Ante-bellum and Civil War in the United States

Northern politicians were opposed to extending slavery into new territories west of the Mississippi River. Southern politicians held that slavery should be allowed to follow the flag into new territories and new states, and they were concerned about their power to influence. These Southern politicians were Democrats, in coalition with northern Democrats, a coalition from the days of Andrew Jackson. These Southern politicians feared an imbalance between slave states and free states would subvert their influence and give too much power to those hostile toward slavery. It was this concern that would lead to Southern states attempting to secede from the union.

Texas and Florida entered the union as a slave states in 1845. Iowa entered as a free state in 1846 and Wisconsin as a free state in 1848. Oregon was organized as a territory without slavery. The President, Zachary Taylor, a member of the Whig party and a slave owner from Virginia, told Californians to bypass territorial status and apply for admission to the union as a free state. Southerners were outraged. Their support for Taylor had given him the presidency, and they felt betrayed.

Those digging for gold in California, and others, did not want competition from slaves and they did not want their dignity undermined by being seen as doing the same work as slaves. The slavery that was brought to California was driven out. A convention met in California and drafted a constitution that prohibited slavery. This was ratified by a vote of 12,000 to 800. In Congress, shouting matches erupted over the question of admitting California into the union, with Southern politicians complaining that they had suffered the "wrongs and insults of the North long enough." Talk of the South seceding from the union arose again, and President Taylor, the old veteran of the U.S.- Mexican War, declared that he would crush secession if he had to lead the army himself. The aging Senator known as the Great Compromiser, Henry Clay of Kentucky -- a slave state -- tried to calm his fellow Southerners. He believed that secessionists were being lightheaded. On the Senate floor he spoke of the benefits to the South of remaining in the Union. He described as delusional the view that secession was constitutional, and warned that it could not be accomplished peacefully.

President Taylor died in July and was succeeded by the vice president, Millard Fillmore -- America's last Whig president. On September 9, 1850, Congress voted California into the union as a free state, but it was done as part of a compromise. For the slaveholders, Congress passed the nation's second Fugitive Slave Law.

The first Fugitive Slave Act, passed back in 1793, allowed slave catchers to function in any state or territory, and that they have only an oral claim given to a federal or state judge that the person was an escaped slave. And under the first Fugitive Slave Act anyone sheltering an escaped slave could be fined 500 dollars -- a large amount of money at that time. By the mid-1800s, Northern states were doing little about runaway slaves. Runaways were being considered free persons when reaching states that had outlawed slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, changed this. A federal marshal who failed to arrest an alleged runaway slave could be fined 1,000 dollars and the federal government was now obligated to track down and apprehend runaway slaves in the North. In the North, any black could be arrested without a warrant and turned over to someone who claimed him or her to be a runaway and himself as the owner. A fine of 1,000 dollars and six months' imprisonment could be charged against anyone caught providing shelter, food or any other assistance to a slave.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 intensified the hunt for runaways. It jeopardized all free blacks and intensified help from people for slaves, with calls in the North for civil disobedience and with more energy devoted to the rescue of slaves through the "underground railroad." More support for the Underground Railroad came in 1852 with the publication of a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe:Uncle Tom's Cabin. The popularity of the book made Southerners feel more besieged. They complained that the novel was exaggerated fiction, and in the South owning a copy of the book was made illegal.

Economics and Culture, North and South

According to an 1850 census, the U.S. population was 23,191,867 -- up from 13 million in 1830. And the 1850s was a decade of more growth and more immigration into the North. According to the 1860 census, the U.S. population was 31,443,321 - an increase of 39 percent in one decade, the South having about 8 million whites in 1860, compared to about 20 million in the North.

Southerners complained of the advantage that the North had in attracting immigrants -- although the North, with its different kind of economy, could absorb the increase of free people better than could the South. What Southern planters wanted was more slaves. Cotton production had been growing, from 160,000,000 in 1820 to1,000,000,000 (one billion) in 1850, and to 2.3 billion pounds in the year of 1860 -- a growth of 230 percent in the 1850s.

The number of slaves in the U.S. at the beginning of the century was 1.2 million. According to the 1860 census it was 3,953,760, almost all in the South. In the U.S., slave mortality rates had been exceeding slave birth rates, and the growth in slave population was dependent on the illegal importing of new slaves from Africa. The United States and most Western nations had declared the slave trade with Africa to be piracy and punishable by death, but only the British had been seriously combating the trade. From 1843 to 1857 the U.S. had seized only 19 ships transporting slaves, and of those 19 only 6 were prosecuted. The British in this same period had seized nearly 600 ships and had prosecuted all but 38.

The North and South were different in a variety of ways. The North, especially New England, had greater percentage of middleclass people. It had more small manufacturing industries, capitalists and banking. By 1840 there were 1,200 cotton factories in the United States, two-thirds of them in New England, which was importing cotton from the South and using water power from its rivers. By 1850 the North had more than 1,500 woolen mills, most of them individually owned, producing blankets, flannel and worsteds. Firearms and furniture were being produced in the North. There was boot and shoemaking -- a winter occupation of New England farmers and fishermen. And people were investing in labor saving machinery -- advancing technology in order to reduce manual labor or labor costs.

New England was also the heart of sea born commerce in the United States. By the late 1840s, ships powered by steam engines had replaced sailing ships in hauling freight and passengers across the Atlantic Ocean, the new technology and competition reducing shipping rates. Foreign commerce grew dramatically in the 1840s and 1850s. The North was manufacturing power looms and exporting them to Europe. Ships owned by Northerners were shipping the South's cotton to Europe, mainly to Britain -- cotton being two-thirds of U.S. exports.

