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February 26 - April 23, 2020
Whatever the precise mixture of power machinery and hand tools, of central shop and putting out, the main characteristics of this new mode of production were division and specialization of labor, standardization of product, greater discipline of the labor force, improved efficiency, higher volume, and lower costs. These factors reduced wholesale commodity prices by 45 percent from 1815 to 1860. During the same years consumer prices declined even more, by an estimated 50 percent.
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Fast-flowing streams provided a cheap source of energy for American mills that enabled water to retain its status as the principal source of industrial power in the United States until 1870.
Of 143 important inventions patented in the United States from 1790 to 1860, 93 percent came out of the free states and nearly half from New England alone—more than twice that region’s proportion of the free population.
New England led the world in educational facilities and literacy at midcentury.
The philosopher of republicanism, Thomas Jefferson, had defined the essence of liberty as independence, which required the ownership of productive property. A man dependent on others for a living could never be truly free, nor could a dependent class constitute the basis of a republican government. Women, children, and slaves were dependent; that defined them out of the polity of republican freemen. Wage laborers were also dependent; that was why Jefferson feared the development of industrial capitalism with its need for wage laborers. Jefferson envisaged an ideal America of farmers and
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The emergence of industrial capitalism from 1815 to 1860 thus began to forge a new system of class relations between capitalists who owned the means of production and workers who owned only their labor power.
The pre-industrial artisan had been accustomed to laboring as much or as little as he pleased. He worked by the job, not by the clock. If he felt like taking time off for a drink or two with friends, he did so. But in the new regimen all laborers worked in lock-step; the system turned them into machines; they became slaves to the clock.
Nevertheless, ownership of property was becoming an elusive goal for Americans at the lower end of the economic scale.24
Banks in general and the Second Bank of the United States in particular became the chief symbol of capitalist development during the 1830s and the chief scapegoat for its perceived ills.
The “free labor system,” concluded Lincoln, “opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.” It was precisely the lack of this hope, energy, and progress in the slave South that made the United States a House Divided.
Numerous studies of antebellum voting patterns have shown that Whigs and Republicans did best among upwardly mobile Protestants in white-collar and skilled occupations and among farmers who lived near transportation networks that drew them into the market economy. These were “insiders” who welcomed the capitalist transformation of the nineteenth century and for the most part benefited from it. Although some Democrats, especially in the South, were also insiders, the greatest Democratic support came from “outsiders": workers who resented the de-skilling of artisan occupations and the dependency
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This nativism was actually more anti-Catholic than anti-immigrant. Indeed, Protestant immigrants (especially from northern Ireland) were among the most violent “nativists.”
The shift of manufacturing from household to shop or factory altered the function of many families from units of production to units of consumption.
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.
Middle-class marriages became more of an equal partnership than ever before. In some respects women attained a superior position in the partnership. If men ruled outside the home, women tended to rule within it. The decision to have fewer children was a mutual one but probably most often initiated by women.
Therefore while the notion of a domestic sphere closed the front door to women’s exit from the home into the real world, it opened the back door to an expanding world of religion, reform, education, and writing.
This breakup of families was the largest chink in the armor of slavery’s defenders. Abolitionists thrust their swords through the chink.
So long as the slavery controversy focused on the morality of the institution where it already existed, the two-party system managed to contain the passions it aroused. But when in the 1840s the controversy began to focus on the expansion of slavery into new territories it became irrepressible.
From 1815 to 1850 the population of the region west of the Appalachians grew nearly three times as fast as the original thirteen states. During that era a new state entered the Union on the average of every three years.
Since there was no more western frontier beyond which to push the Indians of the Pacific coast, a policy evolved to place them on “reservations” where they could learn the white man’s ways or perish. Most reservations were located on poor land, and a good many Indians had little inclination to learn the white man’s ways. So they perished
Polk compromised with Britain on 49° but went to war against Mexico for Texas—with California and New Mexico thrown in for good measure. And thereby hung a tale of sectional conflict that erupted into civil war a decade and a half later.
Like the war, Manifest Destiny was mainly a Democratic doctrine. Since the day when Thomas Jefferson overcame Federalist opposition to the purchase of Louisiana, Democrats had pressed for the expansion of American institutions across the whole of North America whether the residents—Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, Canadians—wanted them or not.
Whigs were not averse to extending the blessings of American liberty, even to Mexicans and Indians. But they looked askance at doing so by force.
While the Democratic notion of progress envisioned the spread of existing institutions over space, the Whig idea envisaged the improvement of those institutions over time.
This triumph of Manifest Destiny may have reminded some Americans of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s prophecy that “the United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.”8 He was right. The poison was slavery.
Many northerners feared a similar future for this new southwestern empire. They condemned the war as part of a “slave power conspiracy” to expand the peculiar institution.
