North and South Essay Example For Students

North and South Essay The Pre-dawning of an American TragedyEconomic, Social and Political InstitutionsThe Eastern regions of the United States experienced tremendous economic and social growth during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Encouraged by waves of work-hungry immigrants, business-friendly laws, and the promises of a resource-rich land, businessmen invested mightily in their schemes and plans for settling the new country before them. The American economy enjoyed unprecedented growth for much of the 1800s. Capital, resources, land, and foreign labor were plentiful, and all these factors combined to engender fertile economic conditions for new generations of entrepreneurs and businessmen. Economic growth was also aided by the countrys emerging legal system, which was fiercely protective of private property and determined to enforce contractual agreements. As the nineteenth century progressed, two distinct economic systems emerged in the North and South. In the North, the opening of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company in Massachusetts in 1823 marked the introduction of the English factory system to America. This triggered the rapid development of a manufacturing-based economy in the North, an economy that was further buoyed by improved transportation options and increased harvesting of raw materials. Fledgling labor organizations began to sprout up as well in the latter part of the 1830s. In the early 1800s, the nations woeful road system quickly gave way to water transportation. The latter option was aided immeasurably by the construction of the Erie Canal (1817-1825), which linked the New York canal system to Lake Erie at Buffalo and opened the Great Lakes region to commerce, as well as the development of the St. Lawrence Sea way, a series of canals, dams, and locks along the U.S. -Canadian border which allowed travel from the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the Atlantic to the Great Lakes. Thousands of miles of canals were built throughout the first half of the nineteenth century; most of them financed by state and local governments. The canal and river systems, though, eventually gave way to the Iron Horse-the locomotive. Railway lines proliferated and became the preferred mode of delivery. Railroads also proved essential to the development of the nations ever-expanding western borders, and railroad hubs in cities such as Chicago were quickly established to transport crops of the plains back to eastern markets. By 1860 more than thirty thousand miles of railroad track had been laidnearly as much as in the rest of the world combined. In the South, meanwhile, the regions economy was fused to the institution of slavery. Agricultural in nature, Southern business interests relied on slaves to harvest the cash crops (especially cotton) that were sold to customers in urban and industrial markets. As abolitionist pressures from the North grew, slave-holders grew increasingly concerned. Two issues dominated American politics in the first part of the nineteenth century: expansion and slavery. Perhaps inevitably, the two issues became tangled together over time, a development that contributed to the slide toward war that nearly tore the nation apart. After Americas ill-fated attempt to annex Canada, the country turned its expansionist attention to the west. In the 1840s America wrested the republic of Texas and another large region (which included modern-day California, Nevada, Utah, and most of New Mexico and Arizona) away from Mexico. The mountains, deserts, and forests that comprised these territories were hundreds of miles away from the eastern United States, but their acquisition nonetheless had a tremendous impact on the relationship between the established Northern and Southern states. As the United States continued its expansion, it became increasingly difficult for it to maintain its balancing act between the North and the South regarding slavery. As new states and territories joined the nation, debate over whether they should be admitted as slave states was furious. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which secretary of state and future president John Quincy Adams perceptively called the title page to a great tragic volume), the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 were all engineered in the hopes of satisfying both sides, but these legislative efforts ultimately failed. Abolitionists continued to rage against the enslavement of blacks, while Southern states felt that the balance of power in Congress between slave and non-slave states was being gradually eroded. The Supreme Courts Dred Scott decision (1857) further heightened tensions between the North and South. During the first half of the nineteenth century, political parties evolved in accordance with patterns of ethnicity, religion, region, and economic class. Leading political parties included the Jeffersonian (National) Republicans, who favored high tariffs and the institution of a national bank; the Whigs, a party that grew out of the National Republican Party and several smaller political factions; and the Jacksonian Democratsnamed after party giant Andrew Jacksonwho held sway from 1829 to the dawn of the Civil War. The issue of slavery, however, finally caused the Democrats, traditionally a coalition of various economic and ethnic groups, to splinter. The two groups each fielded a candidate for the 1860 presidential election, but the anti-slavery Republicans of the North were able to push Abraham Lincoln to the presidency despite the fact that he won only 39 percent of thepopular vote (and only two counties in all of the South). His election further convinced the South that separation from the Union was necessary. American law and interpretations of justice underwent dramatic transformation in the first half of the nineteenth century. American law was based in large measure on English common law, but U.S. politicians, lawyers, and communities shaped and altered that foundation to address uniquely American issues such as land settlement. The countrys fledgling court system showed little inclination to use law as a device to enforce Christian concepts of morality, instead devoting its attention to the issues of property, business, and commercial contracts. As judicial decisions proliferated, they formed a body of case law that