Sectional Conflict: Regional Differences in two minutes
- Cotton and slavery grew together: the enslaved population rose from under 700,000 in 1790 to nearly four million by 1860, and in 1858 Senator James Henry Hammond declared that cotton was king.
- Defenders called slavery a positive good, as Calhoun did. George Fitzhugh and Hammond argued that Northern wage workers were no better off than slaves, and others used racial pseudoscience.
- The North ran on wage labor, factories and railroads that tied Midwestern farms to New York. Free-soilers argued that free labor needed free land, and Lincoln defended free labor in 1859.
- Irish fleeing the potato famine that began in 1845 and Germans, some of them refugees of the failed 1848 revolutions, settled mostly in the North. In 1854 alone, 427,833 immigrants arrived.
- Nativists feared Catholics and newcomers. Riots shook Philadelphia in 1844, and the Know-Nothing American Party swept Massachusetts in 1854 but split over slavery by 1856.
- Abolitionists disagreed: Garrison burned the Constitution in 1854 while Douglass defended it. The Underground Railroad aided escapes, and Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) sold about 300,000 copies in its first year.
- On the exam: expect comparison of North and South and sources by Douglass, Hammond or Fitzhugh. Tie economic and cultural differences to the fight over slavery in the West.
Topic 5.5 key terms
- Gradual emancipation
Freeing enslaved people in stages, not all at once. New York's 1799 law freed children born to enslaved mothers after July 4, 1799 once they reached 25 (girls) or 28 (boys). A 1817 law freed everyone else still enslaved in the state on July 4, 1827.
- Abolitionist
Someone who worked to end slavery everywhere in the United States, not just to stop its spread. In the 1850s abolitionists were a small, loud minority in the North.
- Sectionalism
Putting your own region's interests ahead of the whole country's. By the 1850s, Northerners and Southerners disagreed about slavery, labor and the economy, and trusted each other less every year.
- Cotton Kingdom
The Southern states that grew most of the world's cotton with enslaved labor. In 1860 raw cotton was more than half of all U.S. exports by value.
- Commission merchant
A middleman who sold a planter's cotton for a fee and often lent him money against the crop. Many worked out of New York.
- Secession
A state's withdrawal from the Union. South Carolina left on December 20, 1860; six more Southern states followed by February 1861.
- Remittance
Money an immigrant sent home to family. McCarthy's $20 was 'four Pounds' in Ireland, real help for a family in Cork.
- Tammany Hall
New York City's Democratic Party organization. Irish immigrants traded votes for jobs and help, and by the 1850s they had real power inside it.
- Forty-Eighters
German liberals and radicals who fled after the failed revolutions of 1848–49. Many became editors and teachers, and later antislavery Republicans.
- Kleindeutschland
'Little Germany,' New York's German neighborhood on the Lower East Side, one of the first big foreign-language neighborhoods in an American city.
- Nativism
Hostility to immigrants, and the effort to limit their political power and cultural influence. In the 1840s and 1850s it was aimed above all at Irish and German Catholics.
- Know-Nothing (American) Party
A nativist party of the mid-1850s, grown from a secret order. It wanted a 21-year wait for citizenship and only native-born men in office. It won big in 1854–55, then split over slavery.
- Personal liberty laws
State laws meant to shield accused fugitives and free Black residents from seizure under the Fugitive Slave Act, for example by guaranteeing jury trials or barring state officials from helping slave catchers.
- Garrisonians
Followers of William Lloyd Garrison. They called the Constitution a proslavery bargain, refused to vote or hold office under it, and trusted moral persuasion over politics.
- Abolitionists
Americans who demanded an end to slavery, many of them immediately. A small minority even in the North, they made themselves heard with newspapers, petitions and lecture tours.
- Fugitive Slave Act (1850)
A federal law requiring even free states to help return people who had escaped slavery. Accused people got no jury trial, and anyone who helped them faced fines and jail.
- Underground Railroad
A loose network of free Black communities, people who had escaped slavery, and white allies who hid and guided freedom seekers north. Most had already escaped on their own.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery novel, first printed weekly in the National Era and published as a book on March 20, 1852. It turned the moral case against slavery into a story millions of Northerners read, and it hardened Southern anger at abolitionists.
