Note: The following was one of my tasks for my U.S. history course. I received an excellence award for the paper.
Task 2 – The Early Republic and the
American Civil War
Tara Lang-Jackson
Western Governors University
A.
Following
the American Revolution, the founders all held a great vision for the future,
but differing views as to how that vision should be seen were expressed
(“Partisan Politics,” 2016). Though the
founders opposed political parties, so many conflicts occurred that political
parties eventually developed and lingered (“First Party System,” 2016).
The
conflict started with the adopting of the Constitution. First, the leaders could not agree on how
representatives to Congress were to be elected, even though they did agree on a
bicameral legislature (Norton, 2015).
They finally agreed that three-fifths of the slaves, which made up a
great population in the South, would be counted in population totals for
representation (Norton, 2015). They
agreed on separation of powers with the executive, legislative, and judicial
branches with federalism, a division of federal and state power. They set up checks and balances with features
such as presidential veto, veto overthrow with two-thirds’ majority vote in
Congress, and three-fourths’ support in the states (Norton, 2015).
Some, who called themselves Federalists,
pressed for adopting the Constitution, while others, the Antifederalists,
feared the lack of protection against a tyrannical government and excessive
taxing of land (Norton, 2015). Nearly
everyone agreed that national government needed power over taxation and
commerce, but plenty of the citizens were hesitant to agree on the terms of the
Constitution (Norton, 2015). The
Antifederalists pressed for the Constitution to include inherent rights, and
the Federalists got their way in getting the states to ratify the Constitution
after adding the Bill of Rights to appease the Antifederalists (Norton, 2015).
The
conflicts continued up until the signing of the Constitution on September 17,
1787, and thereafter, and they have not ended.
The Annapolis Convention met to discuss trade policy and caused states
to be taxed, which led to protests and Shay’s Rebellion during which an armory
was attacked and people were killed (Norton, 2015). Many landowning farmers would have had to
sell their land in order to comply with the tax burden (Norton, 2015). Afterward, the government reduced the tax
burden on landowners and instead increased import duties in order to pay for
war debt (Norton, 2015).
Major
players in the disagreements between Federalists and Antifederalists were
Alexander Hamilton, a Federalist, and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who
were both Antifederalists, later known as Democratic Republicans (Norton, 2015).
According
to Norton (2015), Hamilton was born somewhere in the Caribbean and was very
loyal to the nation as a whole. He
favored a centralized government and believed people to be motivated by
personal monetary gain, rather than sacrificing for others so that all benefit
better. He proposed helping industry
take off with “limited use of protective tariffs” and pushing for a whiskey tax
to boost the federal government’s income, preferring to tax the few western
farmers over the merchants who supported him.
This led to the Whiskey Rebellion.
Jefferson
and Madison opposed Hamilton’s respect to wealthy merchants at the expense of
farmers; they viewed Hamilton as an opposer of republican principles (Norton,
2015). They supported the French
Revolution, thinking it good that French citizens loose themselves of an
absolute authority, but Hamilton thought France was perverting republicanism
(Norton, 2015). Republican sympathizers
for the French were called traitors by the Federalists (Norton, 2015).
Republicans
were optimistic in their view of the future and supported western
expansion. Federalists wanted tiered
order and obedience to hierarchy.
Although President George Washington called for an end to partisan
politics in his farewell address, it appeared to the populace that he was
openly opposing Republicans and wanted everyone to unite as Federalists
(Norton, 2015).
Under President John Adams, the Alien and
Sedition Acts were passed, which targeted immigrants who sympathized with
Republicans, required immigrants to register with the federal government and
caused them a longer residency period before citizenship, and made conspiracies
to prevent federal law enforcement and printing or saying defamatory things
about the president or government punishable crimes (Norton, 2015). Jefferson and Madison worked through state
legislatures to attempt to overturn the acts, causing people to question how
much power states possessed in opposing the national government (Norton, 2015).
Even
after Jefferson became the third elected president with a Congress dominated by
Democratic Republicans and gave an inaugural address with words of unity for
Federalists and Republicans, the two parties did not see eye to eye on the way
society was organized and the way government should be run (Norton, 2015). When Jefferson spoke of the first amendment
supporting a “wall of separation between church and state,” the Federalists
called him an atheist. Pamphlets and
newspapers became very popular modes of expressing partisan views during this
time (Norton, 2015). Conflicts only
grew, like a blaze across droughted forests.
Political parties were here to stay.
B.1. The first party system of the early U.S.
republic fell away to the second party system after the election of 1824,
during which time the Democrats and Republicans split, the former supporting
Andrew Jackson, and the latter supporting new president John Quincy Adams
(Norton, 2015). The Republicans and the
short-lived Antimason Party eventually became known as Whigs (Norton, 2015).
