Download FROM INDEPENDENCE TO CIVIL WAR

FROM INDEPENDENCE TO CIVIL WAR.
Although the British had tried to colonize America twice in 1580, they only succeeded in 1607 when a
group of English men founded Jamestown.
People, nevertheless, think about the English Puritans, the Pilgrim Fathers, as the first settlers. They
traveled in the Mayflower and founded Plymouth near Boston in 1620.
The early settlers were highly religious, hardworking, serious people, and wanted to escape the
oppression they had suffered in England. All of them regarded the idea of going to America as a way of
building up their ideas.
From the very beginning there are two different settlements in North America: the settlement in New
England and the one that took place around Virginia.
The motives of the colonists who settled in the southern colonies were mainly economic. They desired
to develop an important trade and to earn a better livelihood. Tobacco and cotton was the base of their
economy whose labor was fulfilled by African slaves. The class distinctions were very strong, its social
structure was even more rigid than in England and the Church had very little influence.
The settlement of New England, however, was completely different in character from the one that took
place around Virginia. The pilgrims who settled in New England did not come for material betterment only; it
was not a mercantile colony, like the South, but a religious one. The ideals were of individualism and
egalitarism. The dominant group of New England settlers were Puritans, who followed essentially the theology
of John Calvin and sought the complete removal of all church ritual that had overtones of Roman Catholicism.
American Revolution (1775-1783)
It has been called American Revolution the conflict between Britain and thirteen of its colonies on the
Atlantic coast of North America. During the course of the Revolution, these colonies declared their
independence from the mother country and concluded and alliance with France.
Basically the thirteen colonies were of three different types: Royal colonies, under the direct control of the
Crown, Proprietary colonies, under the control of proprietors to whom the king granted land and political
authority, and Corporate colonies, founded by various groups in conjunction with trading companies to which
the king granted a charter.
During all 17th and 18th century the crown pursued a sporadic policy of royalization and centralization. But
this increase in direct crown control was paralleled by the development and rise to power of the elected
representatives of the colonists. The 18th century centers largely on the struggle for power between royal
authority represented by royal governors and the elected representatives. From the British point of view King
and Parliament wielded the same powers in America that they did in London. The colonial elective bodies
functioned because they were permitted to do so. Americans, on the other hand, considered their elective
assemblies to be, in essence, little parliaments, the supreme legislative power in domestic matters for the
colonies. The tendency of their political thought was towards a conception of the empire as a federation with
one king and many parliaments.
No centralized, competent body, vested with sufficient authority to make and enforce colonial policy,
existed prior to the French and Indian War (1754-1763). This conflict was the culmination of a long struggle
between England and France for hegemony in the New World. England emerged victorious, but with a heavy
national debt and the immensely difficult prospect of administering vast territorial additions to the empire. After
the war, England could reform and enforce her neglected colonial system; but the colonies, fearing the French
no longer, felt less dependent on the mother country. The colonies had passed the point where they would
submit to an increase in subordination to king and Parliament. When England, after 1763, attempted to reform
and tighten the machinery for administration and enforcement, the colonists stoutly resisted. The colonists
accepted parliamentary taxation that had the purpose of regulation trade. But Parliament had never taxed the
colonies for revenue. There were three important crisis: Stamp Act (1765), Towshend Laws (1767) and Tea
Taxes (1773). Finally Americans decided to vote their Constitution and become a new country.
From Independence to Civil War
1
America before the Civil War. Divisive forces and other issues.
Cultural differences between North and South.
While in the North the society was formed by an increasing middle-class self made, independent man,
in the South the economy was based on the system of plantations , where a few families owned all the land
and needed slaves to make that land productive. There was almost no industry but the growing of cotton.
They were proud to be free of the ‘factor system’; the Industrial revolution in the North had cause a lot of
hardship on the workers, and the South claimed that their slaves were better treated. However, the South
depended on the North for many products.
In 1820. 6 million whites, 500.000 slave-dealers. Most families owned at least 50 black workers.
New territories in the West.
Westward expansion accentuated sectional differences. Territories were sources of future power, and
both Northern and Southern states were eager to secure allies. The existence or nonexistence of Negro
slavery determined whether a territory would be oriented toward the South or the North, and Congress
determined the status of slavery in a territory. New problems aroused with the treaty of Guadeloupe-Hidalgo
when thousands of kilometers were incorporated to the Union.