- Anti-Tom literature
Roughly two dozen novels of the 1850s written to answer Stowe. They showed slavery as kindly and orderly, enslaved people as content, and abolitionists as meddlers or liars. Mary Eastman's Aunt Phillis's Cabin (1852) was among the best sellers.
- HIPP (sourcing)
Four questions to ask of any source: Historical situation, Intended audience, Purpose, Point of view. Together they explain why a source says what it says, and how far to trust it.
- King Cotton
The Southern belief that the world's need for cotton made the South too important to be challenged, economically or militarily.
- Mudsill theory
Hammond's 1858 claim that every society rests on a laboring class at the bottom, like the sill a house sits on. In the South it was enslaved Black people; in the North, he said, wage workers.
- Racial doctrines
Pseudo-scientific claims that races were separate and unequal, used to defend slavery: Cartwright's 'drapetomania' (1851), Nott and Gliddon's Types of Mankind (1854).
- Positive good
The argument, made famous by John C. Calhoun in 1837, that slavery wasn't a necessary evil but a benefit to enslaved people and to society.
- States' rights
The claim that states, not the federal government, held final power over matters such as slavery. Southern leaders used it to argue that Congress couldn't touch slavery in the states, or keep it out of the territories.
- Free labor
The Northern belief that wage work was a stage, not a permanent condition: a worker could save, buy land or tools, and become independent. Slavery, free-labor men said, degraded all work and closed that road.
- Free-soil movement
Northerners who opposed slavery's expansion into the western territories, mostly to protect free white labor. Many didn't object to slavery where it already existed, and many supported laws keeping Black people out.
- Cotton Whigs
Wealthy Massachusetts Whigs, mostly textile-mill owners and merchants, whose business depended on Southern cotton. Their critics, the Conscience Whigs, said they put profit ahead of opposing slavery's spread.
- Free Soil Party
A third party formed in 1848 by antislavery Whigs, Democrats and abolitionists. It opposed slavery's expansion into the territories and carried the slogan "Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men." Many of its members later became Republicans.
- Kansas–Nebraska Act (1854)
The law that created two new territories and let their settlers decide about slavery. It repealed the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery north of 36°30′.
- Popular sovereignty
The idea that a territory's settlers, not Congress, should decide whether to allow slavery there. The Kansas–Nebraska Act applied it.
- Missouri Compromise (1820)
Congress's 1820 deal: Missouri joined as a slave state, Maine as a free one, and slavery was banned in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36°30′.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
The Fifth
1852
Key terms: Gradual emancipation, Abolitionist, Sectionalism
JULY 5 · 1852
In Rochester, New York, the posters promised a Fourth of July oration. The speaker gave it on Monday, the fifth.
The Fourth fell on a Sunday that year. Rochester already had a reason to remember the fifth. On July 5, 1827, Rochester's Black community had gathered to celebrate the end of slavery in New York.
Five or six hundred people paid twelve and a half cents each to hear Frederick Douglass. Nearly fourteen years earlier, he had escaped from slavery in Maryland.
Frederick Douglass
What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?
Frederick Douglass
This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.
Frederick Douglass
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?
Frederick Douglass
I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.
In the 1850s, the North and the South looked like two countries. They were tied together more tightly than either side liked to admit. And they were pulling apart.
South Street
1855 (and 1861)
Key terms: Cotton Kingdom, Commission merchant, Secession
New York, spring 1855. On South Street, ships' bowsprits reach right across the road. No port in the country handled more goods.
Two ships have just tied up at neighboring piers. One came from Liverpool. One came from New Orleans.
Cotton came in from New Orleans and went out to Liverpool on the packets that had brought emigrants.
New York's merchants and banks lent planters money against the next crop, then shipped and insured the bales.
In January 1861, with South Carolina already out of the Union, New York's mayor had an idea.
Fernando Wood
As a free city, with but nominal duty on imports, her local Government could be supported without taxation upon her people.
Fernando Wood
In this she would have the whole and united support of the Southern States…
A Northern mayor had said out loud what cotton was worth to his city.
