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HIST101 Lecture Guide Part III
The Industrial Revolution--Manufacturing first centered in the Northeast.
Factories replaced home manufacturing and the putting-out (jobbing) system. New
York and other cities shifted from commerce to industry and developed corporate
organization with limited liability. Patents increased after 1830. Charles Goodyear
developed a process for vulcanizing rubber to make engine belts and other
products. In 1846, Elias Howe invented the sewing machine which by 1860 became
vital to clothing manufacture. In 1834, Cyrus McCormick invented the reaper, which
reduced the number of workers needed for harvesting wheat. In 1847, John Deere
invented the steel plough. Industrialization helped destroy the traditional masterjourneyman-apprentice system. Most northeast farmers either moved west (for
better soil and longer growing seasons) or switched to dairy farming.
Immigration-The 1830s brought 500,000 new migrants and millions more
came in the next few decades. Most newcomers came from Ireland. Why? Poverty,
lack of upward mobility, the potato famine of the 1840s, and political and religious
persecution were the main reasons. The Irish lived in slums, but the Germans
(including German Jews) often had some money to start a business or farm. They
tended to be middle class businessmen and women. The Nativist Movement began
in the 1850s. Hate campaigns against Catholics and non-Wasps became
commonplace, although the specter of slavery and the coming of the Civil War
eventually eclipsed this xenophobia.
Railroads began about 1830. Short lines connecting two towns came first.
Then Commodore Vanderbilt began to buy up land and short lines, tore up the old
tracks and standardized the gauge (the distance between the rails), and put the Erie
Canal out of business with his New York Central Railroad. This railroad and
connecting lines eventually linked Manhattan with Canada and Denver. In 1844,
Samuel F.B. Morse invented the telegraph. Alexander Graham Bell developed the
telephone by 1876. So, both transportation and communication became faster over
long distances.
The Reform Impulse: Public Schools, Abolitionism, Women’s Rights,
etc.--Idealism spawned a variety of reform and utopian movements. The
Jacksonians’ belief in the perfectability of the common man helped.
Transcendentalism began in the Boston area; its famous practitioners included poet
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Greenleaf Whittier and
others who advocated leaving the artificial city and going out to Walden pond or the
Maine Woods to contemplate nature and the “oversoul” (a form of God).
The Second Great Awakening featured Charles G. Finney and other
evangelists who challenged traditional Protestant theology by arguing that salvation
was by faith and good works. This spurred many liberal Protestants to become
abolitionists and school and women’s rights activists. In the 1820s and 1830s
western New York’s “Burnt Over District” produced a series of new religions that
included Mormonism and the Seventh Day Adventists.
In Massachusetts, Secretary of Education Horace Mann advocated free public
schools, higher teacher salaries, and upgraded curricula. Boston and New York
Catholics objected to Protestant teachers using the King James Version of the Bible
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in class, so they created parochial school systems in the 1840s. Across the U.S.,
African Americans went to separate schools except in Massachusetts.
Utopian societies also developed in the period 1820-1860. See the lecture
notes for Owenism, the Oneida Community and others. Prison reform, care of the
insane (Dorothea Dix), the anti-war movement, William Lloyd Garrison and the
abolitionist movement, Prohibition and women’s rights were also significant
movements. See the lecture notes for details.
The Age of Jackson, 1828-1840--Andrew Jackson was elected president in
1828 and again in 1832. He was a staunch Democrat, a slaveowner, and a strong
chief executive whose political manager was New York governor Martin Van Buren.
Here is a brief review of the nation’s major political parties (the Whigs arose to
oppose “King Andrew’s” policies). Jacksonian Democracy
The three Party Systems in American history were:
1. The Federalists vs. the Democratic-Republicans, 1790-1815. The Democrats
(who dropped the Republican name) have always existed from Thomas Jefferson to
FDR, JFK, Bill Clinton, Obama, etc.
2. Democrats vs. Whigs, 1830-1852. Almost all major politicians were Democrats
until 1830 when King Andrew Jackson inspired the Whig Party opposition. The
Whigs died out in the 1850s, split by the slavery controversy. The Democrats were
the party of slavery.
3. Democrats vs. Republicans, 1854- The Republican Party began around 1854 as
an anti-slavery party. John C. Fremont, Abraham Lincoln, etc. led it.
