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Antebellum is a Latin term that means "before the war.". The antebellum period in the United States was the time period before the American Civil War, which began in 1861. It is most often described as the period between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, and it is most often used to refer to the Southern U.S.
1790 First American cotton spinning mill opens in Pawtucket, Rhode Island
1808 Congress prohibits Americans from engaging in international slave trading
1825–56 Canals link the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and the Great Lakes
1829 David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World
1831 Nat Turner’s slave revolt in Virginia; William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator begins publication
1787 Northwest Ordinance creates first organized territory of the United States
1794 Eli Whitney patents cotton gin
1803 Louisiana Purchase doubles the size of the United States
1803–6 Lewis and Clark expedition
1804 Sauk leaders sign treaty ceding 15 million acres to the U.S. government
1812–15 War of 1812 fought between United States and England 1818 Treaty on joint U.S.–British occupation of Oregon
1820 Missouri Compromise maintains balance of free and slave states in Union
1821 Mexican independence from Spain; opening of Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and New Mexico
1832 Cherokee Supreme Court case Worcester v. Georgia; Black Hawk War
1833 Great Britain abolishes slavery in the West Indies
1834 Philadelphia race riots; first strike by Lowell mill workers to protest wage cuts
1836 Republic of Texas founded; Angelina Grimké’s Appeal to the Christian Women of the South; Sarah Bagley begins working at a cotton mill in Lowell, Massachusetts
1837–44 Financial panic and depression
1837 Sarah Grimké’s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes
1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London
1844 Sarah Bagley organizes Lowell Female Labor Reform Association
1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Irish potato famine
1821–40 Indian removals in Deep South and Old Southwest
1830 Mexico abolishes slavery in Texas
1832 Black Hawk War
1836 Texas declares independence from Mexico
1837–38 Cherokee travel from southeastern homelands to Oklahoma on the “Trail of Tears”
1844 James K. Polk elected president on expansionist platform
1845 Term “Manifest Destiny” coined by newspaper editor John L. O’Sullivan; United States annexes the Republic of Texas
1846 United States and Mexico go to war; Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo taken prisoner in Bear Flag rebellion
1848 Women’s Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, NY
1849 Cholera epidemic in New York, St. Louis, and Cincinnati
1850 Compromise of 1850 brings the Fugitive Slave Law
1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Frederick Douglass delivers Fourth of July speech
1857 Financial panic
1859 John Brown and supporters raid federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry
1860 Cotton production and prices peak; South Carolina becomes first state to secede from Union
1846–48 Mormon migration to Utah
1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends Mexican American War; gold discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California
1850 California admitted to the Union; Compromise of 1850
1851–60 More than 41,000 Chinese travel to United States to work
1852 Ah Tye arrives in California from China
1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act nullifies Missouri Compromise
1856 John Brown leads Pottawatomie Massacre in Kansas
1860 Abraham Lincoln elected president; cotton production and prices peak
why no people?
The struggle of incorporating new lands as states exacerbated existing sectionalist rivalries, leading to a series of political crises that culminated in the Civil War
Over the first six decades of the nineteenth century, multiple political, social, and economic factors drove American territorial expansion.
Expansion affected different groups of people in a variety of ways — offering opportunities to some, and causing dispossession, loss, and conflict for many others.
The evangelical revival spawned a number of reforms, aimed at curbing a broad range of social ills.
The first half of the 1800s brought rapid social, economic, and technological changes, which laid the groundwork for reform.
The Second Great Awakening, a religious revival of the early 1800s, contributed to the reform impulse by emphasizing individual responsibility and perfection.
Now, we will look at some specifics regarding the theme of expansion and reformation!
Bursts of florid rhetoric accompanied territorial growth, and some Americans used the slogan “Manifest Destiny” to justify and account for it.
The phrase, coined in 1845 by John L. O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, expressed the conviction that the country’s superior institutions and culture gave Americans a God-given right, even an obligation, to spread their civilization across the entire continent.
The mural was painted by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze in 1861 and symbolizes Manifest Destiny, the belief that the United States was destined for Western exploration and expansion originating from the initial colonies along the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. A study measuring 33 1 ⁄ 4 by 43 3 ⁄ 8 inches (84.5 cm × 110.2 cm) hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Questions to Consider
1. How did Leutze use light and other features of the landscape to convey a message? What is that message? 2.
How are Native Americans depicted compared to whites? Women compared to men?
