05c: Life in the Good Old Days

For decades, the United States had performed a balancing act between the industrial free-soil North and the agricultural slave-owning South. When the nation was established, it had looked as though slavery would wither away in the United States. But with the invention of the cotton gin, and technological advances such as spinning machinery and the steamboat, Cotton became king in the South. King Cotton required slave labor, and plenty of it. Southern leaders like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison had all owned slaves but hoped that the institution would die. They were replaced by leaders like John C. Calhoun, who resigned from the Vice Presidency in 1832 to become Senator from North Carolina. These leaders fought hard for what they saw as the Southern lifestyle. States had to be added in pairs, one free  state with one slave state. Indiana (1816) entered the Union with Mississippi (1817), Illinois (1818) with Alabama (1819). This arrangement became law with the Missouri Compromise of 1820; Maine entered in 1820 as a free state, accompanied in 1821 by Missouri as a slave state. In the final three pairs, the slave state preceded the free state: Arkansas in 1836 and Michigan in 1837; Florida and Texas in 1845, followed by Iowa in 1846 and Wisconsin in 1848.

North and South
By 1850, prosperity abounded in New England and the Middle Atlantic, where manufacturing, trade, and banking drove the economy. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, factories produced far more for their owners, even if the workers  who did the producing didn't benefit much. Thanks to America's world power status and friendship with Britain, American ships traded around the world, serving not only American markets (although these certainly were important) but the international market as well. Yet the more industry grew, the more class differences grew. Individual craftsmen found it harder and harder to compete with the factories, and were not happy with the waves of immigrants willing to do menial factory work. The industrialists, for their part, believed (not without reason) that they were risking their capital and were therefore personally entitled to all the benefit they could extract from their factories.

To the South, agriculture drove the economy: tobacco, rice, sugar and especially cotton. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, the world now had an enormous appetite for cotton, and the United States was producing more than 80% of the world's supply. Yet cotton was a very labor-intensive crop, which meant that human slavery remained crucial to the Southern economy. Individual small farmers could still survive if they worked very hard, but most moved west in search of better farmland. Moreover, cotton was very hard on the soil, and the planters knew that if the Southern economy was to survive (much less expand), slavery would have to expand into the western territories. The admission of Texas into the United States was a major boost to slaveholding interests, but it was more suited to cattle ranching than cotton production. It would not be enough to help the South match the economic progress of the rapidly growing North. Sadly, the Founders had either failed or refused to consider the possible of North-South division, causing a tremendous sectional struggle which ended in civil war.

The New Frontier
The Midwest was growing by leaps and bounds too. It was being settled not just by immigrants but by restless Northerners and Southerners. The Louisiana Purchase (except for Missouri) really began filling up after 1840. Not only farmers moved west (Thomas Lincoln, father of Abraham Lincoln, was one example, moving from Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois), but merchants and skilled craftsmen too. Whatever the Midwesterners grew and could not eat or use themselves, the Northeast was happy to purchase. Whatever the Northwest could not consume, it exported. By the start of the Civil War, the Midwest was producing more than 170,000,000 bushels per year, much of which went to the Northeast by boat or by one of the railway lines which sprang up in the 1850s. The South experienced the railroad boom too, but the strong railroad links between North and Midwest helped keep the Midwest in the Union during the Civil War. It would be hard to blame the Southerners for feeling they were being surrounded.

Progress and regress
Americans were divided in other ways. The wave of Irish and German Catholic immigrants arriving in the first half of the 19th century caused a backlash among native-born Protestant Americans. Aside from their unusual customs and religious practices, Catholic immigrants competed with native-born Protestants for jobs. Because of their numbers and the ease of acquiring citizenship, the new immigrants gained considerable political clout at the expense of the Protestant establishment. Citizens also strove for greater rights and opportunities. By 1860, thanks to organized labor, the ten hour work day was a generally accepted standard across the nation. The need for a literate, educated citizen body caused the establishment of free tax-supported schools across the North, and in some parts of the South. Prisons, social welfare, and even the prohibition of alcohol became public issues, as Americans worked to ensure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for everyone.

However, the position of women in society remained completely unequal. Although there was some tradition of some young women being allowed to pursue their choice of career, this held true only until marriage. Then as always, individual women found ways of rising above society's arbitrary obstacles. By the 1840s a women's rights movement emerged under the leadership of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. Cady Stanton recognized for all of women's pressing concerns - equality before the law, access to education, right to take part in public life - the right to vote had to come first... which it finally did, in 1920. I can't guarantee that the American Civil War wouldn't have happened if women had been allowed to vote and hold political office. On the other hand, women voters and female elected officials couldn't possibly have messed things up any worse than the men wound up doing.