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Andrew Jackson's Policies (Champion the "Common Man"):
1. Nullification Crisis-As a strong president, he threatened to use troops if South
Carolina tried to nullify the Tariff of Abominations (the high tariff of 1828) or if
Senator (and former Vice President) John C. Calhoun pushed his theory of secession.
2. As a strict constructionist, Jackson vetoed the Maysville Road that would have
helped Whig Party leader and Sen. Henry Clay save land-locked Lexington, Kentucky
with a federally funded road to Maysville, Indiana on the Ohio River.
3. Jackson vetoed renewal of the Bank of the United States (BUS) (1791-1811; 18161836) for a third, twenty-year charter. This enraged its director Nicholas Biddle.
4. Jackson supported the Specie Circular to force purchasers (chiefly farmers) of
public land in the West to pay with "hard money" (specie--gold and silver dollars,
not paper money) or the notes of specie-paying banks.
5. Jackson ordered the Post Office to stop delivering abolitionist mail (censorship).
6. His party blocked the reading of abolitionist petitions in Congress or from having
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them entered into the Congressional Record.
7. Jackson forcibly removed the Cherokees from their century's- old home in Georgia
to west of the Mississippi.
8. He ordered military actions against 1. the Seminoles in Florida, 2. the Creeks
(whom he fought in 1817-1818) in Georgia and, Alabama, and 3. the Black Hawks
near Chicago.
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Jacksonians in state legislatures--Policies (ex. Gov. Martin Van Buren, D-N.Y.):
--liberalized the incorporation laws,
--made more political offices popularly elected
--gave male renters the vote
--reduced gerrymandering of districts,
--pushed free public schools
--liberalized the criminal code--reduce capital offenses
Martin Van Buren’s presidency was troubled by the Panic of 1837, which was
worsened by Jackson’s veto of the Third U.S. Bank. Lots of fly-by-night banks in the
South and west issued bank notes that were not well secured. Many banks and
businesses in this region went bankrupt.
Van Buren supported a ten-hour day for federal workers and the subtreasury plan to place U.S. tax revenues in small sub-treasury buildings rather than
in private sector banks.
The Whig Years--In the election of 1840, the Whigs’ William Henry Harrison
(Old Tippecanoe) (who ran with John Tyler) won the party’s presidential
nomination over Henry Clay. Harrison died after one month in office, and Tyler took
over. Tyler agreed to repeal Van Buren’s sub-treasury law, which pleased the banks
and Whigs. Tyler also raised the tariff and supported the Pre Emption Act of 1841 in
which squatters on land had the first right to buy 80-160 acres for $1.25 an acre. But
Tyler, reverting back to his old pro-farmer Democratic ideas, refused to re-charter
the U.S. Bank and also (like Andrew Jackson when he vetoed the Maysville Road)
vetoed a variety of internal improvements. Tyler supported states rights, turned on
the Whigs, and appointed South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun as Secretary of State.
In foreign policy under Van Buren and Tyler there were several significant
events. In the so-called “Caroline Affair,” Americans sent aid to French Canadian
rebels. The rebels had charted an American ship, the Caroline, to receive guns and
supplies on the U.S. side of the border in New York. One night a British Canadian
force snuck over to the US side and burned the ship, killing one American sailor on
board, and made no apologies for the action. While the “Caroline Affair” simmered,
the ”Aroostook War’ broke out in northern Maine when Canadian and U.S.
lumberjacks fought over where the border was. It was a local conflict but threatened
to escalate Anglo-American tensions further. Then in 1841, the British navy, looking
for illegal slave trade ships heading from Africa to U.S. ports, stopped the Creole,
which had been blown out to sea while transporting slaves from the East Coast to a
Gulf port. The British freed all the slaves and refused to provide compensation.
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Fortunately, the hostile regime in London lost power and a new
administration worked with Secretary of State Daniel Webster to improve AngloAmerican relations. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1942 gave the U..S. 60
percent of the disputed border land in Maine, set the U.S.-Canadian border all the
way to Idaho, and agreed that only U.S. naval ships would search suspicious U.S.
vessels coming from Africa.
The Mexican-American War an Manifest Destiny--The Texas Revolution
occurred in 1836 when American settlers in Northeastern Mexico refused to obey
Mexican President Santa Ana and, led by Sam Houston, won a war of independence.