Commercial goals fueled early interest as traders first sought beaver skins in Oregon territory as early as 1811 and then bison robes prepared by the Plains tribes in the area around the upper Missouri River and its tributaries. Many of the men in the fur business married Indian women, thereby making valuable connections with Indian tribes involved in trapping . . .
In the Southwest, the collapse of the Spanish Empire gave American traders an opportunity they had long sought. Each year, caravans from “the States,” loaded with weapons, tools, and brightly colored calicoes, followed the Santa Fe Trail over the plains and mountains. New Mexico’s 40,000 inhabitants proved eager buyers, exchanging precious metals and furs for manufactured goods.
To the south, in Texas, land for cotton rather than trade or missionary fervor attracted settlers and squatters in the 1820s at the very time that the Tejano population of 2,000 was adjusting to Mexican independence. The lure of cheap land drew more Americans to that area than to any other. By 1835, almost 30,000 Americans were living in Texas. They constituted the largest group of Americans living outside the nation’s boundaries at that time. [Mexico’s leaders hoped that these newcomers would become loyal and productive Mexican citizens.] . . .
Government reports by explorers like Zebulon Pike and John C. Frémont provided detailed information about the interior, and guidebooks and news articles described the routes that fur trappers such as Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, and Jedediah Smith had mapped out.
Lansford Hastings’s Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California (1845) provided not only the practical information that emigrants would need but also the encouragement that heading for the frontier was the right thing to do.
Indian removals: southeast and Midwest
The Cherokee were one of many Indian nations forced to leave their lands and move across the Mississippi in the early 1800s.
The settlers who moved west to occupied land taken from Indian nations were often disappointed to find that life on the frontier was often not what they had imagined it would be.] As they turned toward building a new life, they naturally drew on their experiences back East. “Pioneers though we are, and proud of it, we are not content with the wilds . . . with the idleness of the land, the rudely construct[ed] log cabin,” one Oregon settler explained. “Pioneers are not that kind of folks.”
Westward expansion led to an increase in both slavery and sectionalism, issues that threatened to divide the nation ever since its founding. Southerners worried that an infusion of free states would tilt the balance of power in Congress as anti-slavery sentiment grew in the North.
Northerners, meanwhile, were alarmed by Southern plans for adding slave states, and by the expansion of slavery into Texas and other parts of the Deep South. Yet, the majority of citizens living in most of the West strongly opposed slavery.
Since 1789, politicians had labored to keep the explosive issue of slavery tucked safely beneath the surface of political life, for they understood how quickly it could jeopardize the nation.
In 1819, Missouri’s application for admission to the Union raised anew the question of slavery’s expansion.
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had prohibited slavery north of the Ohio River while allowing its expansion to the south. But Congress had said nothing about slavery’s place in the vast Louisiana territory west of the Mississippi.
Southerners were adamant that the vast area must remain open to their slave property and were determined to preserve the equal balance of slave and free states in the Senate.
Already by 1819, the more rapidly growing population of the free states had given them a 105-to-81 advantage in the House of Representatives. Equality in the Senate offered the only sure protection for southern interests.
Northerners, however, vowed to keep the territories west of the Mississippi open to free labor, which meant closing them to slavery.
In the end, compromise prevailed. Missouri gained admission as a slave state, while Maine (formerly part of Massachusetts) came in as a counterbalancing free state. A line was drawn west from Missouri at latitude 6° 0° to the Rocky Mountains. Lands [south] of that line would be open to slavery; areas to the [north] of it would not.
Improved transportation played a key role in bringing about economic and geographic expansion.
Early in the century, high freight rates discouraged production for distant markets and the exploitation of resources, while primitive transportation hindered western settlement. Canal-building projects in the 1820s and 1830s dramatically transformed this situation.
Even at the height of the canal boom, politicians, promoters, and others, impressed with Britain’s success with steam-powered railways, also supported the construction of railroads. Unlike canals that might freeze during the winter, railroads could operate year-round and could be built almost anywhere.
