©CopyrightDevonHansenAtchison 1Lecture 2, The.docx

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison
1
Lecture 2, The Early National Period: Politics, Government,
Expansion and
Conflict
Contents
I. Growing a Stronger Federal Government
............................................................................... 2
II. International Problems
...............................................................................................
.............. 8
III. The War of 1812
...............................................................................................
................. 10
IV. Madison and the Economy
............................................................................... ................
.. 15
V. Westward Migration
...............................................................................................
............... 18
VI. Cultural Developments
...............................................................................................
....... 20

Important Terms and People (in order of
appearance): Industrial Revolution;
Francis Cabot Lowell; Eli Whitney; Cotton Gin; Steamboat;
Napoleon Bonaparte; Lewis and
Clark; James Monroe; Louisiana Purchase; Merchant Marine;
Continental System; Embargo Act
of 1807; James Madison; Non-Intercourse Act; Northwest
Territory; Assimilate; Tecumseh;
Spanish Florida; USS Constitution; William Henry Harrison;
Andrew Jackson; Fort Henry; “the
Star Spangled Banner”; Treaty of Ghent; Second Bank of the
United States; The Lowell Mills;
National Road; Cotton Economy; Public Schools; Second Great
Awakening; the “era of good
feelings”
Instructions for reading this lecture: This lecture is
broken into the chronologic or
thematic sections shown above in the Table of Contents. I have
done this to make it easier to
follow the information being presented. Please also note the
list of Important Terms and People
that show up directly below the Table of Contents; this list
provides a guide for terms and people
you should be familiar with once you have completed reading
the lecture. There may be
instances in which you desire more information regarding an
important term or person; I have
hyperlinked useful websites throughout this lecture to important
terms or people that you can
follow up on and read if you would like more information (these
hyperlinks show up in bright
blue and when you click on them, they should direct you to the
appropriate website).

Additionally, there are images throughout with captions, to help
you better visualize the
information you are reading, as well as film clips that you can
watch via YouTube (these
hyperlinks to YouTube show up in maroon and when you click
on them, they should direct you
to the clip on YouTube).
2
Last time we talked about the drafting of the American
Constitution, as well as some of
the controversies that came out of both the drafting of this new
Constitution and the
implementation of this new Constitution. We also covered the
first presidencies in the new,
independent America. In this lecture, we’re going to continue
talking about the Early National
period, the name given to that period during which Americans
attempted to stand on their own
two feet, create a viable government and define what it meant to
be an American. We’ll not only
continue examining Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, particularly
the growth of the federal

government and the nation that occurred during his tenure, we’ll
also look at the international
problems that culminated in the War of 1812. After the War of
1812 ended, the United States
found itself continuing its path of expansion and growing
strength and we’ll spend the second
half of lecture looking at the economy, westward expansion and
cultural change in the post-War
of 1812 world.
I. Growing a Stronger Federal Government
We left off last time with a discussion of Thomas Jefferson—
you’ll remember that as a
Republican, Jefferson was most interested in two things: first, a
small federal government that
did not take strong action in the public realm; and second, a
country free of dirty industrial
towns—instead, Thomas Jefferson envisioned an agrarian, self-
sufficient nation.
Well, unfortunately for Thomas Jefferson, his hopes of
maintaining that agrarian nation
with little industrialization were shattered during the Early
National Period. This was largely
because while Americans were fighting the American
Revolution, another revolution was

occurring in England: the industrial revolution. This industrial
revolution replaced hand-
operated tools with power-driven machines, allowing
manufacturing to take place at a much
quicker rate. This changed society and the economy
dramatically in England, and during the
3
early nineteenth century these changes began to affect America,
as well. At first, America
imported technological advances from Europe. For example,
Francis Cabot Lowell, who would
later open the first successful American textile factory, actually
went over to England from 1810-
1812 and while he was there he secretly made drawings of
British spinning mills (he was a spy!)
to bring back home.
But quickly the US began coming up with technological
advances of their own. In 1793,
Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which allowed seeds to be
quickly removed from cotton,

Figure 1: The Cotton Gin1
saving laborers a good deal of time and hard work, and making
cotton a much more popular and
profitable crop in the south. And that sneaky Francis Cabot
Lowell perfected the technology he
had stolen from England and opened his first textile mill in
1814.
Transportation in America also changed in the first years of the
Early National Period,
most notably with the development of the steamboat, which was
the first harnessing of steam
power. This would lead in later years, to the use of steam for
the powering of locomotives and
factory machines, but in the early years of the 1800s, the
steamboat allowed for goods to be
shipped from river port to river port quickly, changing the face
of trade and distribution of goods.
1 From
http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/12700/12718/cottongin_12718_m
d.gif

4
Toll roads were also laid, allowing carriages to travel longer
distances than had been
possible before, adding to the ease with which goods and people
could now be transported.
Though America remained largely agrarian in this period, the
forces of industrialization and
modernization were at work and they would have dramatic
effects on America’s future. So
while agrarianism remained alive during Thomas Jefferson’s
presidency, it was slowly replaced
by industry throughout the years of the Early National Period.
It wasn’t just the industrialization of the nation that shattered
Jefferson’s dreams,
however. Indeed, just as Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a small,
agrarian nation eventually
crumbled, so too did his dreams for a small federal government.
Largely, it was the actions of
French military and political leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, that
began to unravel Jefferson’s
dreams of a federal government that did not act outside of its
limited Constitutional powers.
Napoleon was a man with a plan—he wanted France to regain

its place as a superpower in the
world, and he believed that the most logical step in doing this
would be to restore French power
in the New World. After the French and Indian War in the
1760s, France had ceded a great deal
of their territory in America to the British (territory that would
become the US after the
Revolutionary War) and another set of territory to Spain.
Napoleon was interested in getting
those Spanish-held lands that were once the territory of France
back in his hands, those lands
west of the Mississippi. Spain signed a treaty with France in
the early 1800s (Spain signed the
treaty in exchange for a promise by Napoleon that he would not
attack Spain and that Napoleon
would provide land to the Spanish monarch’s son-in-law),
giving France back the territory of
Louisiana, including almost all of the lush Mississippi Valley
and the popular shipping port of
New Orleans.

5
This treaty with Spain was a secret, though; Napoleon obviously
didn’t want Jefferson to
know of his plan to create a French empire in America, but
Jefferson soon heard rumors about
France’s treaty with Spain and this did not make him happy. In
fact, Jefferson was
simultaneously interested in this land and even sent explorers
Lewis and Clark out to explore
Figure 2: A Map from the Lewis & Clark
Expedition2
the territory. But when Napoleon got his hands on the land,
Jefferson became upset that France
was trying to set up shop in the United States.
2 From http://lewis-clark.org/content/content-
article.asp?ArticleID=2833
6
To make matters worse, soon after Napoleon’s secret treaty with
Spain, American ships

were forbidden from transferring goods at the New Orleans port.
The Port of New Orleans was
one of the most commercially significant ports (if not the most
commercially significant port) in
America, so when American ships were forbidden from trading
there, Jefferson went from
unhappy to livid. Many traders and American citizens who had
heard about this outrageous blow
to American commerce called for Jefferson to do something to
reopen the New Orleans port to
American merchants.
Jefferson really didn’t want to go to war with France, but he
didn’t want to lose political
support by doing nothing. What Jefferson did was pretty smart,
then. He sent James Monroe to
Paris to try and get France to sell New Orleans to the American
government (Monroe was
authorized to spend up to ten million dollars on New Orleans
and part of Florida). While
Monroe was en route to France, however, the situation changed
dramatically. The French colony
of Saint Dominique (present-day Haiti) was in the throes of a
massive slave uprising; Napoleon

saw his dreams of a new French Empire in the Americas
crumbling and offered instead to sell
Figure 3: The Louisiana Purchase3
3 From
http://rhapsodyinbooks.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/la-
purchase-map.jpg
7
America all of the Louisiana territory. With a price tag of just
fifteen million dollars, Jefferson
and his negotiators jumped on the chance to gain so much
territory for the U.S. and agreed to the
Louisiana Purchase.
Jefferson had mixed emotions about the purchase. On the one
hand, he was worried that
he had overstepped his constitutional authority by agreeing to
purchase this territory. On the
other hand, and he got a lot of support for this, he was really
pleased at how good a deal America
had gotten on the land and he was excited that he was able to

avoid war with France and come
out on top. To appease his fears that he was overstepping his
constitutional authority, his
advisers convinced him that since the president had treaty-
making powers, purchasing Louisiana
under a treaty with France was okay. In late 1803, Louisiana
officially became an American
territory and the territory was divided up into a number of
regions that would eventually become
states.
As I said, some would argue that Jefferson’s purchase of the
Louisiana territory was
actually the behavior of a large government—that he had
overstepped his constitutional rights as
President—and Jefferson probably would have agreed. He
worried continuously that he had
done too much and so, once the territory became a part of
America, he didn’t put any sort of
governmental structure in place in this region. Despite this lack
of governmental control on the
Louisiana Territory, there was great curiosity about what this
untamed region held. As I said
earlier, Jefferson had sent famed explorers Meriweather Lewis
and William Clark to explore the

newly acquired lands in early 1803; their expedition was tasked
with crossing the continent all
the way to the Pacific Ocean and, along the way, write down
geographical facts about the region
and try to set up potential trade situations with the native
populations they came across. In three
years, Lewis and Clark traversed the continent and were able to
bring back elaborate information
8
about the geography and culture of the regions they traveled
through. Jefferson’s explorers and
the journal entries they wrote, made the west sound exciting,
vast, lush and full of opportunity,
and these factors would be very important in future westward
expansion in the coming years.
But as a result of having a large area of land with relatively
little federal control, as a result of
having what was still a fairly small, decentralized government,
the nineteenth century opened up
with the United States finding it necessary to establish their

legitimacy as a “stable and united
nation,” both at home and abroad.4
II. International Problems
As Thomas Jefferson strove to demonstrate how stable the US
was in the eyes of the
international powers, he found that once again (and much to his
chagrin), he was required to
expand the role of the federal government. In particular,
Napoleon continued to be a pain in
Thomas Jefferson’s backside, even after the Louisiana Purchase
situation. During Jefferson’s
tenure as president, the United States had created a strong and
powerful merchant marine force
that handled very profitable trade between the US, the West
Indies and Europe. But during the
European Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century, Napoleon
threw a wrench in this trade
system. In 1805, when England almost totally destroyed
Napoleon’s navy, Napoleon decided to
get back at the British economically by implementing the
Continental System. The Continental
System essentially forbid anyone who wanted to trade with
France to trade with England, too (I
guess he thought France was more popular!). How do you think