often addressed questions not yet discussed by the countrys legislative arms. Instead of upholding the ideal of a stable and balanced social order, noted the authors of The Great Republic, the law gave increasing priority to economic growth, encouraging individual enterprise, initiative, and competition. Several legal decisions rendered during the first half of the nineteenth century had an enduring impact on both the nature of the American legal system and the sociological landscape of thecountry. In 1803 the Supreme Courts decision in the case of Marbury v. Madison, authored by Chief Justice John Marshall, established the judicial branchs authority to invalidate federal laws that it deemed unconstitutional, a power that has been invoked with significant effect in the ensuing two centuries of Americas history. Other Supreme Court decisions (such as McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819 and Cohens v. Virginia in 1821) asserted the sovereignty of federal law over state law, thus strengthening the hand of Congress and confirming the power of the Constitution. Another landmark legal decision reflected Americas struggle with the issue of slavery. The 1857 Dred Scott decision, which denied the appeal of a slave who petitioned for freedom on the grounds of his extended stints in free territory, further inflamed passions concerning the subject, and many scholars argue that the decision made the Civil War inevitable. The sociological make-up of the American people underwent a dramatic transformation in the first half of the nineteenth century. The first Americansoverwhelmingly British and Protestantwere joined by an ever-widening range of emigrants from Poland, Germany, Ireland, and other European countries with different political views and religious faiths. These newcomers embraced the uniquely American vision of the young country as a place of opportunity and possibility. Most of these immigrants settled in the cities of the North, where factories were an increasing presence in theeconomy. The Irish, who accounted for more than 40 percent of the immigrants to America in the 1840s, were forced to contend with sometimes violently anti-Catholic feelings in their new land, but they nonetheless managed to accumulate significant political power in major Northern cities. By 1860 eight cities had swelled to populations of more than 150,000; only seven cities in all of England were of that size. Despite the surge in immigrants, however, most Americans continued to live in rural areas; this was especially true in the South. In 1860 four out of five Americans lived on farms or in communities of less than 2,500. The influx of immigrant families, coupled with the growing size of American family units, resulted in a nation in which children were seemingly everywhere. By 1830, nearly one-third of the countrys white population was under the age of ten. Other events during this period had an enduring impact on American society as well. In 1848 more than two hundred women and men met at Seneca Falls, New York, to hold a conference on womens rights. This convention, which charged that women should have the same rights as men in the realms of voting, education, employment, and property ownership, is commonly regarded as the birthplace of the American womens movement. Native American tribes east of the Mississippi River, meanwhile, saw their cultures uprooted and discarded by the steadily encroaching white population. Some tribes were housed on reservations located on unfamiliar land, while others fled in search of land where they might be left undisturbed. Even tribes that sought to adopt civilized ways were swept away. Child abuse Essay The Compromise also included a controversial new Fugitive Slave Act that enabled slave owners to retrieve runaway slaves more easily from the North. Only four years later, however, a new law left the uneasy truce of 1850 broken in the dust. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 jettisoned the 1820 Missouri Compromise (which had outlawed slavery in territories north of Missouris southern boundary), calling instead for an arrangement wherein territories seeking statehood were left to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery within their respective borders. The Act outraged many Northerners and sparked the dissolution of the Whig Party and the creation of the Republican Party (largely composed of Whig Party remnants and Northern Democrats who were unhappy with their partys pro-South stance). By 1860 the South viewed the Republican Party, which boasted a number of important abolitionist voices, as a direct threat to their way of life. The 1854 legislation also resulted in bloodshed and escalating ill will between Americas Northern and Southern blocs. In 1855, when Kansans were called on to vote on whether to allow slavery, thousands of pro-slavery Missourians poured into Kansas to vote illegally. While the majority of the actual natives of Kansas were free-soilers opposed to slavery, the votes of the Missourians enabled slavery supporters to gain control of the territorial legislature. Furious free-soilers defiantly formed their own legislature and petitioned for admittance into the United States as a free state. Violence broke out between pro- and anti-slavery factions all along the Missouri-Kansas border, and the badly splintered nations spiral toward civil war accelerated. Congressmen took to arming themselves before attending sessions of Congress, and in May 1856 House member Preston Brooks, a Southerner, violently beat Republican Charles Sumner in the Senate chambers after the latter gave a speech that included a stinging rebuke of slaveholders (Sumner was unable to return to his job for three years). The ugly incident further inflamed passions between the two sides, as Southern papers hailed Brooks as a defender of Southern honor and Northern commentators castigated him as the inevitable product of a region made mean and corrupt by slavery. In 1857 the Supreme Courtwhich had a Southern majority at the timeruled that Congress had no power to limit slavery in the Western territories. This decision, known as the Dred Scott case in reference to the slave who brought the suit, also held that blackswhether free or enslaved-were inferior beings who could not hold U.S. citizenship, and ruled that slaves were the property of their owners no matter whether they had ever resided