The Democrats preferred small government
and condemned the government’s favoring the rich, and thought the wealthy were
so from receiving special favors. For
this reason, they also reviled the central bank, corporate charters, and paper
currency (Norton, 2015). They supported an agrarian society and agricultural
growth in the West (Norton, 2015). They
held the opinion that Whigs opposed the people’s will and that the nation was
divided between those who possessed things and those who didn’t (Norton, 2015).
2. Leaders of the Democratic party
included President Andrew Jackson, who supported the spoils system of sharing
victory with his supporters’ loyalty rather than competency, who abused veto
power to “limit government” as he saw good in his eyes; Martin Van Buren,
during whose presidency a banking crisis occurred; and President James Polk, a
slave-owning cotton planter from Tennessee who, through deception, had the
nation go to war with Mexico (Norton, 2015).
Democratic constituents consisted of non-evangelical Christians and
those of other religious groups, landowning farmers, wage earners, frontier
slave owners, and immigrants (Norton, 2015).
The Whigs, in contrast to the
Democrats, believed in an active federal government to boost economic growth,
supported commercial growth in the East with the central bank, “high protective
tariffs,” corporate charters, and paper currency, opposed western expansion,
supported progressive social reforms, such as public schools and bettering
prisons and asylums, claimed to support bettering society as a whole, and
preferred top-down rule and put forth the idea of free labor and that the
wealthy had risen from hard work (Norton, 2015). President William Henry Harrison was a Whig
who went straight to work in starting up a new national bank and other
Whig-supported activities but died of pneumonia a month after his
inauguration. His vice president, Tyler,
became a president who exhibited a mix of Democratic and Whig policies (Norton,
2015). Whig constituents were made up of
mostly evangelical Protestants and groups who were opposed to western expansion
(Norton, 2015).
Both parties agreed from time to
time, including supporting the interest-free loans to the states with excess
federal income after the nation’s money was divided among state-chartered
banks, Congressman and other leaders avoiding talking about slavery and not
wanting to annex the Lone Star Republic (Texas) for this reason (Norton,
2015). Supporters of both parties
engaged in riots and voter intimidation (Norton, 2015).
3. The Second Party System caused many
disagreements among the people of the United States to come to light. It continued the ongoing debate concerning
liberty and who had it and who didn’t. According
to M.B. Norton, in A People and a Nation (2015), some thought the
national government wielded too much power.
Others thought the states kept too much power from the federal
government. Some argued that slavery was
necessary and that many slaves would rather stay with their owners in the South
than to go free in the North and starve.
Voting
rights was a hotly debated topic, and black men and women alike became more
outspoken about their belief that they should have the right to vote. Native American rights and western expansion
was debated, as were the several aforementioned policies such as the need for a
central bank or not. People wanted to be
heard more than ever. Those running for
office needed a way to appeal to voters and so would campaign to get
votes. Political talk became very
popular during the Second Party System, and the popularity of newspapers and
pamphlets continued to grow (Norton, 2015).
C.1. During
the U.S. Civil War’s antebellum period, the people were divided in their
beliefs concerning slavery, which mainly occurred in the South. Some were very much proslavery, while others
held economical/political and/or moral /religious views against it, causing
them to be referred to as abolitionists, due to their desire for the nation to
abolish slavery as a practice (Norton, 2015).
Those who argued for slavery from an
economical or political perspective did so mainly because it was profitable,
for the more land and slaves a slaveowner possessed, the more wealth he would
build (Norton, 2015). Even merchants and
bankers in the North were worried about slavery being abolished, since cotton
made up two-fifths of New York’s exports, and the huge cotton market relied on
slavery (Norton, 2015). Some claimed
slavery was absolutely necessary and that it fell under property rights
protected by the Constitution (Norton, 2015).
On the other side of the debate, poor white men suffered financially
with slavery’s existence, because they could not work their way up working
hard, because they could not compete well with slave labor (Norton, 2015).
Economics didn’t play into other
citizens’ views on slavery so much as morality did. Many thought it was evil. Since most believed in the biblical god,
those from both the proslavery and the antislavery sides used the bible to back
their case. Among those who wanted to
see slavery abolished, Quakers pointed to the scriptures saying that all are
equal in God’s eyes and that Jesus taught for people to do unto others as
they’d have done unto them (Norton, 2015).