The Newcomers
1845–1855
Key terms: Remittance, Tammany Hall, Forty-Eighters, Kleindeutschland
In September 1845, a blight began rotting Ireland's potatoes in the ground.
For the poorest families, potatoes were almost all they ate. About a million people died.
Frederick Douglass was lecturing in Ireland that autumn.
Frederick Douglass
…I know the cause of humanity is one the world over.
About two million people left Ireland in ten years, most of them for America.
Margaret McCarthy wrote home from New York in 1850. She sent twenty dollars with the letter.
Margaret McCarthy
…Come to this plentiful Country where no man or woman ever Hungered or ever will…
Margaret McCarthy
…there are Dangers upon Dangers Attending comeing here…
Most of the Irish stayed where they landed: poor, Catholic, and taking the hardest jobs.
They built parishes, some with services in Irish. By the 1850s, Irish voters were a power in New York's Tammany Hall.
In the 1850s almost as many Germans came: farmers, craftsmen, and some Forty-Eighters, refugees from the failed 1848 revolutions.
By 1855, only Berlin and Vienna had more German speakers than New York. Its Kleindeutschland had churches, newspapers, singing clubs and lager beer.
Together, the Irish and Germans made up about seven in ten immigrants.
About twenty thousand Chinese reached California in 1852 alone. In San Francisco they built temples to Tin How, goddess of the sea.
In 1854 alone, 427,833 immigrants arrived. Most of them settled in the North.
I Know Nothing
1844–1856
Key terms: Nativism, Know-Nothing (American) Party, Personal liberty laws
Many native-born Protestants blamed newcomers for low wages, crowded slums and crooked city politics. Some of that had a basis.
Others feared that Catholics took orders from the Pope. That part was fantasy.
In 1844, Philadelphia rioted over which Bible Catholic children could read in school. Mobs burned two churches in May.
On July 5, the day after a nativist parade, a crowd surrounded a third church. Militia and rioters fired cannon at each other.
More than twenty people died in the two riots.
Nativists organized a secret society, the Order of the Star Spangled Banner. Asked about it, members answered, 'I know nothing.'
So everyone called them the Know-Nothings.
Their American Party wanted immigrants to wait twenty-one years for citizenship. Its slogan:
Americans must rule America.
In 1854 they swept Massachusetts: the governor, every state senator and nearly every representative.
That same legislature banned segregated schools and defied the Fugitive Slave Act. In the North, nativism and antislavery often traveled together.
In 1854, someone stole the marble block the Pope sent for the Washington Monument. Nativists got the blame.
Know-Nothings soon took over the monument's society. Work stalled for more than twenty years. You can still see the line.
A California jury convicted George Hall of murdering a Chinese miner, Ling Sing. In 1854 the state Supreme Court threw out the verdict.
Hugh C. Murray
The same rule which would admit them to testify, would admit them to all the equal rights of citizenship,
Hugh C. Murray
and we might soon see them at the polls, in the jury box…
Chinese witnesses could not testify against a white man. Hall went free.
In 1856 the Know-Nothings ran Millard Fillmore for president and carried one state. By then they had split over slavery.
A Light in the Window
1843–1856
Key terms: Garrisonians, Abolitionists, Fugitive Slave Act (1850), Underground Railroad
On July 4, 1854, in Framingham, Massachusetts, William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution. He called it “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” because it protected slavery.
William Lloyd Garrison
So perish all compromises with tyranny!
Douglass disagreed.
Frederick Douglass
…take the constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single proslavery clause in it.
Abolitionists were a small minority in the North, and impossible to miss.
Black abolitionists led much of this fight. In 1843, Henry Highland Garnet told enslaved people to act for themselves.
Henry Highland Garnet
Let your motto be RESISTANCE! RESISTANCE! RESISTANCE!
The convention rejected his call by one vote. Douglass spoke against it.
Martin Delany, a doctor and editor, urged emigration instead.
After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, no free state was safe. The goal became Canada. The Underground Railroad was people, many of them Black, guiding others north.
Harriet Tubman, who escaped Maryland in 1849, went back about thirteen times and led about seventy people out.
At Ripley, Ohio, the river was the line between slavery and freedom. People remembered a light in the Rankin family’s window on the hill.