Many of them conceded that the institution was unlikely to put down deep roots in a region presumed to be covered with deserts and mountains. But to make sure, northern congressmen voted for a resolution to exclude slavery therefrom. This was the fateful Wilmot Proviso.
Having voted for the annexation of Texas with its disputed Rio Grande border at risk of war with Mexico, they felt betrayed by Polk’s refusal to risk war with Britain for all of Oregon.
The normal pattern of division in Congress had occurred along party lines on issues such as the tariff, the Bank, federal aid to internal improvements, and the like. The Wilmot Proviso wrenched this division by parties into a conflict of sections. The political landscape would never again be the same.
Secretary of State James Buchanan made 36° 30′ the centerpiece of his drive for the nomination.
The Barnburner convention provided the spark for an antislavery political blaze; the Liberty party offered itself as kindling.
Through three weeks and sixty-two ballots the House failed to elect a speaker. Threats of disunion became a byword during this crisis. “If, by your legislation, you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico,” thundered Toombs, “I am for disunion.”
Taylor afterward commented to an associate that he had previously regarded Yankees as the aggressors in sectional disputes, but his experience since taking office had convinced him that southerners were “intolerant and revolutionary” and that his former son-in-law Jefferson Davis was their “chief conspirator.”
And the “Compromise” that finally emerged was not really a compromise in which all parties conceded part of what they wanted, but a series of separately enacted measures each of which became law with a majority of congressmen from one section voting against a majority of those from the other. The Compromise of 1850 undoubtedly averted a grave crisis. But hindsight makes clear that it only postponed the trauma.
Calhoun’s prophecies of doom were reflected in the piercing eyes that stared from deep sockets within the shroud. “The great and primary cause” of danger “is that the equilibrium between the two sections has been destroyed.”
California was the test case. Admission of this free state would serve notice of a purpose to “destroy irretrievably the equilibrium between the two sections.”
Fillmore christened the Compromise “a final settlement” of all sectional problems, and this phrase soon became the hallmark of political orthodoxy. Only Calhounites and Free Soilers challenged its finality.
South Carolina fire-eaters came away from Nashville determined that next time they would not dawdle in cooperative action with other states, which only sicklied o’er the native hue of resolution with the pale cast of thought. They would act alone in the expectation that other states would follow.
"I think the settlement of the last session and the firm course of the Administration in the execution of the fugitive slave law have given a new lease to slavery,” wrote a North Carolina Whig at the beginning of 1851. “Property of that kind has not been so secure for the last twenty-five years.”65 He was wrong—and precisely because of the administration’s “firm course” in enforcing the fugitive slave law. Although one of the least-debated parts of the Compromise, this measure turned out to be the most divisive legacy of the “final settlement.”
To remedy such abuses, several northern states enacted personal liberty laws. These measures variously gave fugitives the rights of testimony, habeas corpus, and trial by jury, or they imposed criminal penalties for kidnapping. In the hands of antislavery officials, some of these laws could be used to inhibit the capture of fugitives.
With Fillmore in the White House, the situation seemed stabilized for the time being. But northern Whigs were restless. Most of them were having a hard time swallowing the fugitive slave law. The party was sending a growing number of radical antislavery men to Congress: Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and George W. Julian entered the House in 1849; Benjamin Wade of Ohio came to the Senate in 1851. If such men as these gained control of the party it would splinter along North-South lines. Southern Whigs had barely survived Taylor’s apostasy; another such shock would shatter them.
Mrs. Stowe (or perhaps God) rebuked the whole nation for the sin of slavery. She aimed the novel at the evangelical conscience of the North. And she hit her mark.
The South’s defensive-aggressive temper in the 1850s stemmed in part from a sense of economic subordination to the North. In a nation that equated growth with progress, the census of 1850 alarmed many southerners.
Southern self-condemnation of this “degrading vassalage” to Yankees became almost a litany during the sectional crisis from 1846 to 1851.
How could the South expect to preserve its power, asked the young southern champion of economic diversification James B. D. De Bow, when “the North grows rich and powerful whilst we at best are stationary?”
Noting with shame that most books and magazines read by southerners came from northern authors and presses, that the South sent many of its brightest sons to northern colleges, and that a shocking number of southern college presidents, professors, schoolteachers, and even newspaper editors were natives of Yankeedom, the conventions called for the establishment and patronage of southern publishers, magazines, authors, professors, and colleges.
“Give us factories, machine shops, work shops,” declared southern journalists, and “we shall be able ere long to assert our rights.”
Other accounts of southern industrialization have focused not on deficiencies of labor or of demand but on a lack of capital. Capital was abundant in the South, to be sure: in 1860, according to the census measure of wealth (real and personal property), the average southern white male was nearly twice as wealthy as the average northern white man.38 The problem was that most of this wealth was invested in land and slaves.
Some evidence points to the South’s agrarian value system as an important reason for lack of industrialization.
In other words, southerners had a larger portion of their capital invested in land and slaves in 1860 than in 1850.