inThe Dred Scott decision further aggravated sectionalism and galvanized abolitionists, who felt that the decision might extend slavery. To the utter amazement of the abolitionists, wrote Alan Axelrod and Charles Phillips in What Every American Should Know about American History, the court had invoked the Bill of Rights in a ruling that denied freedom to a black slave. For the southern slave-owners, the decision implied that slavery was safeand according to the reading should be protectedeverywhere in the nation. In 1860, though, disagreement within the Democratic Party over slavery led to a formal split between the two wings. Northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas for the presidency of the United States, while John C. Breckenridge was the nominee of the Southerners. The Republicans, meanwhile, nominated the moderate Abraham Lincoln, who was able to secure the presidency by carrying the North. The South viewed Lincolns ascension to the highest position in the land as an unmitigated disaster. One Southern paper called his election the greatest evil ever to befall the country, and he was burned in effigy in town squares across the South. Of greater import, however, was the reaction of the South Carolina legislature: they called for a convention to discuss seceding from the Union. After years of negotiation and compromise, both sides sensed that confrontation was inevitable. Other issues were important factors in the Civil Warproperty rights, states rights, Southern disaffection with the might of the Northern industrial economybut slavery was the major issue, and the very nature of the institution precluded satisfactory compromise. As Lincoln once wrote to a Southern politician, You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina announced its secession from the United States. Other slave-holding states followed, citing the supremacy of states rights over federal law. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana all left the Union before Lincolns March 1861 inauguration. Texas followed suit as well, ignoring the words of Governor Sam Houston, who was removed from office for his efforts to keep the state in the Union:Let me tell you what is coming . Your fathers and husbands, your sons and brothers, will be herded at the point of the bayonet . I tell you that, while I believe with you in the doctrine of States Rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union. In February 1861 delegations from the seven seceding states met in Alabama and drafted a Confederate Constitution. Jefferson Davis was elected president of the new Confederate States of America. In the following monthsas the first blood of the American Civil War was shedVirginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina joined their fellow slave-holding states under the Confederate Flag. In April 1861 Confederate forces fired on a Union garrison at Fort Sumter, located in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. This attack is regarded as the opening engagement of the Civil War (or the War between the States, as it was known in the South). Lincoln responded with a naval blockade. Avenues of discussion seemed exhausted; the North would have to preserve the Union by force. The North did have some significant advantages. Omitting the deeply divided border states of Kentucky and Missouri, observed Robert Paul Jordan in The Civil War, five and a half million white Southerners faced a total white population of some twenty million. The Union boasted more than eight out of ten factories, more than 70 percent of railroad mileage, all the fighting ships, and most of the money. What the South did have was faith and a consummate will to fight: faith in its cause and the will that springs like a well of strength when ones homeland must be defended. The South also had General Robert E. Lee, a brilliant military strategist who outmaneuvered Union forces for much of the war. The Union Armys early bid to capture Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, was foiled by their defeat at Bull Run in July 1861, one of several early Confederate victories. Union forces returned to the same region a year later, only to be driven into retreat by Lee-led rebel forces in the Seven Days Battle. Seizing the momentum, Lee made a push for Maryland and Pennsylvania that was checked by Union General George B. McClellan in September 1862 (this clash featured a September 17 battle at Antietam Creek in Maryland that proved to be the single bloodiest day of the entire Civil War). That same month, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order which abolished slavery in the Confederacy (but not in slave states such as Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland, which had remained in the Union). By late 1862 and early 1863 it was clear that the conflict was going to be a long and bloody one. In December 1862 the Federalist forces of the North lost another big battle, this time at Fredericksburg, Virginia. In early May 1863, Lee guided the rebel army to yet another important victory in Virginia, at Chancellorsville, but he lost his best general, Thomas Stonewall Jackson, to friendly fire in the process. Further west, however, Union troops under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant sliced through the Deep South and assumed control of the Mississippi River in the Vicksburg Campaign. Grants triumph came in the same monthJuly 1863that the Confederate Army suffered a costly and demoralizing loss at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The Battle of Gettysburg decimated Lees forces, and the defeat marked a significant turn in the fortunes of the Confederacy. In March 1864 Lincoln appointed Grant to head all Union troops. The president had been bitterly disappointed with the unassertive performances of Grants predecessors, but Grant proved an implacable and effective leader. Relying on superior numbers, Grant and his generals systematically pushed their Confederate foes southward, and Lee and Grant engaged their armies at several memorable junctions. But while the Union army finally had the upper hand, Lincolns job was in jeopardy; Northern voters were weary of the bloodshed, and the Democrats had nominated George B. McClellan, the hero of Antietam, who vowed to end the war. In September 1864, however, the North learned that Union troops under the command of General WilliaBibliography: