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SLAVERY AND SECTIONALISM One overriding issue exacerbat- ed the regional and economic dif- ferences between North and South: slavery . Resenting the large profits amassed by Northern businessmen from marketing the cotton crop, many Southerners attributed the backwardness of their own section to Northern aggrandizement . Many Northerners, on the other hand, de- clared that […]

LANDS OF PROMISE By 1850 the national territory stretched over forest, plain, and mountain . Within its far-flung lim- its dwelt 23 million people in a Union comprising 31 states . In the East, in- dustry boomed . In the Midwest and the South, agriculture flourished . After 1849 the gold mines of Cali- fornia

  SECTIONAL CONFLICT “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free.” Senatorial candidate Abraham Lincoln, 1858 OUTLINE OF U.S. HISTORY 131 In everything of which it has made a boast — excepting its education of the people, and its care for poor chil- dren — it

Slave family picking cotton near Savannah, Georgia, in the early 1860s. 130 TWO AMERICAS No visitor to the United States left a more enduring record of his trav- els and observations than the French writer and political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America, first published in 1835, remains one of the most trenchant

WOMEN(S) RIGHTS Such social reforms brought many women to a realization of their own unequal position in society . From colonial times, unmarried women had enjoyed many of the same legal rights as men, although custom re- quired that they marry early . With matrimony, women virtually lost their separate identities in the eyes of

STIRRINGS OF REFORM The democratic upheaval in poli- tics exemplified by Jackson’s election was merely one phase of the long American quest for greater rights and opportunities for all citizens . Another was the beginning of la- bor organization, primarily among skilled and semiskilled workers . In 1835 labor forces in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, succeeded in

WHIGS, DEMOCRATS, AND KNOW-NOTHINGS Jackson’s political opponents, unit- ed by little more than a common opposition to him, eventually co- alesced into a common party called the Whigs, a British term signify- ing opposition to Jackson’s “monar- chial rule .” Although they organized soon after the election campaign of 1832, it was more than a

THE BANK FIGHT Although the nullification crisis possessed the seeds of civil war, it was not as critical a political issue as a bitter struggle over the contin- ued existence of the nation’s central bank, the second Bank of the United States . The first bank, established in 1791 under Alexander Hamilton’s guidance, had been

NULLIFICATION CRISIS Toward the end of his first term in office, Jackson was forced to con- front the state of South Carolina, the most important of the emerg- ing Deep South cotton states, on the issue of the protective tariff . Busi- ness and farming interests in the state had hoped that the president would

FACTIONALISM AND POLITICAL PARTIES Domestically, the presidency of Monroe (1817-1825) was termed the “era of good feelings .” The phrase ac- knowledged the political triumph of the Republican Party over the Feder- alist Party, which had collapsed as a national force . All the same, this was a period of vigorous factional and re- gional