CULTURE
I. Wilderness Utopias
A) New Harmony, IN: cooperative community
B) Brook Farm in MA: transcendentalists
C) Oneida Community: practiced free love
D) Shakers 1774-1940: communistic
II. Folk Music
A) Minstrel Shows: white actors with blackened faces
III. Achievements
A) Scientific
1. John J. Audubon: naturalist and artist of Birds of America
B) Artistic
1. Hudson River School: romanticized local landscapes
III. Transcendentalism
A) Truth “transcends the mind and the senses
1. All possess an inner light that illuminates the highest truth and puts them in direct touch with God.
B) Individualism: self-reliance, self-discipline
C) Dignity of individual: black or white
D) Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
1. “The American Scholar”: intellectual declaration of independence for Americans
E) Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
1. Walden & On the Duty of Civil Disobedience influence idealistic thought
a) “all men recognize the right of revolution”
2. Essays about nature: spiritual father of the conservation movement
IV. Literary Achievements
A) “Who reads an American book?” (1820)
B) Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)
1. Little Women to support family
C) Poet Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
D) Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
E) Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
1. Leaves of Grass
a) Romantic, emotional, unconventional (no titles, stanzas, rhymes, and
often no meter)
All the past we leave behind:
b) love for America and
We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world;
Americans
Fresh and strong the world we seize—world of labor
And the march—
Pioneers! O Pioneers!
F) Literary Dissenters
- Some who went against the social progress of the time
1. Edgar Allan Poe: morbidity at odds with American optimism of the time
2. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: Puritan obsession with sin and the struggle between
good and evil
3. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: allegory of good and evil
V. U.S. History
A) American historians emerged in the mid-1800s
B) Almost all were from New England
1. best libraries and literary tradition
C) Until end of 1800s, views unsympathetic to the South
1. Historians had abolitionists among friends and family
THE CONTROVERSY OF SLAVERY
“What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death
itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment… inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught
with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.” -Thomas Jefferson 1786
I. “Cotton is King”
A) Cotton half the value of all American exports after 1840
B) South produced more than half the world’s cotton
C) 1/5 population of England tied to cotton
D) 75% of cotton supply in England from the South
II. Planter “Aristocracy”
A) By 1850: 1,733 families owned more than 100 slaves
1. able to educate children in private schools
2. leisure for study, reflection and politics
3. Sense of serving the public
III. A Slave to the System
A) “land butchery”: small farms sell out and move west; plantations get bigger
B) Financial instability
1. over-speculation on land and slaves
C) Dependence on one crop; no industry
1. Dependence on North for manufacturing
D) Little immigration
E) The “American Dream” of upward social mobility
F) Racial superiority
1. Perverse comfort in outranking another
G) Exceptions in the South
1. Mountain whites
a) Lived in the valleys of the Appalachians
b) Small independent farmers
c) hated planters and blacks
d) loyal to Union party of Lincoln
H) The “Third Race”
1. Free Blacks
a) Despised by both North and south
b) Resented by Irish immigrants
IV. Plantation Slavery
A) Slave trade ended in 1808
1. Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron
B) Natural reproduction
C) Internal slave trade
1. slave auctions
V. The Life of a Slave
A) Conditions varied by region, size of the plantations, and by master
B) No rights, no education
C) Floggings (whippings)
1. breakers
2. To-night the bond man, Lord is bleeding in his chains; And loud the falling lash is heard on
Carolina’s plains!
3. Often characterized by cruelty
VI. Black Belt
A) In some areas, blacks more than 75% of population
1. Families tended to be more stable
B) Upper South, forced separations more common
1. “until death or distance do you part”
VII. African American Culture
A) Grew despite oppression
B) Religion
1. Heavily Christianized by evangelists of the Second Great Awakening
a) emphasized Israelites in captivity
b) Also used by southern whites
Catechism for blacks:
