Era%20of%20Reforms%20Antebellum%20Society

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Era of Reforms Antebellum Society

• Period 4/5
• AP United States History

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Regional Specialization

• NORTH
• Industrialization
• Urbanization
• Immigration
• Reform Movements

• WEST
• Nations Breadbasket
• Fur traders
• Cattle ranching
• Mining

• SOUTH
• King Cotton
• Plantation system
• Upper South
• Deep South
• Peculiar Institution

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The SouthKing Cotton
Year Exported Cotton (lbs) Export Value of Exports
1800 17,789,803 5,000,000 7
1810 93,261,462 15,108,000 22
1820 127,860,152 22,308,667 32
1830 298,459,102 29,674,883 41
1840 743,941,061 63,870,307 51
1850 635,381,604 71,984,616 49
1860 1,767,686,338 191,806,555 57
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The SouthWhite Society

• Planter Class
• 20 or more slaves
• 0.6 of Southern population
• Small Slave owners
• 88 of slave owners strived to be Planters
• Usually worked in fields with slaves
• Professionals
• Lawyers, doctors, clergy, writers
• Depended on planter class
• Yeoman Farmers
• Backbone of Southern society
• Independent, self-sufficient, local commercial
  market
• Poor Whites
• 10 of population
• Pine barrens, pastoral farming
• Perceived as lazy and uneducated

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Slave Life
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Slave Population of the South (1860)

• South Carolina - 57
• Mississippi - 55
• Louisiana - 47
• Alabama - 45
• Florida - 45
• Georgia - 44
• North Carolina - 33
• Virginia - 31

• Texas - 30
• Arkansas - 26
• Tennessee - 25
• Kentucky - 20
• Maryland - 13
• Missouri - 10
• Delaware - 1.5

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Abolitionism and Antislavery Reforms

• Slavery considered a sin (religious) and a
  violation of natural rights (ideological)
• American Colonization Society (1816)
• Founded by Quakers, abolitionists, former Upper
  South slave owners, Henry Clay, James Monroe
• Colony in Liberia (1821-1822)
• William Lloyd Garrison and the American
  Antislavery Society (1833-1870)
• The Liberator
• Absolute emancipation with no compensation for
  owners
• Pacifism and womens rights endorsement loses
  support
• Frederick Douglass
• Former slave who promoted political and direct
  actions
• The North Star

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Slave Revolts

• Nat Turner
• Inspired by rhetoric for direct action and
  resistance
• Revolt in Virginia in 1831 led to 55 white deaths
• Whites retaliated with brutality and quashed
  anti-slavery discussions in the South
• La Amistad Case (1839-1941)
• African slaves rebel on Spanish ship
• John Q. Adams argues their case to Supreme Court
  and helps earn their freedom
• Inspires abolitionism in northern states

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Free and Slave States (1789-1861)
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Cult of Domesticity

• Separate Spheres
• Public sphere men
• Private sphere women their proper sphere
• Cult of True Womanhood
• Piety
• Purity
• Submissiveness
• Domesticity

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Womens Rights Movement

• Letter on the Condition of Women and the Equality
  of the Sexes - Sarah Grimke, 1837
• Genders are equal in standing
• Men have kept women in inferior positions
• Women capable of same skills as men
• Seneca Falls Convention (1848)
• Declaration of Sentiments
• Led to rise of Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady
  Stanton and Susan B. Anthony

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Seneca Falls Declaration

• We hold these truth to be self-evident that all
  men and women are created equal
• establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.
• He has never permitted her to exercise her
  inalienable right to the elective
  franchisethereby leaving her without
  representationhe has oppressed her on all
  sides.
• He has withheld from her rights which are given
  to the most ignorant and degraded men both
  natives and foreigners.
• He has made her, if married, in the eye of the
  law, civilly dead.
• He has taken from her all right in property,
  even to the wages she earns.
• He has made her, morally, an irresponsible
  being, as she can commit many crimes with
  impunity, provided they be done in the presence
  of her husbandcompelled to promise obediencehe
  becoming to all intents and purposes, her
  master
• He has monopolized nearly all profitable
  employmentsas a teacher of theology, medicine,
  or law, she is not known.
• He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a
  thorough education
• He allows her in Church, as well as State, but a
  subordinate position, claiming Apostolic
  authority for her exclusion from the ministry
• He has created a false public sentiment by
  giving to the world a different code of morals
  for men and women
• He has endeavored, in every way that he could,
  to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to
  lessen her self-respect and to make her willing
  to lead a dependent and abject life.
• Resolved, That the speedy success of our cause
  upon the zealous and untiring efforts of both men
  and women, for the overthrow of the monopoly of
  the pulpit, and for the securing to women an
  equal participation with men in various trades,
  professions, and commerce.
• Resolved, therefore, That, being invested by the
  Creator with the same capabilities, and the same
  consciousness of responsibility for their
  exercise, it is demonstrably the right and duty
  of woman, equally with man, to promote every
  righteous cause by every righteous means