Britain responded? Right,
they said that anyone who wanted to trade with Britain could
not also trade with France. The US
4 Alan Brinkley, The Unfinished Nation: A
Concise History of the American People
(McGraw Hill: New York, 1996),
192.
9
was obviously bummed about this—we wanted to trade with
both countries, but instead were
forced to either take sides or cut off trade completely.
President Jefferson, remember, a guy who didn’t believe the
President should act outside
of his executive powers, decided to take the action that would
least likely lead to war—past
incidents between the US and the British navy over controlling
trade on the seas had nearly led
to war between the US and England and Napoleon had already
previously demonstrated that he
couldn’t be trusted. So Jefferson opted for total neutrality and

put into place a Congressional act,
known as the Embargo Act of 1807. The embargo forbid
American ships to go and trade with
any foreign port in the world. But can you think of any
problems with a set-up like this?
While this embargo allowed the United States to avoid war, it
also essentially destroyed
America’s international trade, launching a serious depression
through much of the country which
hit merchants and shipowners in the northeast the hardest.
These men, many of them Federalists,
were convinced that Jefferson had acted out of his powers, had
acted unconstitutionally, and, the
next year (1808), during the presidential election, a large
Federalist faction was elected to
Congress.
Though the new president elected in 1808 was a Republican (a
man named James
Madison who we’ll talk about in just a few minutes), the new
Federalist Congress worked
Figure 4: President James Madison5
5 From

http://www.archives.gov/nhprc/annotation/march-
2002/images/james-madison.jpg
10
quickly to reverse Jefferson’s Embargo Act. They did so by
passing the Non-Intercourse Act in
1810, which only restricted American trade with Britain and
France. A year later, trade with
France was reopened when France promised to stop violating
US commercial rights on the seas.
There were still problems with the British, however, most
notably over Britain’s odious
policy of forcibly boarding US navy ships that were patrolling
the seas to protect commerce and
forcibly taking away those suspected of deserting the hellish
British navy in favor of the kinder
US navy. The US continued to prohibit trade with England as a
result of England’s awful
policies and tensions between the two countries grew
continually worse.
When Thomas Jefferson left the presidency in 1809, he was
replaced by his secretary of

state, James Madison. Madison had been a founding father, an
author of the Federalist Papers,
and one of the authors of the Bill of Rights, so this guy
definitely had his pulse on what
Americans were thinking. And it’s a good thing because
America had to deal with an
increasingly poor relationship with Great Britain, with problems
that had started while Madison
was still Thomas Jefferson’s secretary of state, and that would
eventually culminate in the War
of 1812.
III. The War of 1812
The War of 1812 came as a result of the bad relations with
Britain on the seas, coupled with a
series of events occurring in America that would spell eventual
war between the US and Britain.
Indeed, as the 19th century opened up, the first of these events
actually started between the US
government and Natives living in the Northwest Territory. Let
me briefly set the stage for what
would become the War of 1812. At the start of Jefferson’s
presidency, many white settlers
wanted access to fertile land in the Northwest territory,
particularly Indiana and Illinois. But,

unfortunately for these would-be settlers, someone already lived
there—Native Americans! Well
11
President Jefferson told the Natives of the Northwest Territory
that they could either assimilate
and begin using the land the way white farmers did or give up
their claims to the land and move
to lands west of the Mississippi River. Some Natives moved,
others became assimilated farmers,
but still others were outraged by this demand that they
assimilate or move.
These natives wanted to rebel, but were powerless against the
US military that would surely
be sent to squash their rebellion. Or at least it seemed that way
until an unlikely ally stepped
in—British subjects living in Canada. Back during the
Revolutionary War, there had been many
colonists who stayed loyal to the crown—well, after the
Revolutionary War, many Loyalists (as
they were called during the Revolution) left America and

migrated to Canada, where they joined
other British subjects who had long lived in Canada.
Though war had been narrowly avoided with the British over
who would have control of
trade on the seas back during the first ten years of the century,
Canadian Brits worried that war
could happen at any time, and they decided to work to build up
a defense to protect themselves
in case America and Britain went to war (rightly fearing that
Canada might become a desired
territory for land-hungry Americans). Their first matter of
business was to renew their
friendships with Indian tribes and they soon began providing
their new
Indian allies with much-needed supplies. This influx of new
supplies
and weapons allowed the Indians to start an uprising and they
did so
around 1810, under the leadership of a remarkable native named
Tecumseh.6 With Tecumseh at the helm, Indians began banding
together, realizing that unity was the only thing that could save
their

6 From http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-
media/60/61860-004-B321DAFB.jpg
Figure 5: Tecumseh
12
culture and their land.
Fighting was intense between Indians and western settlers, and
the U.S. army was
constantly ready to fight. But the native armies were able to
use a guerilla style warfare to attack
white settlements and frighten or kill settlers. The US
government and military quickly became
convinced that the only way to really cure the “Indian problem”
was to drive the British and their
military supplies out of Canada and, thus, completely out of
North America.
And land-hungry settlers also saw the eviction of the British
from Canada as a good
thing—they saw this as a way to further increase American
land; they planned to annex the
province as soon as they kicked the Brits out. Finally, still

others began looking to another new
territory for possible acquisition, Spanish Florida (which had
not been part of the Louisiana
Purchase). Not only was Spanish Florida a nice chunk of land,
including present-day Florida,
Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, as well as some important
rivers, Americans also found the
region to be problematic. Runaway slaves escaped there and
Indians launched raids on the North
from there. This desire to bring Florida into the United States
provided yet another reason to go
to war with the British—Spain was Britain’s ally at this time, so
war with Britain could justify
taking Spanish land.
Congressional elections in 1810 saw a number of pro-war
candidates rising to power and
by 1812, President James Madison had agreed with the pro-war
Congressmen and declared war
on Britain in June, explaining that England’s policies on the
seas were hindering US trade and
that the British needed to be put in their place. Once war was
declared, the US army launched an
attack on British Canada. Despite the fact that American forces
outnumbered Canadian forces,

the US army suffered astounding losses in Canada.
But on the seas, ships like the USS Constitution—Old
Ironsides—fared a bit better
13
Figure 6: Old Ironsides7
against British naval forces sent from England to fight the war.
And in the Great Lakes region,
important victories were also secured: General William Henry
Harrison defeated British,
Canadian and Indian forces, even killing the great Native
leader, Tecumseh. And on the
Southern front, in Spanish Florida and New Orleans, the U.S.
was doing great. A Tennessee
militaman, Andrew Jackson, who you’ll hear about in a lot more
detail over the next couple of
lectures, worked to destroy the Creek Indians in Florida and
gain control of the Florida territory.
But the British weren’t about to give up just because American
forces had subdued Indian

forces—instead they sent over more troops and prepared to
force the US to surrender. On
August 24, 1814, the British made perhaps their boldest move
when they captured the capital, at
Washington, and burnt the White House down.
7 From
http://gonewengland.about.com/library/graphics/oldironsid
es.jpg
14
Figure 7: The British Burn the White House
Down8
The United States would prove to be lucky against the British
again, however, and when
the White House-burning British headed from Washington to
Baltimore, American forces were
able to block their approaching ships in the bay, forcing the
British to try to bombard Fort
Henry from a distance. This event in Baltimore inspired lawyer
Francis Scott Key, who was

watching the bombardment of Fort Henry, to compose a poem
titled “The Star-Spangled
Banner,” in honor of a battered American flag he could still see
flying on the fort. When the
British retreated from Baltimore, Key’s poem was set to an
English drinking song and became
the national anthem of the United States. The withdrawal of
British troops from Baltimore
started the unraveling of the British army. Soon thereafter,
American forces pushed back another
British invasion, this time in northern New York, and Andrew
Jackson and his vigilante friends
in the South were victorious in battle against the British in New
Orleans.
And in 1814, the War of 1812 officially came to a close, with
the United States securing
a victory and a peace treaty with the British. This peace
agreement—the Treaty of Ghent—was
8 From
http://www.findingdulcinea.com/docroot/dulcinea/fd_imag
es/news/on-this-day/July-August-08/On-this-Day--British-