2. Mixture of African elements
Q. Who gave you a master and a mistress?
a) responsorial style of preaching
A. God gave them to me
C) In Bondage
Q. Who says that you must obey them?
1. Often sabotaged work
A. God says that I must.
2. Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831)
a) semiliterate, black preacher led uprising; 60 Virginians died
3. Amistad (1839)
4. “One cannot hold another in the ditch without staying down in the ditch with him…”
-Booker T. Washington
ABOLITIONISM
I. Early Abolitionism
A) Quakers during the Revolutionary War
B) American Colonization Society (1817)
1. Liberia
C) 1833: William Wilberforce MP inspiration
1. “Never, never will we desist, until we have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name”
D) Second Great Awakening
E) Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
II. Radical Abolitionism
A) William Lloyd Garrison
1. The Liberator: antislavery newspaper
B) The American Anti-Slavery Society
C) Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829)
1. David Walker advocated a bloody end to white supremacy
III. Black Abolitionists
A) Sojourner Truth
1. Freed black woman in New York
2.Condemned the sin of slavery in lectures
3. Wrote a narrative of her life as a slave
B) Frederick Douglass
1. Escaped slave
2. “discovered” by abolitionists
3. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
a) Origins: slave mother and white father
b) struggle to learn to read and write
c) escape north
4. Looked to politics to end slavery
RESPONSES TO ABOLITIONISTS
I. Southern Response
A) 1820s South of the Mason-Dixon line: more antislavery societies
B) Debated emancipation in 1831, but defeated
1. what changed?
a) Nat Turner’s Rebellion
b) Slave codes tightened after 1831
c) Nullification Crisis of 1832
C) Gag Resolution 1836: Southerners in Congress (House of Reps) passed requiring all antislavery appeals to be set
aside without debate.
1. Defeated by John Quincy Adams in appeal
D) In defense of slavery: South compared benevolent slave regime to the factories of the north
II. Northern Response
A) Abolitionists unpopular for a long time
B) Importance of the Union
C) Economic stake in the South
D) Southern planters owed $300 million to bankers and creditors in North
E) Textile mills need cotton
F) By 1850, growing number of “free-soilers”, including Lincoln
TIPPECANOE AND TYLER TOO!
I. President Tyler
A) William Henry Harrison dies after one month in office
1. Whig figurehead now gone
B) Virginian Tyler becomes president
2. A Democrat in Whig clothing
II. “His Accidency”, the “Executive Ass”
A) Whig financial reform
1. end independent treasury
2. “Fiscal bank”
3. “Fiscal Corporation”
B) Expelled by Whigs
III. Tariffs
A) Whigs wanted a high tariff
1. would also give money from sale of public lands to the states for internal improvements
2. Tyler vetoes: Tyler a believer in states’ rights
B) Tariff of 1842: 32%
1. money kept by federal government
IV. “Third War with Britain”
A) War of words
B) Pro-British federalists died out leaving Jacksonian democrats
C) American culture derided by British
D) U.S. states defaulted on loans from British
E) Incidents
1. Caroline: American ship carrying supplies to insurgents in Canada attacked and sunk by
British force
2. Creole: American ship taken over by 130 Virginia slaves
a) Slaves offered asylum by British officials in the Bahamas
F) Aroostook War, 1842
1. Disputed land along Maine, Canada border
2. Local militias fought
3. Maine boundary settlement
MANIFEST DESTINY (1840s-1850s)
- Belief that God destined the American people and democracy to spread over the continent
- “Reannexation of Texas”
- “Reoccupation of Oregon”
I. Texas
A) Danger zone for the U.S.
1. Foreign influence in Texas
a) Texas needed protection against Mexico, so negotiated with Britain and France
B) Whig fears of feeding “slave power” with another slave state
C) Texas invited to become state 28 of the US in a joint resolution
II. Oregon
A) Oregon Trail
1. 2000 mile trek from St. Louis, MO
B) Oregon Fever
1. Americans and British peacefully cohabit
2. 1840s: American population multiplied in Oregon
3. “Fifty-four forty or fight!”: disagreement over boundary line
C) 49 degrees: 1846 under President Polk, British offer compromise boundary at the 49th line
1. Senate accepts
JAMES K. POLK
I. Election of 1844
A) Dark horse: James K. Polk for the Democrats
B) Henry Clay for the Whigs
C) Liberty Party (antislavery) took ~62,000 votes from Clay
II. Polk’s Four Point Program
1) Lower the tariff
a) Walker Tariff 1842: lowers from 32% to 25%
- Successful: followed by economic boom and heavy imports
2) Restore independent treasury
a) Done in 1846
3) Settle Oregon controversy
4) Acquire California
III. California
A) Relations with Mexico
1. Texas boundary dispute
a) US: the Rio Grande or the Nueces River?
