals, most in the border states. The administration's heavy-handed tactics suppressed free speech, but the campaign fell short of a reign of terror, for the majority of the prisoners were not northern Democrat ic opponents but Confederates, blockade runners, and citizens of foreign countries, and most of those arrested gained quick release. Still, Lincoln's net did capture Vallandigham, who was arrested, convicted of treason, and eventually banished. In May 1863, Union soldiers escorted the Ohioan to Confederate lines in Tennessee. African americans, no matter if they are free or slaves, are not citizens of the united states

10. Transcendentalism and utopian communities

While manifest destiny, the Mexican-American War, and the California gold rush transformed the nation's boundaries, many Americans sought personal and social reform. The emphasis on self-discipline and individual effort at the core of the free-labor ideal led Americans to believe that insufficient self-control caused the major socia l prob lems o f the era. Evange l ica l Protestants struggled to control individuals' propensity to sin. Temperance advocates exhorted drinkers to control their urge for alcohol. In the midst of the worldly disruptions of geographic expansion and economic change, about one-third of Americans belonged to a church in 1850. Although many — like Abraham Lincoln — remained outside churches, the influence of evangelical religion reached far beyond church members. The evangelicaltemperament—a conviction of righteousness coupled with energy, self- discipline, and faith that the world could be improved — animated most reformers. However, a few activists pointed out that certain fundamental injustices lay beyond the reach of individual self-control. Transcendentalists and utopians believed that perfection could be attained only by rejecting the competitive, individualistic values of mainstream society. Woman's rights activists and abolitionists sought to reverse the subordination of women and to eliminate the enslavement of blacks by changing laws and social institutions as well as attitudes and customs. They confronted the daunting challenge of repudiating widespread assumptions about male supremacy and white supremacy and somehow challenging the entrenched institutions that reinforced those assumptions: the family and slavery A group of New England writers who came to be known as transcendentalists believed that individuals should conform neither to the dictates of the materialistic world nor to the dogma of formal religion. Instead, people should look within themselves for truth and guidance. The leading transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson — an essayist, poet, and lecturer — proclaimed that the power of the solitary individual was nearly limitless. Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and other transcendentalists agreed with Emerson that "if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him." In many ways, the inward gaze and confident egoism of transcendentalism represented less an alternative to mainstream values than an exaggerated form of the rampant individualism of the age. Unlike transcendentalists who sought to turn inward, a few reformers tried to change the world by organizing utopian communities as alternatives to prevailing social arrangements. Although these communities never attracted more than a few thousand people, the activities of their members demonstrated both dissatisfaction with the larger society and their efforts to realize their visions of perfection. Some communities set out to become models of perfection whose success would point the way toward a better life for everyone. During the 1840s, more than two dozen communities organized themselves around the ideas of Charles Fourier, a French critic of contemporary society. Members of Fourierist phalanxes, as these communities were called, believed thatindividualism and competition were evils that denied the basic truth that "men . . . are brothers and not competitors." Phalanxes aspired to replace competition with harmonious cooperation based on communal ownership of property. But Fourierist communities failed to realize their lofty goals, and few survived more than two or three years. The Oneida community went beyond the Fourieristnotionofcommunalism.JohnHumphrey Noyes,the charismatic leader of Oneida, believed that American society's commitment to private property made people greedy and selfish. Noyes claimed that the root of private property lay in marriage, in men's conviction that their wives were their exclusive property. Drawing from a substantial inheritance, Noyes organized the Oneida community in New York in 1848 to abolish marital property rights through the practice of what he called "complex marriage." Sexual intercourse was not restricted to married couples but was permitted between any consenting man andwomaninthe community. Noyes also required all members to relinquish their economic property to the community, which developed a lucrative business manufacturing animal traps. Oneida's sexual and economic communalism attracted several hundred members, but most of their neighbors considered Oneidans adulterers, blasphemers, and worse. Yet the practices that set Oneida apart from its mainstream neighbors strengthened the community, and it survived long after the Civil War.

