American History: A Survey

The American population grew steadily after the Revolutionary War, with a significant spike in the mid-1800s due to increased immigration. Greater population promoted the need for mass transportation of both goods and humans, faster means of communication, and rapid industrialization. Cities in the North expanded especially rapidly. This marked a departure from rural, agrarian lifestyle that most Americans had lived up to that point.

Between the 1820s and 1860s a number of revolutionary ideas came to fruition, including a complex canal system connecting many northern cities and small towns, the first railroad network, the invention of the telegram, and the advent of factories as a major part of American commerce. These innovations had many benefits and more than ever before created social mobility for many people through economic success. Factories became the first large-scale opportunity for women to work outside the home or the family farm. For many, however, this was not an opportunity for greater economic freedom but a necessity. Small farms were becoming less economically sustainable, especially in places with poor agricultural conditions, like New England. Food was increasingly grown in the fertile Midwest and transported across the country. As demand for products as well as competition grew, labor in factories became more difficult and less lucrative for workers. Factories often turned to the many new immigrants for their workforce, as they saw them as more naive than American women, more desperate, and easier to force into unfair working conditions.

Anti-immigrant and anti-slavery sentiment grew quickly during the 1840s-1860s due to Americans’ unease about their economic future. Many were establishing themselves in the middle class, but cheap immigrant labor and the growing practice of slavery in the South loomed as threats to their security. The South was still almost purely agricultural and depended on more slaves each year. Many in the North were pro-abolition for moral reasons, but most worried that if the South gained power, slavery would return to the North and threaten their jobs.

Although the mid-1800s was a time of relative peace between the US and other nations, clear internal divides were forming. Immigrant versus native, pro-slavery versus abolitionist, and, perhaps most importantly, rural versus urban became defining distinctions that threatened the nation’s stability. The slavery question was answered during the coming decades, but debates around immigration and the rural/urban divide became running issues that continue to affect society in the US to this day.

While the North began to industrialize, the South remained primarily agricultural. In 1792, the cotton gin began to revolutionize the economy in the South. Cotton became the dominant commercial crop, providing raw material to the growing textile industries in New England and Britain. Cotton was one most profitable exports in the US by 1860, yet non-agricultural industries in the South languished as the rush to plant more cotton consumed the region. Most goods were imported from the North, and people in the South began to feel like a colony once again, entirely dependent on and governed by elites in a distant land.

This sentiment was reinforced by the unique social structure of the South and, of course, by the presence of slavery. A minute segment of the white population owned most of the land and held most of the enslaved Black people. This “Planter Class“ made enormous efforts to align themselves with historical aristocracies, building huge estates and adopting a lifestyle of formal civility in which men avoided manual labor and women were subordinate social ornaments. Wealthy planters dominated social, economic, and political life in the South. On the largest plantations, all labor was performed by slaves. Their white owners, at least the men, were free to engage in whatever suited their fancy.

The vast majority of people in the South were small-scale farmers, most of whom owned no slaves. Social mobility in the South was almost non-existent, and the poorest people lived on the same type of subsistence farming that was common centuries before—or hunted and foraged for their food. Many of these people, especially in very rural areas, lived happily and were proud of their independence from larger American society. Those living side by side with the wealthy fared worse. They depended on the Planter Class for economic assistance yet were considered below even slaves in the social hierarchy.

Resistance among enslaved people sometimes occurred in the mid-1800s, but successful revolts were incredibly rare. Revolts that did succeed, like the one in 1831 led by Nat Turner, usually resulted in a backlash by white people and no real improvement in the outlook for enslaved people. Rather than revolt, most slaves who were brave and prepared enough to escape did so stealthily and in small numbers. Those who lacked the means to escape often resisted simply by not working as hard as their masters demanded.