Troops-Burn-White-House-and-Capital/news/0/image.jpg
15
signed in late 1814 in Ghent, Belgium. The final treaty
basically just ended the hostilities
between the British and Americans with many original demands
being abandoned. For example,
the Americans gave up on their demands that the British cede
all of Canada to the U.S. The
British gave up on their demands that the U.S. create an Indian
buffer state in the Northwest.
After the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, relations between
America and Great Britain improved
dramatically. Trade opened back up and the British released
troops who were guarding the
Canadian-American border.
But for the Natives, the war’s conclusion was devastating.
Though the Treaty of Ghent
specified that the U.S. would restore any lands seized by white
Americans during the fighting,

this provision was never enforced. Likewise, the Indian buffer
zone that had been an original
British demand wasn’t created. And with the British allies gone
from the border, and with the
death of Tecumseh during the war, Natives no longer banded
together or had much capacity to
fight.
IV. Madison and the Economy
America was in for some major changes at the end of the War
of 1812. Though President
Madison had been elected on a platform of small government
and little industrialization—like
his predecessor Thomas Jefferson—by the war’s end, he began
changing his tune. First off, the
war had convinced Madison that the federal government needed
to have more control over the
economy and so, in 1815, Madison changed his opinion on what
had been a long-standing debate
over the Bank of the United States. The bank’s first charter had
expired in 1811 and hadn’t been
renewed yet, but in 1815, interest in the bank was revived. The
war had pointed out to many,
including former bank opponent, President Madison, that a
national bank was necessary for a

smoothly functioning government, particularly a government
mired in a war. The biggest
16
problem was that when the Bank’s charter had expired in 1811,
new state banks popped up and
began printing and issuing large quantities of paper money,
even though most of the banks didn’t
have the gold or silver supply to back that paper money. And
these state banks weren’t issuing a
standard form of paper money—they were just printing
whatever struck their fancy, so all of the
sudden there were a bunch of different kinds of paper money
floating around, making currency
really confusing.
Well, Madison and Congress set out to correct this problem by
chartering a new, second
Bank of the United States in 1816. This new Bank of the United
States was essentially the
same as the first one, but this bank was bigger and more
powerful. It had more money in its

coffers and could force those state notes out of business with
it’s guaranteed form of paper
money (the Bank of the United States couldn’t tell the states not
to print money—that decision
was in state’s hands. But it could put forth a more powerful,
guaranteed note that merchants
respected, putting state notes out of circulation—which is
exactly what happened).
The government was also called in to deal with another postwar
economic issue, in the
form of protecting industry. The government was called in
because during the war, industry and
manufacturing had boomed. Imports from Britain were blocked
and this allowed domestic
industries to flourish and grow. Because of this, textile
manufacturers began cropping up
everywhere, meeting the demand for cloth. The reason
American cloth was in such high demand
in this period was that America could finally do it cheaply—
because of our sneaky spy from
earlier, Francis Cabot Lowell, who was able to open his
successful spinning and weaving mill
(the Lowell Mills) during the war. Others quickly followed
suit.

17
Figure 8: The Lowell Mills9
But when the War of 1812 drew to a close, as British traders
began swarming the region
again, many manufacturers who had opened up shop when times
were good, when demand was
high, many of these manufacturers got worried and begged for
the US government to protect
their fragile, new companies. And the government didn’t
disappoint these folks—in 1816,
Congress passed a tariff law that limited competition from
abroad on cotton cloth and other
items—again, pretty “big government” stuff coming from
Madison.
Protective tariffs weren’t the only things manufacturers were
clamoring for. They also
pressured the government to pour some money into the nation’s
transportation system, because a
transportation system would give manufacturers better access to
raw materials and far away

markets. Accordingly, the federal government began the
construction of a national road that
9 From
http://www.kirkwood.k12.mo.us/parent_student/khs/plattes
/topics5and6/topics5and615.jpg
18
went from Virginia to Pennsylvania. Construction lasted from
1816 to 1818 and connected a
river port to a manufacturing haven. The road helped spur more
trade and even provided
manufacturers with a cheaper way to ship their goods across the
mountains.
V. Westward Migration
One of the reasons there was so much interest in building up
transportation and making
internal improvements in the country was that so many people
had begun migrating west in the
years following the War of 1812. By 1820, nearly 25% of the
white population lived west of the
Appalachian mountain range; just one decade prior, that number

was lower than 15%.10 So why
had people begun migrating west so much in the period after the
War of 1812? Well, the first
reason was that the population had exploded—between the years
of 1800 and 1820, the
population of the United States nearly doubled, increasing from
5.3 million to 9.6 million. Many
people moved into the cities, where numbers of people could be
crammed into small spaces. But
most Americans were still farmers in this period, and for them
the city wasn’t an option. But, the
lands in the East were basically full and in the South, the
plantation system had pretty much
taken over all of the land. So, people began looking to the west
as a new beacon of hope and
land.
At the same time, and this is the second reason why people
began migrating west after
the War of 1812, the west was beginning to look like a pretty
good place to live. In other words,
it didn’t look so scary, so unknown, so full of angry and
powerful natives. You see, the War of
1812 had demonstrated to many potential white settlers that the
Indian problem wasn’t that big

of a problem. If government policy was any indicator, these
settlers saw, they had nothing to
10 Brinkley, 209.
19
worry about because any time a white settler wanted some land,
the government would quickly
break any treaties they might have signed over that land and
push the Indians off, push the
Indians farther west. Settlers accordingly came in vast numbers
to what is now the Midwest
region of the United States. The journey was often very
difficult and setting up a homestead and
surviving in the west was no walk in the park.
On the flipside, however, the west provided settlers with a
sense of community. Some
settlers migrated in bands, and once they found their land, they
would set up stores, churches and
other institutions that fostered community and kinship.
Likewise, since there wasn’t much in the

way of labor assistance—these people wouldn’t really have been
able to afford slaves or
servants—people in the community tried to help each other out
when they could. Neighbors
would help other neighbors build barns, harvest crops, clear
land or, for women, make quilts.
What this eventually led to was the creation of a farm economy
where families of modest size
who all lived in close proximity would grow grain and raise
livestock to sell across the country,
sort of a co-op system.
While these white settlers were establishing their farm
economy in the northwest territory
(in what is now the Midwest) some people were migrating to the
Southwest regions where, rather
than establishing a farm economy, a cotton economy was
developed that was modeled after the
cotton economy of the South (which you’ll read about in much
more detail in a coming lecture).
What this meant was not only that cotton production had spread
to a new region, but also that the
institution of slavery would be migrating. While the first
settlers, those poor whites who did the

hard work of clearing the forest and getting the soil primed,
came without slaves, the wealthy
plantation owners who followed after them and bought this
cleared, primed land, did. These
large planters would make a big show of their caravan to their
new, southwestern land, carrying
20
extravagant and abundant goods and household items, with their
families in carriages. They
often quickly set up elaborate houses to show off their class
status. And with all of this western
growth in both the Midwest and Southwest regions, four new
states were admitted into the Union
in the years immediately following the War of 1812: Indiana in
1816, Mississippi in 1817,
Illinois in 1818, and Alabama in 1819.11
VI. Cultural Developments
As more and more Americans began fanning out over the
countryside, cultural
developments began to take shape, as well. First off, American
education grew during the Early

National Period. More public schools began to open up across
the nation, allowing a greater
number of Americans to learn how to read and write than ever
before. Additionally, it was
during the Early National Period that a new concept emerged,
the concept of Republican
Motherhood. Republican Motherhood effectively said that
women needed to know how to read
and write, and needed instruction in American politics, so that
they could teach their sons about
civics. As a result, female academies sprung up and public
schools expanded their reach to serve
more women.
Perhaps even more notable than this was the cultural
development that occurred in the
arena of religion. In the 1730s and 1740s, a
religious revival that was termed the Great
Awakening, took shape. The First Great
Awakening encouraged people to be more
pious, to focus on their relationship with God
11 Brinkley, 211.

Figure 9: A Second Great Awakening Revival
21
more. However, in the years leading up to and following the
Revolution, attitudes toward
religion began to change once again. The Constitution had
separated church and state, which had
the effect of weakening religious institutions. Likewise, the
ideals of the Revolution and the
Constitution suggested that individual liberty was more
important than religious tradition. The
focus on education and enlightenment of the post-Revolutionary
period also instilled in
Americans a respect for rational, scientific thought, which
directly contradicted religious theory
and religious importance. As a result, Americans of the late
eighteenth century had stopped
going to church. Only about ten percent of white Americans
were church members by the 1790s.
It certainly appeared that the lessons of the First Great
Awakening had been lost.