John P. Parker
A lighted candle stood as beacon which could be seen from across the river,
John P. Parker
and like the north star was the guide to the fleeing slave.
John Parker, an iron-founder who had bought his own freedom, went into Kentucky himself to bring people out.
Some were ready to fight. In 1851, at Christiana, Pennsylvania, Black neighbors armed themselves against a Maryland slaveholder hunting four men. He was killed. Dozens were charged with treason. None was convicted.
Two Cabins
1851–1853
Key terms: Fugitive Slave Act (1850), Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Anti-Tom literature, HIPP (sourcing)
Harriet Beecher Stowe lived eighteen years in Cincinnati, across the river from Kentucky. After the Fugitive Slave Act, she started a novel in weekly installments.
In the novel, Eliza carries her son across the Ohio on floating ice.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
The incident of the mother's crossing the Ohio river on the ice is a well-known fact.
Uncle Tom's Cabin sold about three hundred thousand copies in America in its first year. Defenders of slavery answered with some two dozen novels of their own.
By the fall of 1853, four books about slavery sat on one New York counter.
Two are novels and two are nonfiction. All four claim to tell the truth. So ask who wrote each one, for whom, and why.
Cotton Is King
1851–1858
Key terms: King Cotton, Mudsill theory, Racial doctrines, Positive good, States' rights
The first census, in 1790, counted fewer than 700,000 enslaved people. By 1860, nearly four million people were enslaved.
In 1857 a financial panic closed banks and idled factories across the North. The cotton South bounced back within a year.
In the Senate, James Henry Hammond of South Carolina drew the lesson.
James Henry Hammond
No, you dare not make war on cotton.
James Henry Hammond
No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.
James Henry Hammond
In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life.
In the South, that meant enslaved people. In the North:
James Henry Hammond
…your whole hireling class of manual laborers and 'operatives,' as you call them, are essentially slaves.
Defenders dressed racial theories up as science. In 1851, Dr. Samuel Cartwright invented a disease for enslaved people who ran away: drapetomania.
Calhoun had called slavery a positive good. In 1857 George Fitzhugh of Virginia went further.
George Fitzhugh
The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.
Two of the people he described had already told their side in print. Solomon Northup, in 1853. Frederick Douglass, in 1852.
Above all, defenders said the Constitution was on their side. It counted three-fifths of enslaved people toward Congress and required escaped people to be returned.
Enslaved people were property, they argued, and slavery was each state's business.
In the North, Hammond's word 'mudsill' landed like a slap. Workers organized Mud-Sill Clubs and turned the word into a badge.
Free Soil
1846–1859
Key terms: Free labor, Free-soil movement, Cotton Whigs, Free Soil Party
The North ran on wages. And by 1860, its railroads tied Midwestern farms to New York, not New Orleans.
In 1859 Abraham Lincoln answered the mudsill theory.
Abraham Lincoln
The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself;
Abraham Lincoln
then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.
Free labor needed free land, so the West mattered. David Wilmot wanted slavery banned from every acre won from Mexico. He said why:
David Wilmot
I plead the cause and the rights of white freemen.
Free-soilers wanted to stop slavery's spread. Many also wanted the West free of Black people. Indiana, Illinois and Oregon barred free Black people from settling.
Some Northerners objected on principle. Charles Sumner blamed his own state's mill owners for backing the planters:
Charles Sumner
…between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.
That August, antislavery Whigs, Democrats and abolitionists met in Buffalo and formed the Free Soil Party. By 1856, many of its voters were Republicans.
So North and South were now fighting over the same place: the West, and who would work it.
With Hope
1852 · 1854
Key terms: Kansas–Nebraska Act (1854), Popular sovereignty, Missouri Compromise (1820)
Back in Rochester, the speech was nearly over. Douglass had called the celebration a sham.
Frederick Douglass
I do not despair of this country.
Frederick Douglass
I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope.
Earlier, he had used a shipyard word.
Frederick Douglass
I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the RINGBOLT to the chain of your nation's destiny; so, indeed, I regard it.
In 1854, Congress let settlers in Kansas and Nebraska decide on slavery, erasing the old Missouri line. After that, every one of these arguments got louder.