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Immigration

• Irish
• Irish Potato Famine (1840s)
• Mostly settled in northeastern urban centers
• Germans
• Mostly settled in northern states west of the
  Appalachians
• Mexican-American War by 1849
• California Gold Rush 1849-1850
• Democratic Party
• Nativists
• Anti-immigrants, anti-Catholic
• Know-Nothing Party

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Antebellum Expansion
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Fundamental Questions

• American expansionism became a cause of sectional
  tension and conflict.
• The national political system may have
  contributed to the cause of the Civil War.

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Manifest Destiny

• Believed it was our God-given right to expand
  from coast to coast
• Away, away with these cobweb tissues of the
  rights of discovery, exploration, settlement,
  The American claim is by the right of our
  manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the
  whole of the continent which Providence has given
  us for the development of the great experiment of
  liberty
• - John L. Sullivan, Democratic Review, 1845

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American Progress
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Overland Trails
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Result of Manifest Destiny
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Texas Revolution

• American settlement
• Fueled by Manifest Destiny
• Encouraged by Mexican government
• Texas Revolution (1836)
• Santa Annas policies
• The Alamo (Feb-Mar 1836)
• Battle of San Jacinto (Apr 21, 1836)

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Taney Court

• Chief Justice Roger Taney
• Appointed by Andrew Jackson
• Slave owner
• Ideology
• States rights
• Limited government
• Major Cases
• Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837)
• Scott v. Sandford (1857)

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Election of 1840

• William Henry Harrison (W)
• Tippecanoe and Tyler Too
• Log Cabin and Hard Cider
• Martin Van Buren (D)
• Suffers from Panic of 1837

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Sectionalist PresidentsWilliam Henry Harrison
(W) (1841)

• Campaign
• A war hero and hero of the common man
• Reality
• Wealthy plantation and slave owner
• Administration
• Intended to re-establish and promote American
  System policies
• Lasts one month after contracting pneumonia
• John Tyler assumes presidency

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Sectionalist PresidentsJohn Tyler (W) (1841-1845)

• His Accidency
• Assumes full presidential powers
• A Democrat in Whig Clothing
• Slave owner from Virginia
• Rejects American System policies
• Passionately pursues Texas annexation
• Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1842)
• Settles boundary disputes with Great Britain

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Election of 1844

• James K. Polk (D)
• Darkhorse candidate
• Expansion platform
• Henry Clay (W)
• Avoided direct expansionist rhetoric

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Sectionalist PresidentsJames K. Polk (D)
(1845-1849)

• Jacksonian Democrat, slave owner, and ardent
  expansionist
• Agenda
• Independent national treasury
• Lower tariffs
• Oregon
• California
• Oregon
• 54 40 or Fight!
• 49th Parallel
• Mexican-American War (1848)
• Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo
• Mexican Cession

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Oregon Country
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Mexican-American War (1846-1848)

• Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)
• Rio Grande as Texas border
• Mexican Cession
• 15 million and assumption of claims against
  Mexico
• Wilmot Proviso
• Prohibit slavery in Mexican Cession lands
• Failed to pass Senate

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Election of 1848

• Zachary Taylor (W)
• Slave owner
• War hero
• Lewis Cass (D)
• Martin van Buren (FSP)

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California Gold Rush

• Massive migration to California
• Forty-Niners
• San Francisco
• 5,000 in 1848
• 25,000 in 1850

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Compromise of 1850

• Parameters
• Admit California as free state
• Mexican Cession
• Popular sovereignty
• Reinforced Fugitive Slave Law
• Texas boundary and debt disputes
• Slave trade abolished in D.C.
• I trust we shall persist in our resistance to
  the admission of California until the
  restoration of all our rights, or disunion, one
  or the other is the consequence. We have borne
  the wrongs and insults of the North long enough.
  - John C. Calhoun

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Fugitive Slave Law

• Enforcement of capturing and returning escaped
  slaves
• Slaves flee to Canada
• Right to trial by jury denied
• Special Commission
• 10 for those finding for slaveholder
• 5 for those finding for fugitive