b) Mexico regards Texas as temporarily in revolt
2. Mexico owed US ~$3 million: defaulted
3. Rumor: Great Britain about to buy California
a) Polk offers $25 million to Mexico for the land
b) Mexico refuses to listen to “insulting” proposition
B) By Force
1. General Zachary Taylor sent to disputed border in Texas
2. Wants to declare war b/c
a) unpaid claims
b) rejection of listening to US envoy’s $25 million proposition
C) Bloodshed
1. Mexican army attacks General Taylor: 16 Americans killed or wounded
2. Polk: “Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed
American blood on American soil.”
a) “Conscience Whigs”
- Lincoln’s Spot Resolutions
- “Polk the Mendacious”
D) Mexican-American War
1. Zachary Taylor proved an able general
2. California Bear Flag Republic: declared by Captain John C. Fremont
3. Most battles won by US
4. Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
a) American gains:
- Texas to California and up towards Oregon
b) Mexican gains
\
- $15 million
5. Effects
a) “Colossus of the North”
- Turning point in relationship with Latin America
b) Slavery issue rises again
-Wilmot Proviso
 Ban slavery in all territories gained from Mexico
 Never passed Senate, but symbolizes slavery issue
SLAVE STATE OR FREE STATE
I. Slavery in the Territories
A) US balanced with 15 slave states and 15 free states
B) Agitation for abolition of slavery in DC
II. Underground Railroad
A) Assisted runaway slaves from South to North
B) Chain of “stations” (antislavery homes) through which “passengers (slaves) were led by “conductors
(abolitionists) to freedom in Canada
1. Harriet Tubman: over 300 slaves freed
III. Popular Sovereignty
A) General Lewis Cass: Democratic candidate for president
B) People of the territory decide whether to be a slave state or a free state
C) Problems?
IV. Election of 1848
A) General Taylor
1. Whig candidate for President in 1848
2. “Hero of Buena Vista”
3. Antislavery men in North distrust both Taylor and Cass
B) Democratic candidate: General Cass
C) Free Soil Party
1. Appealed to all types
a) Democrats angry at Polk for Oregon compromise
b) Northerners who didn’t want to share new territories with blacks
c) Conscience Whigs
D) President Taylor
FREE SOIL CALIFORNIA
I. California gold rush
A) 49ers: many lawless men and women
II. Free Soil California: California admitted as a free state
A) South threatened secession
B) Compromise: North concede to fugitive slave law and in return South will allow California as free state
1. Presented by Daniel Webster in Seventh of March Speech (1850)
C) Reactions:
1. Free-soilers and abolitionists: Webster a Benedict Arnold
2. Young northern politicians: interested in purifying nation, not uniting it
a) “higher law” than the Constitution
3. President Taylor: ready to veto compromise and send troops
III. Compromise of 1850
A) President Taylor died; Vice President Millard Fillmore now President and signs Henry Clay’s Compromise
1. California a free state
2. Slave trade abolished in DC
3. Texas gets $10 million for loss of New Mexico
4. Slavery in New Mexico and Utah: popular sovereignty
5. Fugitive Slave law strengthened
IV. Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
A) Called “the bloodhound Bill”
1. Slaves could not testify on their own behalf
2. Denied a jury trial
3. Federal commissioner handling cases receives $5 if freed, $10 if not freed
4. Northerners helping slaves fined or jailed
B) Reaction in the North
1. “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad
Abolitionists.”