But starting in 1801, America’s religious sensibilities were
reawakened by a revivalist
wave of religious activity, known as the Second Great
Awakening. So where, exactly, did this
Second Great Awakening come from? What did it tell people
and why did they get so caught up
in it? Well, the Second Great Awakening started out when
conservative religious leaders,
desperate to revitalize their churches and bring people back into
their congregations, began
denouncing dissenters and preaching nationwide. Presbyterians,
Methodists and Baptists sent
preachers to travel the nation, to win recruits for their religions,
and all three religions were
extremely successful in doing so. These traveling preachers
created a revivalist spirit by
mobilizing large numbers of people with their strong and
dramatic preaching style and the huge
meetings they set up to spread their gospel. The basic thrust of
the Second Great Awakening
was this: “Individuals must readmit God and Christ into their
daily lives, must embrace a fervent,
active piety, and must reject the skeptical rationalism that
threatened traditional beliefs.”12 One

12 Brinkley, 176.
22
could express “fervent, active piety,” by attending loud,
exciting meetings, and getting loud and
excited themselves! This was thought to be the only thing to
really keep people accountable
about their religiosity, to really keep people engaged in their
religiosity. The Second Great
Awakening appealed to minorities (who were reminded that
though this world may not be
perfect for them, they—“the meek”—among them slaves,
natives and others, would “inherit the
earth”) and to women most frequently and the nation became
once again participatory in
religiosity.
All of these positive things that were going on in the US after
the War of 1812—the
expanding economy, the growing west, the establishment of new
states, the reemergence of

religiosity, the growth of education—led to a growing spirit of
nationalism in the country, a spirit
of positive thoughts about the government and about the
country. In 1816, a new president,
James Monroe, was elected and the era was dubbed the “era of
good feelings,” because things
in America just seemed to be going the right away. Monroe
included both Northerners and
Southerners in his cabinet, both Federalists and Republicans,
trying to increase the goodwill,
increase the bipartisanship. The economy, with new textile
mills, new production centers and
more cotton, was booming. Additionally, months after Monroe
took office, militiaman Andrew
Jackson was able to force Spain to cede their claim to the
Florida territory to the US—a huge
moment of national pride for America.
But almost immediately after this magnificent diplomatic
accomplishment, things started
to go south in the country. The Era of Good Feelings, it
appeared, were over when the Panic of
1819 struck. But things had been going so well, right? What
happened to cause the Panic of

1819? To that story and to the story of Jacksonian America,
we’ll turn next time.
1
Lecture 4, The Antebellum North
Contents
I. The Market Revolution and the Transportation Revolution,
1820s-1840s ............................................2
II. Northern Industry
...............................................................................................
....................................9
III. Transportation
...............................................................................................
...................................11
IV. Immigration
...............................................................................................
.......................................12
V. The Northwest
...............................................................................................
.......................................14
VI. Women and the Antebellum North
...............................................................................................
...15

A. Abolitionism
...............................................................................................
.....................................17
B. Temperance
...............................................................................................
.......................................21
C. Women’s Rights Movement
...............................................................................................
.............23
appearance): Antebellum Period; Market
Revolution; Transportation Revolution; Erie Canal;
Corporation; Textile Mills; Unions;
Interchangeable Parts; Working Class; Strike; Anti-Immigrant
Sentiment; Native American
Association/ Native American Party/ “Know-Nothing” Party;
Nativist; Abolitionism; William
Lloyd Garrison; The Liberator; American Anti-Slavery Society;
Fugitive Slaves; Boston Female
Anti-Slavery Society; Petition Campaign of 1835; Antislavery
Fairs; Temperance Movement;
Susan B. Anthony; Lucy Stone; Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Amelia
Bloomer; Woman’s State
Temperance Convention; Separate Spheres Ideology; Seneca
Falls Convention; Lucretia Mott;
Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions; Sojourner Truth;
Frances E.W. Harper; Sarah
Redmond
broken into the chronologic or thematic
sections shown above in the Table of Contents. I have done this

to make it easier to follow the information being
presented. Please also note the list of Important Terms and
People that show up directly below the Table of
Contents; this list provides a guide for terms and people you
should be familiar with once you have completed
reading the lecture. There may be instances in which you desire
more information regarding an important term or
person; I have hyperlinked useful websites throughout this
lecture to important terms or people that you can follow
up on and read if you would like more information (these
hyperlinks show up in bright blue and when you click on
them, they should direct you to the appropriate website).
Additionally, there are images throughout with captions, to
help you better visualize the information you are reading, as
well as film clips that you can watch via YouTube
(these hyperlinks to YouTube show up in maroon and when you
click on them, they should direct you to the clip on
YouTube).
2
We talked last time about the presidency of Andrew Jackson, as
well as the state of
politics, the economy and American culture in the period from
1820 through the end of Jackson’s
presidency in 1839. We also focused on the beginning of some
sectional differences between the
North and the South last time and we’re going to be following

those differences for the rest of
the semester as we talk about how the country moved closer and
closer to Civil War. What I’d
like to do today, then, is to begin the first of our lectures about
the antebellum period. The
antebellum period refers to the years preceding the Civil War
(“antebellum” means “before the
war”). Throughout the next three lectures, we’ll be looking
separately at the regions of the
North, the South and the West and we’ll also be spending a
little more time looking at the status
of women and slaves during this period. Today, in our first
lecture on antebellum America, we’ll
be focusing on the North—looking in particular at industry,
transportation, immigration, western
lands and agriculture— and we’ll also be looking at the women
who were making waves in the
North in this period.
I. The Market Revolution and the Transportation
Revolution, 1820s-1840s
But before we do that, we’re first going to take a very brief look
at how the North was
developing in terms of population, transportation, and industry
from the 1820s through the early

1840s, to set the stage for our separate discussions over the
coming lectures of Northern,
Southern and Western development from the 1840s to the 1860s.
In other words, we’ll be
looking at the market revolution and the transportation
revolution, both of which truly began
to set the North apart from the South.
Just to give you an idea of what the American population looked
like in this period, in 1790,
there were 4 million people living in America. By 1820, just
thirty years later, the population
had grown to 10 million, so it had multiplied by two and a half
times. By 1830, the population
3
was at 12 million and by 1840, it was up to 17 million, meaning
that the population had
increased by 7 million inhabitants in just 20 years! And by
1860, America was getting close to
being the largest nation in the world, nipping at the heels of
Germany and France. Pretty

remarkable stuff. The majority of this booming population
lived in new western lands or,
increasingly over the years, in Northern industrial centers.
So what did the world that all of these people lived in look
like? How did the nation deal
with such a rapid increase in the population? Well, disease and
epidemics abounded as the
population started to increase around the turn of the nineteenth
century, but public health
measures were quickly put into place to try and stop these
epidemics. Disease rates slowly
dropped throughout the early nineteenth century as a result, and
mortality rates dropped to an all-
time low. So, the massive population growth that took place in
the first half of the nineteenth
century could partially be accounted for by the fact that fewer
people were dying from
epidemics/ diseases.
But there were other factors involved in the massive population
growth that took place, as
well. The most significant factor was the high birth rate that
emerged in this period—the white
population found its numbers multiplying at a rapid pace. The
population growth was further

aided by a new wave of immigration that took place in the late
1830s and after. Immigration had
been stifled in the first three decades of the nineteenth century
because of wars in Europe and the
difficult financial situations in America, but by the late 1830s,
immigrants from Ireland and other
northern European countries began coming over.
And it should come as no surprise, then, that this population
growth meant that
Americans were looking for their favorite thing: more land.
The population boom caused a great
deal of the new population to migrate to lands in the west.
We’ll be talking in much more detail
4
about this westward migration in the coming lectures, but just
know for now that much of the
population growth was absorbed by new lands in the west.
The rest of the newly enlarged population would turn to cities
as their new place of

inhabitance and the cities grew rapidly both in terms of
population and commerce in the period
from the 1820s to the 1840s. By 1840, one in twelve Americans
lived in a city, which was a
dramatic increase from the turn of the century, when only one
person in thirty was living in a
city. New York City saw the greatest population growth and by
the early 1800s, it was the
Figure 1: Broadway and Trinity Church in
Manhattan, 18301
biggest city in the U.S. You see, New York had a lot going for
it—it had a great harbor, it gave
the city access to the interior lands with the construction of the
Erie Canal (which you’ll read
more about in just a few minutes) in 1825, and the city had
really liberal laws with regard to
commerce, which encouraged merchants, traders, peddlers and
laborers, among others, to move
1 From http://www.nyc-architecture.com/LM/no14.jpg

5
to New York City. (Check out this clip from the documentary,
New York for a great visual of
New York and it’s growth during this period:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPSCef5iQos&list=PL6B43
5B2D9E826797&index=10 ).
So, we have population growth in this period, we have the
growth of cities, and these
things set the stage for a changing economy. With the stage set,
three major developments took
place between 1820 and 1840 that provided the greatest changes
to the American economic
landscape: the proliferation of canals; the creation of railroads;
and the growth of factories.
Interestingly enough, however, these developments all primarily
occurred in the North. Canals
developed as Northern merchants looked for new ways to ship
goods from one place to the next
and the first of the major canals, the Erie Canal, was an
immediate financial success. The
Figure 2: The Erie Canal2
Canal was seen as a major technological advancement and it
meant that goods and people could

travel much faster than ever before. Now, of course, that’s
relatively speaking—it was still a
LONG journey, as you can hear with “The Erie Canal Song”
(click on the link to listen to the
song!).
2 From
http://www.history.rochester.edu/canal/images/1.jpg
6
Railroad lines also became much more common in the North
from the 1820s to the
1840s, allowing more people and more goods to travel to new
places. What kind of impact do
you imagine these two developments would have had on the
North to make the North
different from the South? Both would’ve made the North easier
to travel around, made goods
more available, and encouraged the production of additional
goods (causing a “market

