The Growth of American Society(1800 – 1865)

Meeting 4

Matakuliah : G0862/American Culture and SocietyTahun : 2007

Contents

• American Romance: Mark Twain• Industrialization: The growth of American

economy • Slavery and the separation of American South• The Nation is divided: the Civil War

Review on Huckleberry Finn

In his latest story, Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade), by Mark Twain, Mr. Clemens has made a very distinct literary advance over Tom Sawyer, as an interpreter of human nature and a contributor to our stock of original pictures of American life. Still adhering to his plan of narrating the adventures of boys, with a primeval and Robin Hood freshness, he has broadened his canvas and given us a picture of a people, of a geographical region, of a life that is new in the world. The scene of his romance is the Mississippi river.

Review on Huckleberry Finn

Mr. Clemens has written of this river before specifically, but he has not before presented it to the imagination so distinctly nor so powerfully. Huck Finn's voyage down the Mississippi with the run away nigger Jim, and with occasionally other companions, is an adventure fascinating in itself as any of the classic outlaw stories, but in order that the reader may know what the author has done for him, let him notice the impression left on his mind of this lawless, mysterious, wonderful Mississippi, when he has closed the book. But it is not alone the river that is indelibly impressed upon the mind, the life that went up and down it and went on along its banks are projected with extraordinary power. Incidentally, and with a true artistic instinct, the villages, the cabins, the people of this river become startlingly real.

The Hartford Courant Feb. 20, 1885 p. 2

American Industrialization (1790 and 1820 )

According to geographer David R. Meyer, In The Roots of American Industrialization, he argues that it was the prosperity of eastern agriculture that sparked the industrial transformation of the antebellum era. Once a manufacturing base had been established in the East, moreover, the region’s urban metropolises further fueled demand and supplied capital. Finally, within each industry, entrepreneurs developed a variety of innovative organizational, technological, and marketing strategies to ensure that the region retained its premier industrial position and eventually expanded into national markets.

Meyer argues that between 1790 and 1820 “significant changes” in commerce, agriculture, and manufacturing “set the stage for faster growth from 1820 to 1860” (p. 281). Foremost among the changes was the increasing commercialization and prosperity of eastern agriculture, which led to a growing rural population and labor force and to rising per capita incomes, wages, and capital investment.

Though Meyer recognizes that some rural areas—particularly less fertile, hilly regions—experienced economic decline and outmigration, most eastern farmers “responded to local opportunities” (p. 35), transporting farm produce to nearby markets by wagon and embracing new agricultural techniques. According to Meyer, the prosperous agricultural economy that resulted spurred capital accumulation; inspired the creation of a hierarchy of urban places that provided retail outlets and commercial services for farmers; opened up markets for manufactured goods as prosperous farmers

American Industrialization (1790 and 1820 )

Slavery

From about the 1640s until 1865, people of African descent were legally enslaved within the boundaries of the present U. S. mostly by whites, but also by a comparatively small number of American Indians and free blacks. The wealth of the U.S. was greatly enhanced by the exploitation of African American slaves.

While estimates of the number of slaves brought to North America vary from a few hundred thousand to a few million, the slave population in the U.S. had grown to 4 million by the 1860 Census. In other countries, the slave population barely reproduced itself. From the later 18th century, and possibly before that even, and until the Civil War, the rate of natural growth of North American slaves was much greater than for the population of any nation in Europe, and was nearly twice as rapid as that of England.

Slavery

Treatment of slaves, primarily African Americans, was both harsh and inhumane. Whether laboring or walking about in public, people living as slaves were regulated by legally authorized violence. On large plantations, slave overseers were authorized to whip and brutalize noncompliant slaves. Because they were the legal property of their owners, it was not unusual for enslaved African American women to be raped by their owners, members of their owner's families, or their owner's friends. Children who resulted from such rapes generally were slaves as wellIn addition to physical abuse and murder, slaves were at constant risk of losing members of their families if their owners decided to trade them for profit, punishment, or to pay debts. A few slaves retaliated by murdering owners and overseers, burning barns, killing horses, or staging work slowdowns. .

Civil War:

In U.S. history, the conflict (1861 – 65) between the Northern states (the Union) and the Southern states that seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy. It is generally known in the South as the War between the States and is also called the War of the Rebellion (the official Union designation), the War of Secession, and the War for Southern Independence.

The chronology of Civil War

The “wedges of separation” caused by slavery split large Protestant sects into Northern and Southern branches and dissolved the Whig party (One of the two major political parties of the United States in the second quarter of the 19th century ) . Most Southern Whigs joined the Democratic party, one of the few remaining, if shaky, nationwide institutions. The new Republican party, heir to the Free-Soil party and to the Liberty party, was a strictly Northern phenomenon.

The crucial point was reached in the presidential election of 1860, in which the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, defeated three opponents—Stephen A. Douglas (Northern Democrat), John C. Breckinridge (Southern Democrat), and John Bell of the Constitutional Union party.

The chronology of Civil War

Lincoln's victory was the signal for the secession of South Carolina (Dec. 20, 1860), and that state was followed out of the Union by six other states—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Immediately the question of federal property in these states became important, especially the forts in the harbor of Charleston, S.C. The outgoing President, James Buchanan, a Northern Democrat who was either truckling to the Southern, proslavery wing of his party or sincerely attempting to avert war, pursued a vacillating course. At any rate the question of the forts was still unsettled when Lincoln was inaugurated, and meanwhile there had been several futile efforts to reunite the sections, notably the Crittenden Compromise offered by Sen. J. J. Crittenden. Lincoln resolved to hold Sumter. The new Confederate government under President Jefferson Davis and South Carolina were equally determined to oust the Federals.