2. “Man-Stealing Law” hated in the North and drove many passive moderates to antislavery
C) Legacy
1. Closes off land to slavery
a) Southerners look South to Latin America and Caribbean
2. 1848: treaty with New Granada for American transit across isthmus
a) Clayton-Bulwer Treaty: avoids conflict with Great Britain
3. Cuba
a) Ostend Manifesto
- US would pay $120 million to Spain or justified in wresting it away
- Secret, but leaked
- Northern free-soilers outraged
- President Pierce withdraws manifesto
AMERICA IN ASIA
-With California and Oregon, the U.S. now a "Pacific Power"
I. China
A) Opium War: Great Britain gains trading rights
B) Treaty of Wanghia
1. Caleb Cushing sent by President Tyler
2. Trade rights as "most favored nation" status
II. Japan
A) US Commodore Matthew Perry sent by President Fillmore
B) Threats and gifts
C) Treaty of Kanagawa (1854)
1. Shipwrecked sailors, coaling rights, diplomatic relations
III. Railroad
A) Issue of transportation of California and Oregon
B) Southern route the best but through Mexico
1. Gadsden Purchase, 1853
2. South can claim the railroad
C) Stephen Douglas's Scheme
1. Senator of Illinois with investment in Chicago real estate
2. Wants to offset Gadsden Purchase with northern Pacific railroad (starting in Chicago)
a) needs Nebraska
KANSAS-NEBRASKA SCHEME
I. Territory of Nebraska split into two
A) Nebraska and Kansas
B) Slavery status determined by popular sovereignty
C) Problem?
II. Kansas-Nebraska Act
A) Northern Reaction
1. Bad faith of southerners regarding the Missouri Compromise
2. Fugitive Slave Law dead
a) Future compromise difficult
3. Growing antislavery sentiment in North
III. Election of 1852
A) Democratic Party candidate: Franklin Pierce
1. A pro-southern northerner
B) Whigs choose Winfield Scott (war hero) and platform praised Compromise of 1850
1. Northern antislavery Whigs: "we accept the candidate but spit on the platform"
2. Southern Whigs: accepted platform, but spit on the candidate
C) Results
1. Democrats win: President Pierce
2. End of the Whig Party
a) marks the end of a national party
TOWARDS DISUNION
I. Republican Party
A) Midwest offspring of Kansas-Nebraska Act
B) Moral protest against spread of slavery and southern power in federal government
1. Included former Whigs, disgruntled Democrats, Free-Soilers, Know-Nothings and others who were against
the Act
C) Spread east quickly
D) Within 2 years of formation, a Republican became Speaker of the House
E) Hodgepodge group of people, but a NORTHERN party
II. "the book that made this great war"
A)Uncle Tom's Cabin: Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote after the Fugitive Slave Law
1. "God wrote it"
B)Influenced many in the North, Great Britain and France
III. Bleeding Kansas
A) Most moving to Kansas were northern pioneers who wanted land
B) Some Northern abolitionists and free-soilers
1. New England Emigrant Aid Company
C) 1860: only 2 slaves in all of Kansas Territory
D) Kansas Territorial Legislature 1855
1. Pro-slavery Missouri residents crossed border and voted often
2. Pro-slavery government at Shawnee Mission
3. Free-soiler government in Topeka
4. Free-soil town Lawrence, burned by pro-slavery faction
E) Civil War in Kansas
1. John Brown: fanatical free-soiler/abolitionist
2. With followers, hacks 5 men to death at Pottawatomie Creek
a) retaliation for burning of Lawrence
F) Lecompton Constitution
1. 1857: Kansas can apply for statehood
2. Pro-slavery leaders draft Constitution
a) Either way, slavery can exist in Kansas
b) President Buchanan approves: under influence of Southern Democrats
3. Antislavery residents boycott vote
4. Democratic Senator Douglas decries fraudulent vote
a) Compromise: vote for entire Lecompton Constitution
b) Kansas votes NO
IV. Democratic Party
A) A party across geographical lines
B) Democrat Douglas lost support of South and President Buchanan alienates Democrats in the North
C) One remaining national party becomes divided
V. "Bully" Brooks (1856)
A) Senator Sumner of MA condemned proslavery men, including all of South Carolina
B) Congressman Brooks of South Carolina beats Sumner in the Senate Chamber
VI. Dred Scott
A) Slave in Illinois sued master for freedom
1. Based on long residence on free soil
B) Legal case turns into political issue
C) The Ruling
1. Scott a black slave, so not a citizen; cannot sue in a federal court
2. Slave is private property, so can be taken into any territory and remain a slave (5 th Amendment)
3. Banning slavery in territories unconstitutional
D) Northern defiance against the ruling
VII. John Brown
A) Harpers Ferry
1. John Brown's plan: invade South, incite slave uprising, establish black free state
2. Money from abolitionists
3. Attacked federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry and killed 7 innocent men
4. Plan failed; captured by US marines
B)"God's Angry Man"
1. John Brown convicted of murder and treason
2. "I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose…"
3. Northerners outraged at his execution
4. Southerners concluded all abolitionists were as crazy and violent as Brown
VIII. Panic of 1857
A) California gold inflates currency
B) Crimean War in Russia increases grain demand which led to speculation in land, railroads, etc.