revolution,” which encompasses these new and more available
goods!). Sophisticated
transportation also made the North a more desirable place to
immigrate or migrate to.
The third major economic factor that came into play between
the 1820s and the 1840s
was the growth of the factory system in the North. In the 1820s
and 1830s, business saw rapid
growth as the idea of the corporation was introduced, allowing
businessmen to come together to
make big profits. By the 1830s, corporations were cropping up
all over the North and these
corporations quickly used their massive capital to purchase or
create large manufacturing and
business enterprises.
The rise of the factory system illustrated the major industrial
changes that had been
occurring in the US in the previous 75 years. You may
remember that during the colonial
period, industry was mainly centered around the home. Most
Americans created goods that were
immediately useful and necessary to running the household
economy. People would spin cloth
and make their own clothes, people would create ceramic bowls

and cups, people would make
shovels to deal with their land. But as technology improved,
this type of industry was slowly
replaced with a much larger-scale, consolidated one.
As early as the early 1800s, textile mills popped up for the first
time, like the New
England Lowell Mills we talked about a few lectures ago.
These textile mills of the early 1800s
were incredibly innovative in that they brought all methods of
production under one roof—with
7
the wool spun into thread, and fabric created from that thread
on the premises—and by the 1820s
and 1830s, textile factories were able to make cloth for so cheap
that they replaced the making of
one’s own cloth in the home entirely. Shoes followed closely
behind cloth in the early 1800s,
and by the 1830s, factories for a number of different industries
began cropping up across New
England and the Northern United States. Technology became so

advanced, so rapidly, that
America, for the first time, became the true innovators. Other
countries were now coming to
learn techniques and get new inventions from America, rather
than the other way around.
What this new, expanding factory system meant for the
American people was not just a
cheaper way to make cloth, not just an easier way to have shoes
made, but the factory system
also had the effect of taking more people out of the homes—out
of domestic manufacturing—
and into the factories. In particular, the 1820s and 1830s saw
factory workers coming, not yet
from immigrant populations, as they would in later years, but
instead from native white
populations. Factory owners had to recruit these native
populations to leave their self-sufficient
farms, which were already being overshadowed by cheap farm
goods that could be shipped to
and from various new regions.
They recruited workers, in some cases, by moving an entire
family to a mill, or factory,
town. At these types of factories, mothers, fathers and children
would work together and

produce the factory’s goods. In other cases, and this was more
common—particularly in the
Massachusetts area where textile production had become so
popular and profitable—factories
recruited young, single women to leave their farm families and
move to the factory town. This
was a pretty remarkable development because it truly marked
the first time that women left the
private sphere and were actively pursued to enter wage labor.
These women generally only
worked in the factories for a few years; they usually left once
they had saved up some money,
8
returned to their home town, married and had children. Other
women married men they met in
the factory or in the surrounding town.
Also, these women factory workers were pretty closely looked
after during the 1820s and
1830s. People were obviously worried about putting women to
work in wage labor, a system

that had been decried as corrupt and disgusting in early years,
and many factory owners wanted
to protect the integrity and morality of their female workers via
curfews and strict supervision.
Women, at first, were also paid decent wages and given
appropriate working hours.
Figure 3: Lowell Mill Girls3
But life in the factories wasn’t all good for these female
workers. They often found
working in a more urban, factory life was difficult and strange
compared to their farm lives.
Also, the paternalistic system wherein factory owners protected
the honor and morality of their
female workers, and where they paid fair wages and had women
working reasonable hours,
didn’t last that long. By the 1830s, factory owners began
focusing instead on driving up
production and profits while reducing wages and high living
standards that were costly. Women
workers created unions and went on strike in the 1830s to
combat this, but quickly found that the
employers—the factory owners—were much more powerful,
particularly because they could

3 From
http://www.dover.lib.nh.us/DoverHistory/millgirls.htm
9
replace women who were on strike, women who complained
about their situation (such as the
woman who composed the strike song below), with immigrants
who started coming over in the
1830s and 1840s.
LOWELL MILLS STRIKE SONG
Oh! isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I-
Should be sent to the factory to pine awayand
die?
Oh ! I cannot be a slave,
I will not be a slave,
For I’m so fond of liberty
That I cannot be a slave.
Immigrants from Ireland made up the majority of European
immigrants to America in
this period, and they were seen as a low form of worker—
employers did not feel any obligation

to give them good living or working conditions, to give them
fair wages, as they had with
women. Accordingly, running factories became less costly and
more profitable for owners.
II. Northern Industry
Now that we’ve set the stage for the antebellum period, I’d like
to focus specifically on the
development of the North during the antebellum period. We’ll
start off where we just left off—
looking at industry. The factory owners were focused on
making big profits and by the 1840s,
Northern factories were very financially successful. In 1840,
the US was producing $483 million
worth of manufactured goods; by 1850, that number had jumped
to over $1 billion and in 1860 it
had almost doubled, had almost reached $2 billion. This
northern industry grew rapidly in the
1840s and 1850s because of technological advances, such as
interchangeable parts, which
made for dramatic changes in certain industries, like the
railroad industry and in the factories.
Likewise, around this time, coal was replacing wood as fuel and
that coal could push new steam
engines and harness water power in factories. So, industry was

seeing new technology come in
10
to play that allowed factories to run more smoothly and produce
goods in a more efficient
manner, and, as a result, industry was booming in the North
around the 1840s and 1850s.
One of the immediate results of this industrial growth was the
growing need for factory
workers and that growing need led to the development, in
America, of a large, permanent
working class. These workers came largely from that new
immigrant population who came to
America beginning in the 1830s, a group we’ll talk about a little
later.
Beginning in the 1840s, labor conditions for that working class
got pretty bad. Affordable
places to live were difficult to come by and, as a result, workers
typically lived in horrible slum
apartments in the factory town where they worked. Though
living conditions were bad, the

conditions in the factory were worse: factories were large,
noisy, unsanitary and dangerous.
Workdays were often twelve or fourteen hours long and wages
were going down rather than up,
particularly for women and children.
Workers tried to improve their situation, begging state
governments to set up protective laws
or a maximum-hour workday. Some states—New Hampshire in
1847 and Pennsylvania in
1848—did pass laws that barred employers from making
employees work longer than ten hours a
day without their consent. But what do you think the problem
with a law like this would’ve
been? Laws like this were easily violated—employers could
require that a worker agree to
extended workdays as a condition of their employment and
someone desperate for work would
give the okay.
Other states passed laws limiting the number of hours children
could work, also to ten (can
you imagine children working ten hours a day in the US
today??) and employers were able to
easily circumvent these laws, as well. Workers did gain one
major legal victory in this period

and that was when the Massachusetts court ruled in 1842 that
unions were lawful organizations
11
and that the strike was a lawful weapon. Other state courts
followed suit, giving labor its first
effective bargaining tool. But the union movement, as a whole,
remained extremely weak in this
period and didn’t amount to much, particularly for those
workers who probably needed it the
most. Most labor organization happened among skilled
workers, tradesmen, and admission to
their unions was restricted to male, skilled workers.
Among the unskilled laborers, the development of labor unions
was inhibited by the fact that
new immigrants were often willing to work for lower wages
than the current workers and
because there was such a large influx of immigrants needing
work, employers could just get rid
of a grumbling employee and replace him with a new, desperate
immigrant. Additionally,

industry, and the money behind it, was so powerful in this
period, that it was seemingly
impossible to beat the corporations, to beat industry. Industry
and the money and power it
created just seemed to grow and grow in the North in this
period.
III. Transportation
One factor that fueled this industrial economy was the growth
of transportation and
communication in the North. You know from earlier in this
lecture that America had already
implemented a canal system that changed the face of domestic
trade and production. You also
know that the railroads started to develop between the 1820s
and 1830s—not in a way that would
rival the canals, but the groundwork for a powerful network had
been laid. Businessmen had
been experimenting with steam-powered locomotives, they had
laid railroad tracks—now all
they needed to do was to connect independent lines and try to
reach out to some more inland,
rural areas.
Well, that happened from the 1840s to the 1860s in the North,
particularly in the Northeast,

where railroad use—for both human and product
transportation—would soon far exceed canal
12
use. The money for building these railroads came from a variety
of sources. Private investors—
those men who had already been thinking about and
experimenting with railroads in the early
years— poured money into more railroad development. Local
and state governments also
contributed, realizing that having a railroad could only help
their region out. Even more
important than these two investing groups was the federal
government. Politicians who had seen
the potential of the railroads convinced Congress to grant
federal land to the railroad lines and by
the 1860s, Congress had granted over thirty million acres to
eleven states to subsidize railroad
lines. The railroads truly set the North apart from the South. In
the South, there was no real,
sophisticated railroad system, so people had a difficult time

traveling from their local areas. But
in the North, industry was allowed to flourish, people were able
to travel, and goods had a way to
make it from raw materials to products because of the railroads.
IV. Immigration
As a result of the massive economic and industrial growth of the
North in the 1820s and
1830s, Northern cities became much larger and more powerful.
One of the factors contributing to
this growth was, of course, a population boom. In the 1840s,
1850s and 1860s, the population
growth was dramatic and those who didn’t head west made their
way into Northern cities. The
population growth from the 1840s to the 1860s was due partially
to higher birth rates in the
country, but also to increased immigration from abroad to
America. Between 1840 and 1850,
more than one and a half million people moved from Europe to
the United States and in the
1850s, the number had reached two and a half million. The
majority of the immigrants in this
period came from Ireland and Germany and almost all of the
Irish immigrants landed in a
Northeastern city like Boston or New York City (causing