* 1790. Population 4 million. 500.000 black slaves.
* 1820. Population USA = 10 millions.
* 1846-1860 Immigration from Europe (escaping political conflicts) , settling mainly in the Atlantic, but also in
the Pacific (Chinese immigration).
* 1860 Population USA = 32 millions. 1 in 8 was an immigrant. 4.5 millions were black.
* In the 50 years after the Independence, the 13 Colonial States had doubled. The Republic extended beyond
the Mississippi.
Economic Issues
Anxious for easy credit, the South and the West united in opposition to the Second Bank of the United
States (a powerful, privately controlled institution dominating the nation’s banking industry), while the
Northeast tended to support it.
Because it consumed rather than produced manufactured goods, the South opposed the protective
tariff, while the industrial Northeast supported it, as did many Westerners who concluded that the tariff would
promote home markets for agricultural produce and would finance internal improvements.
The impact of cotton culture on the South and industrialization on the North widened the gulf between
the two sections. In 1793, the invention of gin produced from cotton seeds produced a tremendous boom of
cotton production. Cotton did not require elaborate tools and techniques. The multiplying cotton production
demanded more land and more slaves, and differentiated Southern society from the rest of American society.
The South was determined to keep its slaves. As the spread of cotton culture made slavery more profitable,
and intense opposition to protective tariffs and resentment over Northern attacks on slavery grew, embattled
Southerners became increasingly sectional.
More diversified economically, the North was not so conscious of sectional differences as the South.
The new railway, a system of channels,...granted the North economic autonomy. Many products came from
the West and not the South. Despite the expansion and prosperity of agriculture and commerce in the North,
political power was shifting from agrarians and merchants to factory owners (industrialization).
Humanitarian reformers, already critical of defects in Northern industrialized society, found Southern
Negro slavery intolerable. Despite their small numbers, abolitionists did arouse antislavery sentiment and
helped to make slavery a political issue and to organize an antislavery bloc in Congress.
From Independence to Civil War
2
Compromise and contention.
Making slavery a political issue meant taking steps toward both extinction and disruption of the Union.
Neither Whigs nor Democrats wished to take a stand on slavery; but after the acquisition of the Southwest
from Mexico, Congress had to decide whether to introduce or to prohibit slavery in that territory. In 1820 the
Missouri Compromise was attained. Missouri was the tenth state to join the Union since 1789 (President:
George Washington). Four states were already abolitionist States: Vermont, Ohio, Indiana e Illinois. Five were
anti-abolitionist: Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Missouri joined as antiabolitionist. The South began to worry. Conflict was delayed because the state of Maine joined as abolitionist.
In The Missouri Compromise established also that no new anti-abolitionist states could be created in its
neighborhood. Higher immigration in the North promised the creation of new abolitionist states there. The
South decided to break the Union as soon as South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi,
Louisiana and Texas (which was abolitionist) joined in. Once Lincoln was elected the South seceded and
established the Confederate States of America- The Civil War began when the Confederates fired on Fort
Sumter in April 1861.
American Civil War (1860-1865)
A tremendous advantage in manpower –there was a steady flow of immigrants-, the North’s economic
superiority was almost incalculable. The North also possessed 81% of the country’s bank deposits. The
Northern economy expanded with the demands of war. Although the war began during a business depression,
high tariffs cutting off imports from abroad and huge government expenditures, created a boom by 1862 that
continued for the duration of the war.
The South had been vastly affected by the war; there was a widespread destruction of property, a
collapse of the labor system, and the fall of the social régime founded on Negro slavery. Nevertheless the
North was equally affected. Two millions of men, the Unionist army, had to be fed, clothed and armed. But the
farms and the mills and the great transportation systems had been drained of laborers to supply men for the
regiments. The wheat fields had no harvesters; the Mississippi had been closed by the war, and the railroads
were insufficient to handle the burden. The grappling with this mighty problem wrought a chance in the North
that was a revolution in itself. The lack of laborers called for machinery, and the reaper and the mowing
machine for the first time sprang into widespread use; great meat-packing houses arouse to meet the new
conditions; the strain upon the railroads brought increased energy and efficiency and capital to bear upon the
problem of transportation, and it was swiftly solved.
The Civil War had shaken America into eager, restless life. Mark Twain, who was a part of it all, could
say in later days: ‘The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 uprooted institutions that were centuries old,
changed the politics of people, transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon
the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations’.
From Independence to Civil War
3