C) "Bread or Death"
1. North: 5,000 businesses failed in one year; unemployment and hunger
2. South: Cotton prices favorable, so less affected; belief that cotton is king and economy of south stronger than
that of the north
D) Tariff of 1857
1. Before panic, treasury had surplus, so lowered tariff to 20%
2. After panic, many northern manufacturers, mostly Republicans, blamed economic woes on low tariff
3. Homestead Act 1860 vetoed by President Buchanan
IX. Illinois Senate Race of 1858
A) Democrat Douglas vs. Republican Abraham Lincoln ("Honest Abe")
B) Kansas-Nebraska Act
C) Lincoln-Douglas Debates
1. Both talented orators
2. Seven debates
3. Freeport Question: After the Dred Scott decision, if a territory votes slavery down, who will prevail? The
Court or the people?
4. Freeport Doctrine: If people vote slavery down, legislatures would have to pass laws to protect slavery.
Legislatures won't do so in the face of popular opposition
D) Senator "Little Giant"
1. Douglas splinters Democratic party
a) Opposition to Lecompton Constitution of Kansas
b) Defiance of the Supreme Court at Freeport
ELECTION OF 1860
I. Deeply Divided
A) Democrats from North elect Stephen Douglas as candidate
1. Platform: popular sovereignty
B) Democrats from South elect John Breckinridge as candidate
1. Platform: extend slavery and annex Cuba
C) Constitutional Union Party
1. "Do Nothing" or "Old Gentleman's" Party
2. Platform: maintain the Union
a) "The Union, the Constitution, and the Enforcement of Laws"
3. Compromise candidate: John Bell
D) Republican Party
1. Abraham Lincoln as candidate
2. "High Old Abe" to his party; "baboon" and "abolitionist" who would split the Union, to the South
3. Lincoln: hated slavery, but not outright abolitionist
a) favored cash compensation for freed slaves
b) kept quiet to avoid new antagonisms
4. Platform: Attractive to most non-southern groups
a) Free-soilers: non-extension of slavery
b) Northern manufacturers: protective tariff
c) Immigrants: keep their rights
d) Northwest: the Pacific railroad
e) West: internal improvements by federal
government
f) Farmers: free homesteads
II. Secessionists
A) Majority of Supreme Court southern
B) Republicans did not control Congress
III. Confederate States of America
A) South Carolina convention voted unanimously to secede
B) Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas follow within six weeks
1. Lame duck period
C) Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas within six months
D) President Jefferson Davis
IV. Crittenden Amendments
A) Compromise by the North to appease the South
1. Slavery protected in all southern territories
B) Lincoln rejected the amendments on principle
1. Could not yield to slavery
2. Elected on a platform opposing its extension
V. Farewell to the Union
A) Alarmed by loss of political balance
B) Tired of Abolitionists and northern interference
1. Underground Railroad, John Brown
C) Self-determination
D) Secessionists confident they would be unopposed
1. Northern manufacturers dependent on cotton and markets
a) "The North without us would be a motherless calf, bleating about, and die of mange and starvation"
2. Bankers owed money by southerners