intense anti-Irish sentiment).
13
As the immigrant population was increasing, anti-immigrant
sentiment in the North
simultaneously grew. But why? Well, first, these immigrants
quickly became a political factor.
Politicians saw them as an important potential voting
constituency and so they set out, quickly,
to encourage state governments to liberalize state voting laws to
allow immigrants who hadn’t
yet become citizens to vote. Once they were able to secure the
state legislation in favor of
immigrant voting, politicians would court the new immigrant
population with money or other
favors. What this meant, of course, was that the tenets of
democracy were being violated—
people were supposed to be informed voters who voted based on
personal conviction; the
immigrants who were voting fresh from Ireland, were often
poorly educated (but generously

bribed to vote a certain way) on the matters they were voting
on.
Second, some Americans saw immigrants as mentally and
physically inferior and believed
immigrants were bringing the stock of the American race, if
there was such a thing, down.
Third, still others feared the job competition that immigrants
posed; they felt that immigrants
were stealing jobs from native workers because immigrants
were willing and able to work for
lower wages.
All of this anti-immigrant sentiment and paranoia led to the
creation of a number of anti-
immigrant societies. The largest of these societies was an
association known as the Native
American Association, which became a political party, the
Native American party, in 1845.
The Native American party wanted to ban immigrants from
holding public office, enact stricter
laws for immigrants to gain citizenship, and put a literacy test
for voting in place to prohibit
much of the immigrant population from voting. The party
functioned much like a fraternal
order, holding meetings in lodges and requiring members to

give a secret password for entry.
14
That secret password (not so secret anymore), was “I know
nothing,” and the Native American
party was often referred to as the Know-Nothing party.
After the 1852 presidential election, the Know-Nothings created
a new political organization
out of the Native American party and they were able to secure a
number of victories in the
Congressional elections of 1854, even winning control of the
state government in Massachusetts
(demonstrating how hated the Irish were in Boston!). Though
the party would never do much
else beyond this, their ideas about immigration, their nativist
sentiment, would carry over for
decades to come.
Figure 4: A Know-Nothing Party Flag4
V. The Northwest

It wasn’t just cities that were seeing major changes during the
antebellum period. Rural
areas also saw some massive transformations. Most notable was
the decline of agricultural
production in the Northeast, a phenomenon that occurred largely
because of the fertility and
abundance of the Northwestern lands. Keep in mind, this isn’t
yet the Far West, which we’ll talk
about in a few lectures from now… these are simply the western
regions of the North; places like
4 From
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/immigration/know-
nothing-flag.jpg
15
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan. With the shift west, white
settlers began moving from
eastern areas to Northwestern lands where they would generally
set up pretty nice family farms.
The Northwest was particularly important, though, because the
growth of the agricultural

economy in the Northwest would have profound effects on the
growing divide between the North
and the South, between slave and free. You see, the
relationship between the Northeast and the
Northwest became increasingly tight in the 1840s and 1850s;
the Northeast sold many of its
industrial products to the prospering Northwest; the Northwest
sold many of its agricultural
goods to the Northeast. This relationship strengthened the bond
between these two regions and
contributed to a growing isolation of the North from the South
(in other words, the South began
to feel unneeded and the North began to feel like they were
superior—in their self-sufficiency—
to the South).
VI. Women and the Antebellum North
With all of the dramatic changes going on in the North, the
divide between North and
South was growing ever deeper. As the North focused on
industry, commerce and economic
stability, the South continued to depend on the system of
slavery. As the South continued to
focus on maintaining traditional gender relationships and
cultural traditions, the North began to

expand and challenge the old system. And it was women,
perhaps the most, who challenged the
Northern cultural and social traditions during the antebellum
period and I’d like to spend the rest
of this lecture looking at women and some of the strides they
made in the North in this period.
Women were able to change public perceptions about women
and change their own status in
Northern society by getting involved in reform movements.
Women were also the major players
in the reform movements of the antebellum period, from roughly
1820 to 1860, and becoming
16
involved in reform allowed women, for the first time since the
American Revolution, to step out
of the confines of the domestic sphere and have a public voice.
The post-Revolutionary period saw women’s role in the
economy completely limited,
particularly for middle- and upper-class women. Though women
had demonstrated the ability to

run farms and deal with the household economy while their
husbands were off fighting the
Revolution, the industrial, market economy that developed in
America (which had established
itself by the 1800s), set up a sexual division of labor in
economics that was even more
pronounced than before. In this new economy, rather than
working on small farms, many men
went to work for wages; women’s roles as workers (it was
thought), were in service to the needs
of others, particularly their husbands. Likewise, women were
forced into financial dependence
since it was only men who really had the ability to earn money.
The industrial economy was also often depicted as a corrupt,
immoral, and dangerous
world that women needed to be shielded from. The domestic
sphere provided a safe haven, it
seemed, from the masculine, grimy public sphere. Furthermore,
the feminine characteristics that
made women helpless in the face of the crafty, deceitful
business and political world highlighted
the opposing characteristics assigned to femininity, such as
morality, honesty, and safety. Ideas
about women’s nature suggested that they could only function

in the safe haven of the private
sphere while men toiled in the public world to provide for the
family—and this notion became
the basis for the SEPARATE SPHERES IDEOLOGY, which
ruled gender relations for
much of the 18th, 19th and even 20th centuries.
This exclusion from economic and political life seems to
suggest that women were not
only seen in an inferior light, but accepted their subordinate
status without questioning it, but
today we’ll see that women did, indeed, challenge their
subordination, though they did so at
17
times in a rather sneaky way. Although the antebellum period
did not see women make any
widespread gains or pathways into the public sphere—such as
voting rights or equal pay—
women found many ways to actually use the idea of femininity
and rhetoric appropriate to the
domestic sphere to gain autonomy and power within the private

sphere (the home), and a voice
and position within the public one. Women found that
becoming involved in reform movements
fit with ideas about women’s nature because these reform
movements hoped to better society, to
make society moral and good. These reform movements were
often started by men, but it was
women who actually helped the reform movements gain strength
and get something done.
Women’s involvement in reform movements led to a use of
rhetoric which seemed to agree
with the separate spheres ideology, but instead justified the
public, sometimes masculine
actions of women in their reforming crusade and women’s
involvement in abolitionism and
temperance really highlights this.
A. Abolitionism
So first let’s take a look at abolitionism. Abolitionism was the
term given to the anti-
slavery movement in America. The national crusade against
slavery basically began in the
1830s, largely because of the efforts of a man named William
Lloyd Garrison and his Boston

Figure 5: Garrison and The Liberator5
5 From
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2950b.html and
http://www.theliberatorfiles.com/wp-
content/uploads/2008/02/Page_1_The_Liberator_No_17_April_2
3_1831.jpg
18
newspaper, The Liberator. Garrison believed that opponents of
slavery should focus not on the
evil influence of slavery on white society (this had largely been
the way anti-slavery activists
argued against slavery—they claimed that it made whites more
debased, it brought Africans to
America, and so on—all things that don’t take into account the
awful effects of slavery on the
slaves themselves!), but instead on how evil slavery was to
blacks. He called for the
“immediate, unconditional, universal abolition of slavery and
the extension to blacks of all the
rights of American citizenship.”6 Garrison quickly attracted a
number of Northern followers with

his message and he founded the American Antislavery Society
in 1833. Just a few years later,
by the end of the 1830s, Garrison’s Antislavery Society had
over 250,000 members.
In the years after the development of the American Antislavery
Society, Garrison grew
increasingly radical in his abolitionist rhetoric and in his ideas
for ending slavery, which caused
some followers to abandon abolitionism and others to call for a
change in leadership. You see,
Garrison had begun arguing by the 1840s, that women be
allowed to participate in the antislavery
movement and the Society on terms of full equality with men
(this probably doesn’t sound very
radical to you, but in the 1840s, this was very radical stuff!).
He also began arguing that all
forms of coercion, such as prisons and asylums, should be
outlawed (imagine how this
suggestion went over!) and he called for the North to break
away from the South, thus getting rid
of slavery in the Union (secession?! Yikes!). So, as I said, as
Garrison grew more radical, the
abolitionist movement began going in different directions.

The movement split into various cohorts. Some abolitionists
tried to plead with Southern
slave owners to get rid of the horrible institution of slavery.
When that didn’t work, many tried
6 Alan Brinkley, The Unfinished Nation: A
Concise History of the American People
(McGraw Hill: New
York, 1996), 319.
19
using politics to enact change. For example, some of these
political abolitionists helped slaves to
escape to the north or to Canada and, more importantly, won a
Supreme Court victory in 1842
(although the victory was short-lived, being overturned in 1850)
that said that states did not need
to aid in enforcing a law that had been passed in the 1790s that
required the return of runaway or
fugitive slaves to their owners. In other words, northerners no
longer had to return runaway
slaves to owners in the south. Likewise, political abolitionists
also encouraged the federal

government to outlaw slavery in the new territories that were
being added to the US. Other
abolitionists, frustrated with how long it was taking to get
slavery abolished, took matters into
their own hands, using violence as a means to their end (that’s a
little foreshadowing of what’s to
come in future lectures—mayhem, madness, violence!!).
But women really took the reins of the abolitionist movement
from the 1830s on, helping
to make the antislavery movement a vocal and powerful one.
As I said a few minutes ago,
people thought William Lloyd Garrison’s idea that women be
granted full equality within the
American Antislavery Society was seen as extremely radical. In
response to this, female anti-
slavery societies formed alongside (and as technical
subordinates to) male-dominated societies as
a way to maintain the unwritten gender laws of the time.
Women widely participated in the
movement, citing a hatred for human suffering, which meshed
well with the roles as mother,
wife, moral guardian, and nurturer that women were expected to
follow. The best known of

