History

A DIVIDED NATION During the 1850s, the issue of slav- ery severed the political bonds that had held the United States together . CHAPTER 6: SECTIONAL CONFLICT OUTLINE OF U.S. HISTORY 137 It ate away at the country’s two great political parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, destroying the first and irrevocably dividing the second […]

THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 Until 1845, it had seemed likely that slavery would be confined to the areas where it already existed . It had been given limits by the Missouri Compromise in 1820 and had no op- portunity to overstep them . The new territories made renewed expansion of slavery a real likelihood .

TEXAS AND WAR WITH MEXICO Throughout the 1820s, Ameri- cans settled in the vast territory of Texas, often with land grants from the Mexican government . However, their numbers soon alarmed the au- thorities, who prohibited further im- migration in 1830 . In 1834 General Antonio López de Santa Anna estab- lished a dictatorship in

THE ABOLITIONISTS In national politics, Southerners chiefly sought protection and en- largement of the interests represent- ed by the cotton/slavery system . They sought territorial expansion because the wastefulness of cultivating a sin- gle crop, cotton, rapidly exhausted the soil, increasing the need for new fertile lands . Moreover, new territory would establish a basis

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