Sectionalism Splits North & South

Differing Ways of Life

and

Differing Worldviews

Northern Society: Urban & RuralUrban•Attracted immigrants in large numbers•Population increased from 7% to 20% by 1860•Gap between rich & poor glaringly obvious – slums proliferatedRich owned > $5,000; poorest<$100; middle in-between•Lack of municipal water, sewers, garbage collection, fire protection•Outdoor privies used & horse drawn vehicles created manure heaps, noise, & traffic jams•Provision of municipal services segregated neighborhoods by wealth•Middle class flight & urban decay

Rural

•Family farms with hired labor, extended families, and community help provided labor

•Diverse agriculture producing fruits & vegetables, beef & pork, grains, dairy products

•Benefited from new agricultural equipment produced by the industry such as the McCormick reaper & John Deere plow.

•Benefited from new roads, bridges, steamboats & canals

•Also dependant on cash crops and were less self-sufficient

Factory System Replaces Domestic System

Slater’s Mill

Lowell girl at a weaving loom.

One of the Lowell Mills

A Strict Schedule

Girls, used to a relaxed schedule on the farm, found the rigid schedule difficult.

Compare to a typical schedule in factories today.

Why was the schedule so strict?

“Old Immigration” to the USA: 1820-1860

Chief Causes•Irish potato Famine

•1848 Revolution in German states

•Promise of greater economic opportunities for Europe’s desperately poor

Results•Ethnic neighborhoods

•Poorer Irish settled in urban centers

•Germans not as poor

•Catholics

Why did relatively few immigrant live in the South?

Thomas Jefferson on slavery

“We have the wolf by the ears and we can neither hold him or safely let him go. Justice is on one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”

What did this mean to slave owners after the Nat Turner Rebellion in 1831?

Cotton Exports

Cotton became king where it could be grown in the deep south. Southern wealth and status was tied up in land and slaves.

Was this a money making operation?

How did the South try to use this fact diplomatically?

Slaves concentrated in the deep south where cultivation of cotton increasing with the movement west

Antebellum Society: Status and Wealth linked to Slavery

Planters

•owning 20 or more slaves and dominated economics, social life and politics

•Frequently self-made men

Small Slave Owners

•Taking step from subsistence to commercial agriculture

•Most vulnerable to fluctuating prices and depressions

Yeoman Farmers- Tenant Farmers

•2/3 of southerners did not own slaves –worked small farms with family labor.

•Communal help performed intense labor jobs such as barn-building, harvesting

•Up to 1/3 of poor white farmers were tenants

•Poor whites seen as a potential danger by planters if opposed slavery

South Remained mostly rural and was divided loosely into the upper and lower regions.

The Interstate trade in slaves shifted slaves from the upper to the lower region where expanding the cotton culture increased the demand for slaves.

Natchez, MS was the wealthiest area in the USA in 1850

Cruelty to slaves such as scars on this slave’s back served as propaganda to spread anti-slavery sentiment. Relatively rare because it was not in the planter’s economic interest to damage his property, the dehumanizing life of the slave, without control over ordinary affairs, was worse. Despite hardships, slaves established a unique culture of their own.

The South’s Peculiar Institution

African American Culture:

A Response to the Institution of Slavery•“Grapevines” kept slave quarters informed

•Strong matriarchs tended family ties. Search for lost family members a chief post-slavery concern

•Churches, such as AME ,preferred that blended African & Christian traditions

•. Families established & children taught to avoid confrontation

•Music & dance provided relief and communication

•Resistance respected

1. Economic Necessity

2. Slave could not manage if free (inferior race)

3. Slavery based on Biblical model

4. Slavery was a positive good (paternalism)

5. An attack on slavery was an attack of a way of life

Defense of Slavery

Northern factory workers referred to as wage slaves when were treated worse than the slaves.

How did the economic changes in technology and geographic differences

contribute to the development of sectionalism?

Was Civil War inevitable?