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the American white population before 1830 was overwhelmingly British and Protestant in heritage. Cheap, abundant land and the need for labor in a growing economy, coupled with the pressure of population against limited resources in northern Europe, impelled first a trickle and then a flood of German and Irish immigrants to the United States in the generation after 1830.
the American white population before 1830 was overwhelmingly British and Protestant in heritage. Cheap, abundant land and the need for labor in a growing economy, coupled with the pressure of population against limited resources in northern Europe, impelled first a trickle and then a flood of German and Irish immigrants to the United States in the generation after 1830.
Slavery was not the evil that Yankee fanatics portrayed; it was a positive good, the basis of prosperity, peace, and white supremacy, a necessity to prevent blacks from degenerating into barbarism, crime, and poverty.
By 1860 the country contained nearly thirty-two million people, four million of them slaves.
Jefferson envisaged an ideal America of farmers and artisan producers who owned their means of production and depended on no man for a living.
Capitalism was incompatible with republicanism, they insisted. Dependence on wages robbed a man of his independence and therefore of his liberty.
Recovery from the depression in the United States coincided with the potato-famine years in Ireland and political unrest on the Continent associated with the revolutions of 1848. These push-pull forces impelled three million immigrants across the Atlantic in the decade after 1845. This was the largest proportionate influx of foreign-born in American history.
At midcentury one-fourth of the employees in manufacturing were women, while in the textile industry women and girls
Nevertheless, only 25 percent of white women worked outside the home before marriage and fewer than 5 percent did so while married.
The economic transformation took men as producers out of the home into office or factory. This separation of job from home evoked a notion of separate “spheres” for men and women. Man’s sphere was the bustling, competitive, dynamic world of business, politics, affairs of state. Woman’s world was the home and family; her role was to bear and nurture children and to make the home a haven to which the husband returned from work each day to find love and warmth at the hearth.
By 1850 the white man’s diseases and wars had reduced the Indian population north of the Rio Grande to half of the estimated one million who had lived there two centuries earlier. In the United States all but a few thousand Indians had been pushed west of the Mississippi.
Democratic administrations in the 1830s had carried out a forced removal of 85,000 Indians of the five “civilized nations"—Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole—from the southeastern states to an Indian territory set aside for them just west of Arkansas.
So they perished—in California alone disease, malnutrition, firewater, and homicide reduced the Indian population from an estimated 150,000 in 1845 to 35,000 by 1860. Although
James K. Polk presided over the acquisition of more territory than any other president in American history.
Like the war, Manifest Destiny was mainly a Democratic doctrine.
But efforts to persuade Mexico to sell California and New Mexico had failed. So Polk decided to use force.
The Compromise of 1850 undoubtedly averted a grave crisis. But hindsight makes clear that it only postponed the trauma.
On all issues but one, antebellum southerners stood for state’s rights and a weak federal government. The exception was the fugitive slave law of 1850,
In 1851 Indiana and Iowa and in 1853 Illinois enacted legislation barring the immigration of any black persons, free or slave. Three-fifths of the nation’s border between free and slave states ran along the southern boundaries of these states. Intended
the only expansionist achievement of the Pierce administration was the Gadsden Purchase.
the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed by Congress in May 1854. Coming at the same time as the Anthony Burns case, this law may have been the most important single event pushing the nation toward civil war.
Kansas-Nebraska finished off the Whig party and gave birth to a new, entirely northern Republican party.