23. Native Americans and the Civil War

While most eyes focused on events in the East, the decisive early encounters of the war were taking place betweenthe AppalachianMountains and the Ozarks (see Map 15.2). Confederates wanted Missouri and Kentucky, states they claimed but did not control. Federals wanted to split Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas from the Confederacy by taking control of the Mississippi River and to occupy Tennessee, one of the Confederacy's main producers of food, mules, and iron — all vital resources BeforeUnionforces couldmarchonTennessee, they needed to secure Missourito the west. Union troops swept across Missouri to the border of Arkansas,where inMarch 1862 they encountered a 16,000-man Confederate army, which included three regiments of Indians from the so-calledFive CivilizedTribes—theChoctaw,Chickasaw,Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee. AlthoughIndians fought on both sides during the war, Native Americans who sided with the South hoped that the Confederacy would grant them more independence than had the United States. The Union victory at the battle of Pea Ridge left Missouri free of Confederate troops, but Missouri was notfree of Confederate fighters. Guerrilla bands led by the notorious WilliamClarkeQuantrilland"Bloody Bill" Anderson burned, tortured, scalped, and murdered Union civilians and soldiers untilthe final year of the war. Even farther west, Confederate armies sought to fulfill Jefferson Davis's vision of a slaveholding empire stretching all the way to the Pacific. Both sides recognized the immense value ofthe gold and silver mines of California, Nevada, and Colorado. And both sides bolstered their armies in the Southwest with Mexican Americans, some 2,500 fighting for the Confederacy and 1,000 joining Union forces. A quick strike by Texas troops took Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the winter of 1861-62. Then in March 1862, a band of Colorado miners ambushed and crushed southern forces at Glorieta Pass, outside Santa Fe. Confederate military failures in the far West meant that there would be no Confederate empire beyond Texas The principal western battles took place in Tennessee, where General Ulysses S. Grant emerged as the key northern commander. Grant hadgraduatedfromWestPointandservedbravely in Mexico. When the Civil War began, he was a thirty-nine-year-old dry-goods clerk in Galena, Illinois. Gentle at home, he became pugnacious on the battlefield. "The art of war is simple," he said. "Find out where your enemy is, get at him as soon as you can and strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on." Grant's philosophy of war as attrition would take a huge toll in human life, but it played to the North's superiority in manpower. In his private's uniform and slouch hat, Grant did not look much like a general. But Lincoln, who did not look much like a president, learned his worth. Later, to critics who wanted the president to sack Grant because of his drinking, Lincoln would say,"I can't spare this man. He fights." Both the Union and the Confederacy enrolled Indian soldiers. Here, a Union recruiter swears in two recruits. The Confederates promised to assume the financial obligations of the old treaties with the United States, guarantee slavery, respect tribal independence, and permit the tribes to send delegates to Richmond. Cherokee chief John Ross, who signed with the Confederacy, likened his difficult choice to that of a man in a flood who sees a log floating by: "By refusing [the log] he is a doomed man. By seizing hold of it he has a chance for his life." Approximately 20,000 Indians fought in the Civil War, sometimes against each other gunboats, Grant captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland (see Map 15.2). Defeat forced the Confederates to withdraw from all of Kentucky and most of Tennessee, but Grant followed gunboats, Grant captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland (see Map 15.2). Defeat forced the Confederates to withdraw from all of Kentucky and most of Tennessee, but Grant followed.

11. Seneca Falls convention

Women participated in the many reform activities that grewout of evangelical churches.Women church members outnumbered men two to one and worked to put their religious ideas into practice by joining peace, temperance, antislavery, and other societies. Involvement in reform organizations gave a few women activists practical experience in such political arts as speaking in public, running a meeting, drafting resolutions, and circulating petitions. Along with such experience came confidence. The abolitionist Lydia Maria Child pointed outin 1841 that"those who urged women to become missionaries and form tract societies . . . have changed the household utensil to a living energetic being and they have no spell to turn it into a broom again." In 1848, about three hundred reformers led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott gathered at Seneca Falls, New York, for the first national woman's rights convention in the United States. As Stanton recalled, "The general discontent I felt with women's portion as wife, mother, housekeeper, physician, and spiritual guide, [and] the wearied anxious look of the majority of women impressed me with a strong feeling that some active measure should be taken to right the wrongs of society in general, and of women in particular." The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments set an ambitious agenda to demand civil liberties for women and to right the wrongs of society. The declaration proclaimed that "the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her." In the style of the Declaration of Independence (see appendix I, page A-1), the Seneca Falls declaration demanded that women "have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States," particularly the "inalienable right to the elective franchise." Nearly two dozen other woman's rights conventions assembled before 1860, repeatedly calling for suffrage and an end to discrimination against women. But women had difficulty receiving a respectful hearing, much less achieving legislative action. Even so, the Seneca Falls declaration served as a pathbreaking manifesto of dissent against male supremacy and of support for woman suffrage, and it inspired many women to challenge the barriers that limited their opportunities eir opportunities. Stanton and other activists sought fair pay andexpandedemploymentopportunitiesforwomen by appealing to free-labor ideology. Woman's rights advocate Paula Wright Davis urged Americans to stop discriminating against able and enterprising women: "Let [women] . . . open a Store, . . . plant and tend an Orchard, . . . learn any of the lighter mechanical Trades, . . . study for a Profession, . . . be called to the lecture-room, [and] . . . the Temperance rostrum . . . [and] let her be appointed [to serve in the Post Office]." Some women pioneered in these and many other occupations during the 1840s and 1850s.Woman's rights activists also succeeded in protecting married women's rights to their own wages and property in New York in 1860. But discrimination against women persisted, as most men believed that free-labor ideology required no compromise of male supremacy