these corollary female groups was the Boston Female Anti-
Slavery Society, created as an
adjunct to the Garrison-led Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, which
became an arena for women to
perform their moral duties, and, for some, a way to voice
political opinion.
These women made their first foray into public life with the
abolitionist Petition
Campaign of 1835, which was largely run by women. These
women collected signatures to
20
show support for a growing call to outlaw slavery in
Washington, DC—in the nation’s capital.
But their petition campaign was something much bigger, too—
women were now going beyond
the private, domestic sphere. In their quest for signatures, these
women found themselves
enormously successful. The vast number of signatures obtained
by female abolitionists
suggested that rather than simply gaining support from obvious
sympathizers, these women were

actually educating new people—new petition signers, who were
male—on the ills of slavery by
sharing their own political opinions.
Not only were women involved in politics, they also played an
economic role in the
antislavery movement, a role that was supposed to fall to men.
This economic support came
largely from the antislavery fairs that women began to hold,
which were the primary fundraisers
for the antislavery movement. Though women were still not
supposed to be involved in the
economy, the public sphere or politics, at the fairs women were
selling goods (like potholders
embroidered with slogans like “any holder but a slaveholder”
and sugar bowls that read “sugar
not grown by slaves”), raising money, keeping accounting
books, meeting with people and
Figure 6: An Anti-Slavery Sugar Bowl7
7 From
http://www.history.org/history/teaching/enewsletter/volum
e2/february04/iotm.cfm
An inscription inside this sugar bowl read:

East IndiaSugar not made
By Slaves.
By Six families using
East India, instead of
West IndiaSugar, one
Slave less is required
21
discussing the politics of slavery and abolition with those
people. This was all revolutionary
behavior for women, but behavior that worked under the veil of
feminine activity (because
women were pursuing the moral cause of saving slaves).
Women contributed dramatically to the
growing popularity of abolitionism in the North.
B. Temperance
A second reform movement in the antebellum period, in which
women would play a large
role, was the temperance movement. The goal of the
temperance movement was to outlaw the
production and consumption of alcohol in the United States;
temperance activists claimed that

drunkenness was a moral and religious problem that had an ill
effect on families. In the early
antebellum temperance movement, like the early antislavery
movement, women were not
permitted as formal members in temperance societies. But male
leaders
called on women to assist the movement from a subordinate
position, and
women, particularly Protestant, middle-class women, became
increasingly
drawn to the movement. These women were drawn to
temperance because
of its focus on morality and its goal of ridding American society
of one of
its great social ills, the drinking of alcohol.8
The most notable group of women in the temperance movement
was
known as the Daughters of Temperance.9 In the first few years
of its
existence, the Daughters of Temperance focused on changing
moral
views on alcohol, mainly by telling stories about the detrimental
effects

8 Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of
Domesticity: Women, Evangelism and Temperance
in Nineteenth-
Century America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1981),
89.
9 Image from
http://www.njwomenshistory.org/Period_3/daughters.htm
Figure 7: Daughters of Temperance
Pledge
22
of intemperance on the family. But they quickly shifted gears
to focus on the more public issue
of making alcohol consumption illegal and with this shift came
a movement of these women into
a radical position, into the public sphere. One Daughter of
Temperance, Susan B. Anthony,
began fundraising, organizing women and organizing larger
meetings. Simultaneously, other
Daughters began to take more militant action. A few of the
women “‘took power in their own
hands, visiting saloons, breaking windows, glasses, bottles and
emptying [beer bottles] and

barrels into the street.’”10 Other women began voicing public
opinion in forums such as poetry,
literature, and newspapers.
Figure 8: Temperance Activists Destroying
Alcohol11
Anthony and her supporters, women like Lucy Stone,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and
Amelia Bloomer, whose names you’ll hear again, continued to
defy femininity by organizing a
committee and making the arrangements for a Woman’s State
Temperance Convention, which
10 Ross Evans Paulson, Women’s Suffrage and
Prohibition: A Comparative Study of
Equality and Social
Control, (Glenview: Scott, Foresman and Company,
1973), 70-71.
11 From
http://www1.assumption.edu/WHW/old/DowNapoleonofTe
mperance.jpg
23

was held in April, 1852, in Rochester, New York. Building
upon the resolutions made at the
Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, which we will talk about in
more detail in a few minutes, this
meeting made even more radical and controversial resolutions.
Most important was the Convention’s resolve to, “Let no woman
remain in the relation
of wife with a confirmed drunkard. Let no drunkard be the
father of her children…Let us
petition our State government so to modify the laws affecting
marriage and the custody of
children, that the drunkard shall have no claims on wife or
child.” Not only does this
resolution propose reforms in divorce laws that would favor
women, it insinuates that women are
capable of living, in fact, of raising children, with no help,
emotionally or economically from
men. Although the resolution was clearly designed to help
women, particularly those who were
mothers (the traditional role for women), the resolution defied
tradition, defied the separate
spheres ideology (public sphere=male world; private
sphere/home=female world), and called
into question the traditional definition of feminine difference.12

The temperance movement was
not very successful in this period, but it did call attention to
drunkenness and it led to eventual
reform in the 20th century. Perhaps more important, the
temperance movement provided women
with a way to challenge separate spheres ideology.
C. Women’s Rights Movement
With the challenges the abolitionist and temperance movements
posed to the separate spheres
ideology, it should come as no surprise that the women’s rights
movement, or as it has often
been called, the first wave of feminism, largely grew out of
these two reform movements.
12 Ida H. Harper, Life and Work of Susan B.
Anthony, Vol. 1, (New York: Arno & New
York Times, 1969),
68.
24
Women’s activism in the temperance movement and the
abolitionist movement got women

thinking about their own rights, in particular their economic and
legal rights. This thinking
brought together a number of women in 1848 to the Seneca
Falls Convention13, where a
discussion was started about what rights women deserved and
needed granted by law to them, as well as a discussion about the
merits of starting a fight for women’s suffrage.
Immediately before the Seneca Falls Convention, its two
leaders, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, drafted their
“Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions,” (also known as
the
“Declaration of Rights and Sentiments”) which was modeled
after
the Declaration of Independence, and claimed, “We hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created
equal.”14 “The Seneca Falls convention made this bold claim
for
full citizenship—including the right of suffrage—in a way that
claimed republicanism for women not as mothers responsible
for
rearing good little citizens but as autonomous individuals
deserving of that right.”15. So the

Seneca Falls Convention was making some pretty bold
statements and calling for major social
change.
The logical question, then, is what happened after the Seneca
Falls Convention? After
all, we know that the right to vote was not extended to women
until the early twentieth century
13 Image from
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/images/vc006195.jp
g
14 http://www.ku.edu/carrie/docs/texts/seneca.htm
15 Sara Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of
Women in America (New York: Free Press,
1997), 95.
Figure 9: The Declaration of Sentiments and
Resolutions
25
(1920), decades after the end of the Civil War; decades, even,
after the right to vote had been
granted to former male slaves. Unfortunately, at least on the
national level, not much came

about after Seneca Falls. The women’s rights movement lacked
a strong, central leadership and
even more importantly, many disagreed on exactly what was
being fought for. In fact, most of
the women involved in women’s rights in this period were not
all that interested in getting the
right to vote; Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a few others believed
the vote was necessary, but many
more women thought that women should first fight for the
control of property and earnings,
guardianship of children in the event of a divorce, favorable
divorce laws, education and
employment rights and for legal status such as being able to sue
and bear witness. But without
the right to vote, Stanton argued, women’s rights activists found
it difficult to change conditions,
and, more importantly, get legislation passed.
Despite their disagreements, however, women’s rights activists
worked tirelessly, on the
state level to make changes for women. In New York, for
example, from 1851 to 1859 women
collected petitions calling on the New York State Legislature to
give women control over their

earnings, guardianship of their children in cases of divorce, and
the right to vote. What they got,
in 1860, was the passage of a bill giving “women the right, in
addition to owning property, to
collect their own wages, to sue in court, and to have…property
rights at their husband’s death.”16
Not quite what they were hoping for, but it was a start.
Though the women’s rights movement, at this time, was largely
made up of white
middle-class women, there were also some African American
women involved in the movement.
African-American women, such as Sojourner Truth, Frances
E.W. Harper, and Sarah
Redmond, brought new life and powerful testimony into the
women’s rights movement. While
16 Evans, 83.

26
these women were simultaneously abolitionists, they powerfully
pointed out the problem with
any type of inequality—be it based on skin color, gender or
something else.
I’d like to look a little more closely at one of these African-
American women, Sojourner
Truth. Born into slavery in New York, Truth’s experience with
slavery, a system which forced
her to endure frequent beatings by her master, a forced
marriage, and the bearing of thirteen
children, most of whom she was forced to watch be sold into
slavery, was a difficult one. She
was freed in 1827, when New York State freed all of its slaves
and was a domestic worker until
the abolitionist movement drew her in. But unlike other women
in the abolitionist movement,
Truth was not immediately welcomed into the women’s rights
movement. Because she was
African-American, some women feared that she would put the
cause of anti-slavery before
women’s rights at a detriment to the women’s rights movement.
Luckily, however, Truth was given the pulpit at an 1851
women’s rights convention in

Ohio, where she easily countered the claims of an earlier
speaker who had argued that women
were too weak and dependent to be trusted with the right to
vote.17 In fact, Truth used her
doubly inferior status as a Black Woman to refute the
clergyman’s claims, stating “The man
over there says women need to be helped into carriages and
lifted over ditches, and to have
the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriage
or over puddles, or gives
me the best place—and ain’t I a woman?”18 Truth’s powerful
speech caused others at the
convention, mostly white women, to draw similar conclusions
about their power, strength and
capability. Yet, no set of women’s rights would become
uniform across even the Northern
states, as women’s rights activists continued to focus on local,
state-centered issues and politics.
17 Evans, 85.
18 Evans, 88.

