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... 1840 a growing need for transportation had became clear. Roads, canals, steamboats, and railroads lowered the cost and raised the speed of travel. Transportation had a huge effect as new mail, and people where traveling farther and faster. As markets developed, people reorganized their operations to increase production. The Waltham system, employed young single women who lived and worked for a few years in the mills, saving their wages or contributing them to their families. The number of state-chartered banks increased after 1815, to several hundred.
This revolution was called the Market Revolution and led the way for a revolution in commercial law. The United Stated, in the panic of 1819, endured its first economic problem. The panic caused unemployment, bank failures, falling crop priced and the collapse of land investments. The people of the US recovered quickly, but some were wary of rapid economic changes. Helping improve the economy was the passage of several tariffs on imported goods. But by 1824, when a tariff bill was passed, the South raised concerns over the unfair benefits.
The last and most talked about tariff passed in 1824. It was an Agglomeration of dozen of tariffs from every section of the country and from every type of industry demanding protection. Southerners were against the measure, calling it the "tariff of abominations. " This tariff of 1828 would soon cause grave sectional and constitutional crises for the nation. Between 1820 and 1840, a democratic revolution of sort takes place. Two major features of this democratization were the second-party system of Democrats and Whigs and importance of the candidate's popularity with the "common man" in the determining the outcome of elections.
Jackson won the presidential election in 1828. His agenda was committed to extending power beyond entrenched elites, Jackson wanted to reduce the functions of the federal government and extend opportunities to the rising classes of the South and West. This was the time when the United States got increasingly wealthier each year while society was becoming unequal and transforming society and culture, from the workplace to the family. There was a change in the family way of life. For example, the middle class family husband was to bring home the money and the wife was to stay home and do domestic activities.
Women became the custodians of morality and benevolence providing religious and moral structures for their children and to counterbalance the acquisitive, materialistic impulses of their husbands. Children began to go to public schools starting in 1790. The education of boys and girls at that time was equal. Higher education was a different story. There were fewer colleges for girls to attend, than for boys. The "penny press" of 1830 was one of the most important developments of the "communication revolution. " Thousands of new readers were informed in a variety of issues.
The "penny press" was kind of like a "tabloid" holding entertainment, local news, and imposed all kind of information. In the 1830 s, presentations of plays, poetry, and lectures were all new forms of entertainment. The theater also became very popular in the 1830 s. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Second Great Awaking took place. The revivalists saw the nations redemption through stronger Christian beliefs. As a result the church membership doubled between, 1800 to 1820, in the United States.
Out of all the reforms that came up in this period the temperance movement was one of the first. The movement was to limit or prohibit the consumption of alcohol. Another reform was the "moral reform, " which initially applied to public morals in general but quickly became restricted to a campaign to eradicate sexual sin. "Abolitionism, " the case of abolishing slavery, gained strength in the 1830 s. David Walker, a black abolitionist, demanded freedom and called upon the northern whites to get rid of their racial prejudices. In the North and South abolitionist were consider dangerous radicals. With the antislavery campaigns all about came the fight for women's rights.
Southerners and Northerners were different, and the main difference was in the South. This difference was slavery. During mid-nineteenth century the economic power shifted from the states along the eastern coast to the new states of the Southwest. The reason for the shift was the demand of cotton in the southern economy. Slaves picked seventy-five percent of the cotton, and as the crops grew, so did the slave population.
By 1860, the South had the largest slave society in the New World. With such a great number of blacks in the South, whites found themselves to be in the minority. Black slavery, to an extent, helped the whites in telling the differences in class, wealth, education, and culture, as both slave less whites and slave masters opposed black freedom. Unfortunately, for the South, they lacked forms of economic activity, while the North developed a diversified economy, agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing, the South mainly stayed with agriculture.
Black resistance and rebellion became more commonplace. Some would run away, others would resist work by being defiant. Nat Turner's uprising in 1831 was the most notorious of the antebellum period. Showing the slaves willingness to risk their lives for freedom. Most whites did not like free blacks, whose presence they believed to be the racial hierarchy that was the essence of slavery.
Some free blacks prospered in skilled services, and with whites that appreciated them. Being free, blacks were able to own property, choose occupations, legally marry and pass their freedom to their children. Some even owned slaves themselves, wanting to "succeed" in a hostile white world. Most white southerners were yeoman farmers that owned their own land. There were two kinds of yeoman societies and one plantation belt yeoman, and the other upcountry yeoman. Slavery or large plantations did not dominate yeomen and although they didn't benefit directly from slavery, most yeomen and non-slaveholders supported or at least tolerated the institution.
Other white Southerners who had no benefit from the plantation economy; were poor whites. Even though these poor whites were impoverished, they were ambitious and worked hard to become "respectable" yeoman farmers. The South was different from the North and everyone knew it. It was overwhelmingly rural and agrarian society based on a system of human bondage, a system very crucial to the Southern economy.
The economic growth never stopped. Important changes in agriculture occurred in the Midwest. The land was rich and plentiful, making farming a lucrative and expanding activity there. Manufacturing was on the rise with production of interchangeable parts, which became known as the "American System." Railroads were providing faster travel, and linking the cities together leading to a huge economic growth. As the northern society became industrialized, they developed the concept of "free labor", which meant that northern society was open to all individuals, all white males, who were hard working, self-reliant, and independent. Agreeing that if one maintains these qualities throughout life, material success would result.
Many men obtained the free-labor ideal, but most Americans did not. While others got hit with the reality no matter how hard you work, there was not material success and security, but a life of self-doubt and personal dissatisfaction. The free-labor ideal did not stop immigrants from Ireland and Germany from coming over. German-Americans, on the whole, attained the free labor ideal.
The Irish were not so fortunate, and were looked down upon and discriminated against by most native-born Americans, because of their devotion to Catholicism which aroused Protestant resentment. People began to look for perfection, and some described it as transcendentalism. Transcendentalism was the literary and philosophical movement that said individuals should transcend material reality, leaving behind the competitive, materialistic world to attain through intuitive reasoning oneness with the universe as a whole and with the spiritual forces that lay behind it. Some even began utopian experiments, which included the spirit of reform and the belief in the limitless possibilities of antebellum America.
As Americans continued westward into unknown territory, a new ideology was born. The Manifest Destiny, which reflected burgeoning mid-nineteenth century American nationalism. Resting on the ideal that the U. S. was destined by God and history, to expand its boundaries over the vast North America continent and in the process, bring to other cultures and people the great "uplifting" benefits of American democracy and the free-labor ideal.
The United States wanted Mexico's land. We had just annexed Texas, but President Polk wanted Mexico's other northern provinces and that made was impossible to avoid. The war had many opponents in the United States, Whig critics chief among them, who charged that from the beginning Polk had contrived the whole affair and that the war amounted to bullying of a weak nation by its greedy imperialist neighbor. Opposition intensified as the war continued and as the public home became aware of the casualties and expense. The U. S.
won the war and gain new territory, but it had created a new set of troubling and divisive issues. As you can tell America was getting richer, in land, manufacturing, and economically. But issues between the rich and poor brought out much diversity. The white Americans dealing with the Indians and their land also had created many controversial issues that America was again split on.
The hypocrisy in the Declaration of Independence, being written by actual slave owners, and the way we dealt with the immigrants and their right in relation to the rest of the country were all very important issues that divided American and their views. These are some of the things and reasons that gave American people the reason to have split views on many of the issues from 1790 to 1850. America was also become very powerful and democratic, but because of the America's diversity of people, religion, and culture, we had conflicting views on how America could be bettered as a whole... Bibliography:
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