Northern communities were an anthill of activity. There were not yet many city parks, pleasure resorts, or much game playing. The Puritan work ethic prevailed, people working long hours and six days per week. College rowing teams was the only competitive sport, the average adult seeing leisure and games as a waste of time. But oddity shows had begun -- the Jerry Springer shows of that time, but with some real freaks, some fake freaks and dwarfs as had been practiced by kings. Orchestras were beginning to appear in the bigger cities, and operas were performed, while in New England the name "theater" was in bad repute and the names museum or athenaeum were used instead.

In the 1850s a boom in railroad development across the North was changing business organization and management and reducing freight costs. Railroads were influencing a rise in real estate values, increasing regional concentrations of industry, the size of business units and stimulating growth in investment banking and agriculture. Wheat production was moving westward with the rail lines. The federal government was granting federal lands to states for building railroads, and railroad companies were selling their land grants they had received from the federal government to individuals as farm sites.

The Northern economy was still largely farming -- small farms -- with adolescents having time for fishing and hunting. The North was growing mainly food, and farmers were investing in steel plows and mechanical reapers, which were reducing the labor and time required to plant and harvest.

In the North was still plenty of misery. Plumbing -- what there was of it - froze in the winter, and in the 1850s most homes were still heated by wood or coal in open furnaces. Cooking used the same fuel, while whale oil was being used in lamps in the cities and candles were still being used in rural areas. Health care was still largely in a realm of ignorance, with no one knowing how to cure tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, yellow fever, typhus and other diseases. But in the North was some optimism, with predictions that electricity and machinery would be transforming life and relieving mankind of drudgery.

New England was more devoted to education than was the South. Of the nation's 321 public high schools only 30 were in the South. In the South the sons of the poor were likely to receive no education. Illiteracy was more common in the South. Education there was more for the gentry, and teaching tended to be private.

The South was more of an agricultural society, with more of a division between a landed gentry and their poorer, often barefoot, cousins. Women were viewed differently. In New England, women were more active and hard working, a few of them becoming doctors, writers or activists in their church. Women of the landed gentry in the South were put on pedestals, and they had slaves to do their work. The Southern gentry was more into fox hunting, horseracing, and into dueling, for which the Puritans of New England had scorn. The South had a higher percentage of horsemen and soldiers than did the North.

Southerners looked askance at developments in the North. They disliked the increase in loudness of Puritanism's proclamations in the 1850s. They disliked the Puritan strictures and prohibitions against a good drink, strong language and fun on Sundays. They believed more in leisure than did the Puritans, and were aided in this by milder winters.

Southerners were investing in slaves rather than in machines. Planters were interested in the size of their holdings rather than in cash to invest elsewhere in the economy, and those with a good spread of land were more happy to break even than were the capitalists of New England. Southerners looked upon New Englanders - whom they called Yankees -- as greedy and boorish -- as did some in the North outside of New England. People in slave-owning families did not have the same work ethic as Northerners. Planters were borrowing from New England banks in order to do their spring planting and they had little love for their creditors.

Professionals in the South were little interested in becoming investors in the economy in general. Instead of becoming Yankee-like, they dreamed of buying land and a few slaves and retiring as a Southern gentleman on their small plantation. Only 25 percent of Southerners owned slaves. Most slave owners owned fewer than five slaves, and only 12 percent of Southerners had twenty or more slaves. Many whites who had no slaves looked with envy upon the wealthy, and to a degree admired them. The poor, scraped hard on little plots of land for subsistence. They knew how hard the plantation slaves were driven, and there was sympathy for the slave in this regard, but they did not want to see the slaves freed. Similar to most Northerners, they saw themselves as superior to blacks, and the Southern poor drew some comfort from their belief that they were not on the bottom of society's hierarchies. And with large numbers of slaves nearby, the Southern poor feared that if the slaves were freed they would overrun, steal from and perhaps murder them.

In the North was a general dislike of slavery but little favor in coercing the South into freeing the slaves. Abolitionists were a minority -- and more in New England than elsewhere in the North. But there was also hostility toward slavery from abroad, and it reached its peak in the 1850s. Britain had ended slavery in the 1830s, and France in 1848. Outside of the South, only two major powers still had legal slavery:Spain, in its colonies, notably Cuba; and Brazil.

Southerners were moved by arguments that countered the rising hostility toward slavery in the 1840s and 1850s - arguments led by the South's religious leaders. The religious denomination of the planters was largely Episcopalian, which was more ritualistic (liturgical) and more hierarchical and conservative than the Congregationalists of New England - whose tradition was more hostile toward aristocracy and, in the 1850s, decidedly anti-slavery. The North and South had common religious denominations, such as the Methodists and Baptists, but social and economic circumstances had split the way they viewed the world and had split these denominations into Northern and Southern halves.

The interconnection between the economies of the North and South mollified the differences in opinion for some Northerners. Commerce was peace-minded, and among manufactures in the New England was a tendency to avoid the slavery issue. They wanted no irreparable split from their source of cotton. And Northerners had an interest in keeping the South as a good customer of its food and manufactured products. The South grew more cotton than food and was importing its food from the North. The South bought its shoes from the North, much of their weaponry, and it rode on carriage wheels produced in the North. The federal government had high tariffs on products from Europe which protected the North's markets in the South, in addition to supplying the government with 85 to 90 percent of its revenues. (There was as yet no federal income tax.) By people in the North who worried about such things, it was feared that secession and no more high tariff barriers by the federal government, the South would start buying from Britain. And it was feared that secession might also be accompanied by a repudiation of debts owned by Southerners to Northerners.

The cotton growers in the South, meanwhile, were tied economically and culturally to the rest of the South, including Virginia and Kentucky. Virginia and Kentucky were not the cotton producers that other Southern states were, but they were supplying the cotton states with food, mules, iron products and other goods.

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