27
Further, no women’s rights movement would develop in the
South, where a dominant social code
of chivalry, paternalism and hierarchy kept women firmly
rooted in the domestic sphere.
So, where did all of this leave women and the women’s rights
movement on the brink of
the Civil War? Well, first, the development of the women’s
rights movement, beginning in the
abolitionist and moral reform societies, allowed women to
slowly enhance their position and
influence in American society. Additionally, without the
support of women in such public
activities as moral reform societies, religious groups, and the
temperance and abolitionist
movements, these reform movements may never have made it
out of their infant stages. And
though the Civil War forced women to put their demands on
hold, the lessons learned during this
first foray into politics were instrumental in the fight women
would wage after the war.
And to answer the question of where did this leave the women’s
rights movement, by 1860, the

women’s rights movement had created large, local and even a
few national populations of
women who believed that women deserved to participate in
public life and could question the
confines of domesticity. The lessons that women’s rights
activists in the antebellum period
learned about organization, protest, and gathering support
would prove incredibly important in
the women’s rights movement after the Civil War.
You see, the demands and trials of the Civil War would draw
attention away from
women’s rights temporarily, but, the Civil War offered women
new, more public roles as nurses,
spies, heads of plantations, and office workers, which we’ll be
looking at as we get to the end of
our course. As a result of these new roles, at the end of the
Civil War, women quickly renewed
their efforts to gain equality and the right to vote. But these
new female behaviors were limited,
almost entirely through the Civil War period and the antebellum
period, to women of the North.

28
Why was this the case? Why did the South develop so
differently from the North? What was
life in the South like? To those stories and many more, we’ll
turn next time.
1
Lecture 3, 1820s Politics and Jacksonian America in
the 1830s
Contents
I. The Panic of 1819
...............................................................................................
...................................2
II. Sectional Crisis: The Missouri Compromise
.........................................................................................3
III. A Growing Federal Government
...............................................................................................
........5
IV. Jackson’s Presidency
...............................................................................................

........................10
V. Sectional Crisis: Nullification
...............................................................................................
...............14
VI. The Bank War
...............................................................................................
...................................19
VII. Indian Removal
...................................................................................... .........
.................................21
appearance): Panic of 1819; Speculators;
James Tallmadge; Thomas Cobb; Missouri Compromise;
Monroe Doctrine; Gibbons v. Ogden;
Presidential Election of 1824; Caucus System; William
Crawford; John Quincy Adams; Henry
Clay; Andrew Jackson; Corrupt Bargain; Presidential Election
of 1828; National Republicans;
Democratic Republicans; Era of the Common Man; Mass
Politics; Democrats; Whigs; National
Convention; John Calhoun; Tariff of Abominations;
Nullification; Robert Hayne; Daniel
Webster; states' rights versus the power of the federal
government; 1832 Tariff; Force Bill; "soft
money" faction; "hard money" faction; Presidential Election of
1832; Nicholas Biddle; Recharter
Bill; Indian Removal; Blackhawk War of 1831 and 1832; the
"Five Civilized Tribes"; Indian
Removal Act; Cherokee; Seminole; Worcester v. Georgia; Trail
of Tears; the Seminole War;
Reservations

broken into the chronologic or thematic
sections shown above in the Table of Contents. I have done this
to make it easier to follow the
information being presented. Please also note the list of
Important Terms and People that show up
directly below the Table of Contents; this list provides a guide
for terms and people you should be
familiar with once you have completed reading the lecture.
There may be instances in which you desire
more information regarding an important term or person; I have
hyperlinked useful websites throughout
this lecture to important terms or people that you can follow up
on and read if you would like more
information (these hyperlinks show up in bright blue and when
you click on them, they should direct you
to the appropriate website). Additionally, there are images
throughout with captions, to help you better
visualize the information you are reading, as well as film clips
that you can watch via YouTube (these
hyperlinks to YouTube show up in maroon and when you click
on them, they should direct you to the clip
on YouTube).
2
Today we’re going to talk about a period that’s been termed the
Jacksonian period, which
spanned the presidency of Andrew Jackson, from 1829-1839. In

this discussion, we’ll talk a
little about politics in the period from 1819 up until Jackson’s
election to the presidency 10 years
later, focusing on domestic issues like a major sectional crisis
that took place in 1819, as well as
the growth and solidification of the power of the federal
government during the 1820s. We’ll
then take a look, specifically, at the presidency of Andrew
Jackson, to get an idea of what was
going on politically, how slavery was being dealt with, the
growing regional rift and westward
expansion and Indian Removal. But first, I’d like to pick up
where we left off last time, with the
Era of Good Feelings and the divergent economic Panic of
1819.
I. The Panic of 1819
We left off last time looking at the Era of Good Feelings—
that time during James
Monroe’s presidency where bipartisanship, economic growth
and national pride seemed
boundless. But when the economic Panic of 1819 occurred, all
of these positive developments
took a back seat. What happened to cause the Panic of 1819?
Well, the first factor was that in

the period immediately after the end of the War of 1812, there
was high demand for American
farm goods, and thus farmers were getting paid high prices for
their products. These bigger
paychecks led to a land boom in the Western United States. But
it wasn’t really farmers out
there buying land. Instead it was speculators, people who
hoped to buy land cheap and then
turn around and sell it to a potential farmer for a higher price.
And much to their pleasure, land
prices soared. Both settlers and speculators had easy access to
credit from the government and
from state banks and they used this easy credit to purchase
expensive land. But in 1819, the
national bank began tightening this credit and calling in
payments on the loans they had allowed.
If a debtor couldn’t pay the banks back, the banks would seize
his land. The government also
3
collected state bank notes and demanded they be paid off in
cash by the banks, who often

couldn’t come up with it, causing those state banks to fail. The
bank failures put people into a
panic, and a financial depression carried on for the next six
years, during which time the price of
manufactured goods and agricultural produce plummeted.
Manufacturers and farmers convinced the government to pass
relief acts and protective
tariffs to help them out and the government came through.
Though these relief acts and
protective tariffs were welcome actions in 1819, the protective
tariffs would become a hot button
issue in the 1820s, which we’ll talk about a little later in this
lecture.
II. Sectional Crisis: The Missouri Compromise
To make matters worse, the Panic of 1819 was closely followed
by a huge sectional crisis
that almost caused the southern states to break away from the
northern ones. The issue was over
a part of the Louisiana Purchase territory—the Missouri
territory—whose residents applied for
statehood in 1818 as a slave state. The major problem their
application posed was this: as
Missouri began their application for statehood, Congress had a
nice, comfortable balance

between slave and free states: there were eleven of each. But
when Missouri applied for
statehood in 1818-19, with a system of slavery well in place,
that balance was threatened.
Many Northern politicians were worried about admitting a state
to the Union as a slave
state, fearing that if slave states had more power than free
states, they might use that
Congressional power to undermine the free states or increase
the power of the slave states. In
response to this fear, Representative James Tallmadge of New
York proposed that an
amendment be added on to the Missouri statehood bill which
said that no further slaves would be
allowed in Missouri and that Missouri would gradually
emancipate their slaves. In other words,
Tallmadge (and the many Northerners who supported his
amendment), only wanted to accept
4
Missouri as a slave state if Missouri quickly ceased being a

slave state! How do you think this
concept made Southerners/Slave states feel?
This proposal outraged southerners so much that some began to
claim, like Thomas
Cobb of Georgia, “If you persist, the Union will be dissolved.”
The debate over Missouri—
really, the debate over the balance of power between free and
slave states—was growing heated
to the point of threatening the sanctity of the Union. Luckily,
however, a compromise was put
together, in which:
1. Maine was carved out of Massachusetts as a separate state;
2. both Maine and Missouri would be approved as states on the
same bill;
3. Maine would enter the Union as a free state; and
4. Missouri would enter as a slave state.
This was enough to calm the fears of both Northern and
Southern Congressmen regarding
the Missouri issue. But the Missouri statehood application had
brought up a much larger
question: should slavery be allowed in the vast Louisiana
Purchase territory, should it be limited
in any way, or should it be forbidden altogether? As I’m sure
you can imagine, people had very

different opinions on this question and in an effort to answer
the question once and for all,
another provision was added to the Missouri/Maine statehood
bill. This additional provision
5. prohibited the introduction of slavery in the rest of the
Louisiana Territory north of the
southern border of Missouri (the 36/30 parallel, also known as
the Mason-Dixon line).
In other words, the Missouri Compromise not only brought
Maine and Missouri into the Union,
it also declared that the northern half of the Louisiana Purchase
territory would not see the spread
of slavery while the southern half was open to the expansion of
slavery. Though the Missouri
Compromise would keep the growing divide between the North
and the South at bay for a little
longer, the tensions between the two would continue to be
exacerbated at every turn, and we’ll
be talking about this increasingly in the next few lectures.
5

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