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Underground Railroad

• Mostly run by free blacks and fugitive slaves
• Harriet Tubman
• Abolitionists and white supporters
• Few white families in South assisted
• Slave catchers knowledge

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Uncle Toms Cabin (1852)

• Harriet Beacher Stowe
• Bestselling novel
• Fuels abolitionist guilt and rhetoric in Northern
  free states

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Slavery and Literature

• Anti-Slavery Arguments

• Pro-Slavery Arguments

• Uncle Toms Cabin
• Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Moral and emotional argument against slavery

• Sociology for the South (1854)
• George Fitzhugh
• Capitalism and liberalism virtually enslaved the
  lower classes
• Cannibals All! (1857)
• George Fitzhugh
• "the unrestricted exploitation of so-called free
  society is more oppressive to the laborer than
  domestic slavery."

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Sectionalist PresidentsZachary Taylor (W)
(1849-1850)

• War hero of Mexican-American War
• States rights, but no secession
• Views on Slavery
• Slave owner
• No expansion of slavery
• Refused to sign Compromise of 1850
• Died after a year in office

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Sectionalist PresidentsMillard Fillmore (W)
(1850-1853)

• Assumes the presidency after Taylors death
• Anti-slave moderate
• Signs Compromise of 1850
• Perry Expedition to Japan (1853-1854)

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The Death of Compromising?

• The Great Triumvirate was no more by 1852
• A new generation of sectional and ambitious
  politicians assume leadership roles

Stephen Douglas (D)
William Seward (W, R)
Jefferson Davis (D)
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Election of 1852

• Franklin Pierce (D)
• Doughface
• Winfield Scott (W)

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Sectionalist PresidentsFranklin Pierce (D)
(1853-1857)

• Jackson Democrat from New Hampshire
• Doughface (Northerners who favored the Southern
  position in political disputes)
• Supported Compromise of 1850
• Gadsden Purchase
• Ostend Manifesto (1854)
• Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)

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Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)

• Stephen Douglas and Chicago
• Parameters
• Separate Nebraska Territory into Nebraska and
  Kansas
• Each territory voted for slavery based on popular
  sovereignty
• Impact
• Douglas won his railroad and Southern support
• Virtually repealed the Missouri Compromise
• Ended the Whig Party and Second Party System

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Bleeding Kansas (1854-1861)

• Kansas Territory settled by two groups
• Free-Soilers
• Border Ruffians
• A virtual civil war between anti-slave and
  pro-slave local governments
• Pierce and federal government barely addressed
  the issue

A Tragic Prelude, John Steuart Curry, 1937
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Brooks-Sumner IncidentMay 22, 1856

• Senator Charles Sumner (R) (MA)
• Crime Against Kansas Speech
• Rep. Preston Brooks (D) (SC)
• Becomes a Southern hero

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The Republican Party

• Makeup
• Disillusioned Northern Democrats
• Frustrated Conscience Whigs
• Free Soil Party members
• Platform
• Increasingly against expansion of slavery
• Protective tariffs
• Homestead Act/sale of federal lands
• Funding for transcontinental railroad

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Scott v. Sandford (1857)

• Pro-slave Chief Justice Roger B. Taney rules that
  Africans are not citizens and cant sue
• Slaves have no rights (merely property)
• Congress cannot prohibit slavery in territories
  (thus the Missouri Compromise was determined to
  be unconstitutional)
• Decision inflamed abolitionists and many
  Northerners, while lifting the hopes of
  pro-slavery forces
• Tensions increase even more
• 14th Amendment (1868) declares blacks to be
  citizens, thus overcoming Dred Scott

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Election of 1856

• James Buchanan (D)
• Doughface
• John Fremont (R)
• Election results establish Republican Party as
  legitimate national party
• Millard Fillmore (KNP)

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Sectionalist PresidentsJames Buchanan (D)
(1857-1861)

• Doughface
• Supported Kansas-Nebraska Act
• Involved himself in Dred Scott decision

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Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1858)

• Freeport Doctrine
• Dred Scott decision and popular sovereignty

• A house divided against itself cannot stand. I
  believe this government cannot endure,
  permanently half slave and half free.

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John Brown and Harpers Ferry (1859)

• "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the
  crimes of this guilty land will never be purged
  away but with blood. I had, as I now think,
  vainly flattered myself that without very much
  bloodshed it might be done."

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Election of 1860

• Abraham Lincoln (R)
• Stephen Douglas (D)
• Northern Democrats
• John Breckinridge (D)
• Southern Democrats
• John Bell (CU)
• Coalition of Cotton Whigs and Know-Nothing

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Union vs. Confederacy
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Free and Slave States (1789-1861)