Both Andrew Jackson and John Tyler tried to admit Texas as a state (or rather 3-5
states), but the anti-slave North blocked the treaty in Congress. Finally in 1845,
James Polk got Texas admitted as one state in a joint resolution of Congress, which,
unlike a treaty, did not require a 2/3rds vote just 51 percent.
Mexico was enraged and refused to sell California and the Southwest to Polk
after the president had earlier (illegally) sent explorers into the area (including John
C. Fremont) to map the region and helped American merchants in the San Francisco
Bay Area promote an independence movement in northern California. Santa Ana
rejected James Slidell’s $5 million offer for the New Mexico (including today’s
northern Arizona) Territory and $25 million for California provided Mexico agreed
to recognize the Rio Grande River as the international border rather than the
(farther north) Nueces. The Mexican American War of 1846-48 soon broke out. The
U.S., led by General Zachary Taylor, invaded Mexico from Texas while another force
eventually came down from California. See the lecture notes for details concerning
the war as well as the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the 1846 Oregon Treaty,
which gave the U.S. the Far West.
The Ferment in the 1850s--The conquest of the Far West was an early
cause of the Civil War. In 1846, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot proposed
(in a rider to an army appropriations bill) that there never be slavery in the Mexican
Cession, but twice the South blocked it in Congress. However, the issue caused bitter
and prolonged debate that raised sectional tensions. In 1848, Whig presidential
candidate Lewis Cass proposed “squatter sovereignty” as a solution—let the local
settlers decide the slavery issue in their particular territory. In 1848, Zachary Taylor
defeated Cass for president and later tried to admit California as a free state.
Congress was at an impasse. Henry Clay (the “Great Compromiser”) sought a
solution in an omnibus bill that failed twice in Congress. Finally, Illinois Senator
Stephen Douglas broke Clay’s omnibus bill into several little bills and got the socalled “Compromise of 1850) through Congress. The Compromise of 1850, along
with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Freeport Doctrine, Panic of 1857, “Bleeding
Kansas”, the Dred Scott decision, the Ostend Manifesto, the “caneing” of Senator
Sumner, John Brown’s Raid at Harper’s Ferry arsenal, and Lincoln’s election and
other causes of the Civil War are all covered in lecture notes as is the Gadsen
Purchase of southern Arizona as a thru route for a planned southern
transcontinental railroad.
The Civil War began on April 14, 1861, after the South fired on the U.S.
arsenal and troops at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. Historians have attributed the
war to several main causes: slavery, economics, constitutional breakdown,
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irrepressible conflict, a “blundering generation” of leaders, and failure of race
adjustment. See the lecture notes for details.
A Psycho-Cultural Approach to Slavery--Slavery Rural and Urban-The U.S.
and Britain abolished the African slave trade in 1808 and both navies enforced it by
intercepting slave ships on the Atlantic Ocean (witness the British seizing the
Creole). After 1808, old tobacco plantations in Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas,
where tobacco had exhausted the soil, began breeding slaves for sale in Alabama
and newer states farther west. Large plantations in places like Mississippi often had
200 slaves or more. By contrast, family farms in border states like Tennessee might
have only 8 or 9 slaves with the farm owner working in the fields with his slaves. On
big plantations, however, the planter stayed at home in his mansion and played lord
of the manor, letting his overseers (supervisors) manage the slaves and crop
production. Slave mothers taught their children how to get along with overseers. On
many plantations, laves had a pecking order. Those in the fields (the “pickers”) had
the worst jobs and slept in locked shacks at night. Those in the master’s house—the
butlers, cooks, gardeners, mammies, and concubines—had the best jobs.
Plantations fed, clothed, and housed their slaves and provided the least
medical care. Old, sick slaves were often sold off to a farmer for a low price. There
was much interracial violence at some plantations. Southern whites lived in
constant fear of slave revolts, but there were few major revolts (Nat Turner’s was
the largest). Some slaves were freed (manumitted) when the owner died. Freed
slaves then got jobs and often tried to buy the manumission of relatives form the
owners’ heirs. Urban slaves generally had a better life than their rural counterparts.
The alleys, streets and pony walls between townhouses in southern cities and the
slaves’ ability to visit freed slaves gave slaves more mobility and hope. “Hiring out”
and “living out” (explained in the lecture) also gave urban slaves more freedom,
because the boss on the job often gave them more freedom (to curry favor with
them and make his workers more productive) than their master (owner) would.