Improved transportation stimulated agricultural expansion and regional specialization. Farmers began to plant larger crops for the market, concentrating on those most suited to their soil and climate.
By the late 1830s, the Old Northwest had become the country’s granary, and New England farmers turned to dairy or produce farming.
In 1860, American farmers were producing four to five times as much wheat, corn, cattle, and hogs as they had in 1810. Their achievements meant plentiful, cheap food for American workers and more income for farmers to spend on the new consumer goods.
Industrialization created a more efficient means of producing more goods at much lower cost than had been possible in the homes and small shops of an earlier day.
In the four decades before the Civil War, the rate of urbanization in the United States was faster than ever before or since. In 1820, about 9 percent of the American people lived in cities (defined as areas containing a population of 2,500 or more). Forty years later, almost 20 percent of them did. Older cities like Philadelphia and New York mushroomed, while new cities like Cincinnati, Columbus, and Chicago sprang up. Although urban growth was not confined to the East, it was most dramatic there. By 1860, more than one-third of the people living in the Northeast were urban residents, compared with only 14 percent of westerners and 7 percent of southerners.
[Southern society developed much differently, although it, too, enjoyed substantial economic expansion.] In the 20 years preceding the Civil War, the South’s agricultural economy grew slightly faster than the North’s . . . If the South had become an independent nation in 1860, it would have ranked as one of the wealthiest countries in the world in per capita income, a wealth based mainly on cotton.
In 1820, the South became the world’s largest producer of cotton, and after 1840, cotton represented more than half of all American exports. Cotton spurred economic growth not only in England but also throughout the United States. New England textile mills bought it, northern merchants profitably shipped, insured, and marketed it, northern bankers added capital from cotton sales, and western grain farmers found the South a major market for their foodstuffs.
Transportation costs fell dramatically from 1785 to 1865. Which modes of
transportation were most and least expensive, and did that change over time?
From the late 1790s until the late 1830s, a wave of religious revivals that
matched the intensity of the Great Awakening in the 1730s and 1740s swept
through the United States . . . The camp meeting revivals of the frontier at the
turn of the century and the New England revivals sparked by Lyman Beecher
took on a new emphasis and location after 1830. [Charles G. Finney moved
revivalism westward.] The Finney revivals followed the Erie Canal across
upstate New York and eventually swept into Ohio. These areas had experienced profound economic and social changes, as the example of Rochester, New York, suggests
[Bold religious ideas also emerged from the nation’s leading thinkers, such
as Ralph Waldo Emerson of Concord, Massachusetts.] Emerson’s essays of
the 1830s—“Nature,” “American Scholar,” and “Divinity School Address,”
among others—influenced the generation of reformist American intellectuals
coming of age in mid-century and helped inspire artists and writers.
Casting off the European intellectual tradition and influenced to some extent by Eastern thought, Emerson urged Americans to look inward and to nature for self-knowledge, self-reliance, and the spark of divinity burning within all people.
“To acquaint a man with himself,” he wrote, would inspire a “reverence” for self and others, which would then lead outward to social reform. “What is man born for,” Emerson wrote, “but to be a Reformer?”
[Racism extended well beyond slavery. Free blacks faced violence, segregation,
and other forms of discrimination in the North and the South. Even many
white abolitionists refused to treat blacks as their equals.]
Many antislavery businessmen refused to hire blacks. The antislavery societies usually provided less than full membership rights for blacks, permitted them to do only menial tasks rather than form policy, and, sometimes unknowingly, perpetuated racial stereotypes in their literature.
One free black, in fact, described a white abolitionist as one who hated slavery, “especially that slavery which is 1,000 to 1,500 miles away,” but who hated even more “a man who wears a black skin.”
Black and white abolitionists, however, agreed more than they disagreed and usually worked together well. They supported each other’s publications. The first subscribers to Garrison’s Liberator were nearly all African American, and an estimated 80 percent of the readers of Douglass’s paper were white. Weld and Garrison often stayed in the homes of black abolitionists when they traveled. In addition, black and white “stations” cooperated on the Underground Railroad, passing fugitives from one hiding place to the next (for example, from a black church to a white farmer’s barn to a Quaker meetinghouse to a black carpenter’s shop).
Convo!
How do these things develop into the Civil War?