Southern corporations and even governments also owned slaves and gave them
much more freedom than a plantation owner or overseer would.
In many ways, John Blassingame’s book, The Slave Community, was written
to attack the interpretation of Stanley Elkins, who studied comparative slavery in
the U.S. Africa and Brazil to answer the question: Why didn’t more slave revolt? And,
was American slavery worse than Brazilian slavery? See the lecture notes for Elkins’
arguments and findings.
The Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861-1877--The South seceded from
the Union and the South’s representatives left Congress in the months after
Abraham Lincoln’s election as president. Once the South was gone, Republicans in
Congress passed several important laws. For example, the Homestead Act (1862)
gave 160 acres of land free to anyone who worked it for 5 years. The Morrill Act
gave federal land to any state that used the proceeds from its sale to build a land
grant college. This is how UNR, UC-Berkeley, the University of Arizona, and other
state universities began. The Morrill Tariff raised a high protective tariff to benefit
American industry and help pay for the war. For the key battles of the war and the
North’s advantages over the South, see the lecture notes.
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Reconstruction- Lincoln’s Plan began even before the war ended. An April
1862 law extended financial aid to any state (border states like Missouri and
Maryland that stayed in the Union) or District of Columbia slave owner that/who
gradually abolished slavery. In June 1862 another law abolished slavery in all U.S.
territories (like Nevada). In 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation
Proclamation that abolished slavery in the unconquered portions of the Confederacy
to encourage slave revolts. The 13the Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished
slavery effective December 18, 1865 in all parts of the United States. This occurred
eight months after Lincoln’s death.
Lincoln’s 10% plan- 1. If just 10 percent of those who voted in a seceded state
in the presidential election of 1860 took a loyalty oath to the U.S. Constitution, that
state could then schedule an election for delegates to a constitutional convention to
write a new constitution for that state (ending slavery) and it could return to the
Union. Major Confederate officials (including generals) could never again vote or
hold office. 3. A full pardon (from treason) and restoration of property would be
available for any former Confederate citizen of that state who took a loyalty oath to
the U.S. Constitution. But Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth and so his
Vice President, Democrat and former Tennessee governor Andrew Johnson, became
president. He proposed an even more lenient plan which specified no percentage to
schedule elections for delegates to a constitutional convention. To return to the
Union, states only had to repudiate, slavery, secession and their war debts to Britain
and other foreign powers/creditors. A year later, many of the major Confederate
officials were back in power and trying to enter Congress. Most southern states had
passed “Black Codes’ to restrict the civil rights of freed slaves, virtually voiding a
major northern reason for fighting the war. As a result, the Republican Party in
Congress voted to end Johnson’s Plan and enact the Radical Plan of Reconstruction
which: 1. Declared that only Tennessee (which came back into the Union under
Lincoln’s Plan) was a legal government 2. Divided the South into five military
districts, each ruled by a Governor General (essentially imposing martial law on the
South). 3. Required that voter registrars must take an “ironclad oath” that they
never aided the rebellion. Carpetbaggers began moving from the North to the South,
as they, freed slaves and Scalawags began ruling the former white Confederates in
the South (who quickly transformed an old social club, the Ku Klux Klan, into a
terrorist organization designed to thwart radical Reconstruction). To make sure
President Johnson did not appoint former Confederates to his cabinet (especially as
head of the War Department) or as Army generals and navy admirals (esp. men like
Robert E. Lee), Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act and Command of the Army
Act. When Johnson tried to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the Republicans
impeached Johnson in the House, although the Senate failed to convict him by one
vote, and so he finished his term in office as a lame duck president. See the lecture
notes for details.
So, Radical Reconstruction was the plan under which most southern states
returned to the Union. Ulysses S. Grant was elected president in 1868 and remained
in until 1877. Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act to indict thousands of terrorists and
he helped push through the 14th and 15th amendments that theoretically gave
African Americans their civil rights and black males the right to vote. The
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Reconstruction process continued until 1877 when the South finally ended the
disputed presidential election of 1876 by voting for Rutherford B. Hayes over
Democrat Samuel Tilden. Hayes agreed to end Reconstruction and provide federal
aid to southern states.