Evangelicals asserted that slavery kept the enslaved from being free
moral agents that would allow them to freely choose what was good and what was
evil; evangelicals thought this would also delay Jesus’ second coming, because
they thought he would not come back until everyone chose freely to do what is good
(Norton, 2015). The bible, however, was
also used to back slavery. People
holding to this viewpoint referenced the biblical scriptures supporting the
owning of slaves and claimed that biblical hierarchy was desired by God
(Norton, 2015). Many said slavery was
moral because it followed the natural law in that humans are not naturally
equal (Norton, 2015). Furthermore, a
popular idea in society was that slave owners were paternal caretakers of their
slaves, that it was their duty to keep and take care of them (Norton, 2015).
Even among abolitionists, most did
not believe that African Americans, slave or free, should possess all the
rights that white citizens, especially white men, did. This weighed in favor of the proslavery side,
as the idea was put forth that whites are more intellectual, while blacks were
much like monkeys and more physical and so “destined” for labor (Norton,
2015). It ended up taking a war to
decide slavery’s fate.
2. During the late 1840s and through the
1850s, the nation became a lot more divided, not simply by location, North and
South, but by thought process, all due to slavery, racism, and westward
expansion. The North was generally
antislavery, while the South was generally proslavery, the North having free
states and the South slave states (Norton, 2015). Southerners generally desired westward
expansion more so than Northerners. When
those in Missouri territory wanted to be annexed as a state, a debate
brewed. If Missouri became a free state,
the South would be angry that the free states would have more total senators
representing their interests, but if Missouri allowed slavery in their
constitution, Northerners would be outnumbered by southern proslavery senators
(Norton, 2015). In the end, House
Speaker Henry Clay suggested a compromise, and the Missouri Compromise of 1820
was passed, which admitted Maine into the union as a free state and Missouri as
a slave state (Norton, 2015).
Feathers were ruffled once more when
Texas was to become annexed, which it did on March 1, 1845, with a constitution
permitting slavery. In 1846, Polk urged
Texans to seize land to the Rio Grande, though Mexico was insistent the
national border be the Nueces River. He
had his general, Zachary Taylor, provoke the Mexicans, and once Mexican
militants killed a few American soldiers, Polk deceptively announced that
Mexico sought war with the U.S (Norton, 2015). At the same time, Polk wanted
the Oregon Territory but did not want to war with Great Britain. The U.S. was able to get the land through
diplomacy, and the Oregon Treaty was signed in 1846 (Norton, 2015).
Norton (2015) wrote about this era
of time, “Racism fueled the expansionist spirit.” He quoted a newspaper editor of the time
calling Mexicans “reptiles in the path of progressive democracy.” He showed that some stood on the other side
of thought, such as one abolitionist referring to the expansion as a “national
crime” that benefitted the practice of slavery.
Abolitionists and antislavery Whigs said the war was a plot to extend
slavery, and abolitionists had long feared an upcoming slaveholding oligarchy.
Even some proslavery people saw problems with the expansion (Norton,
2015).
In February 1848, the U.S. and
Mexico signed a treaty in which the U.S. gained California and New Mexico with
the Rio Grande designated as Texas’ southern border (Norton, 2015). Not everyone was happy with this. Many whites in both the North and the South
worried about all the Mexicans this may have brought into the United States,
and they didn’t want any non-whites who were not slaves (Norton, 2015). Most northerners, even though generally
antislavery, wanted to keep blacks away as much as they wanted to prevent
slavery from expanding to the West and causing free men to lose work (Norton,
2015).
Sectionalism and debates over
expanding and annexing continued on when California wanted to enter as a free
state. Southerners wanted it to be a
slave state or for the Missouri Compromise to be extended to the Pacific
territories (Norton, 2015). It was
finally decided that California would enter as a free state and that the other
territories could choose for themselves, but even that kept the debate brewing,
especially when Kansas and Nebraska wanted to annex, since their being able to
choose contradicted the agreement in the Missouri Compromise that should keep
everything north from the south Missouri line up to Canada as free (Norton,
2015). As the sectionalism debate heated
up, the Whig Party was eventually all but destroyed by 1952, and the formation
of the Republican Party, for the purpose of going against slavery, was, and is,
the quickest reorganization of party allegiance in American history (Norton,
2015).
White Americans, especially those in
the South, felt superior over other races.
They had already taken over most Native American lands and moved most of
the remaining natives into Oklahoma during the “Trail of Tears” in the early
1830s, believing it was their duty to civilize them (Norton, 2015). They didn’t care whether Mexico had settled
what is now the western United States.
They didn’t care whether African Americans were fairly treated or
whether they were enslaved. They
believed it was their “manifest destiny” to rule over the other “races” and to
expand across the continent (Norton, 2015).
Westward expansion truly did seem to have racism and greed as its
motivators, and Americans were very divided, mainly by North and South, causing
sectionalism, as to who was on the right moral and political/economical side of
the debate.
3. Many events led up to the Civil War,
but the three major events I believe did the most to lead to eventual warfare
are the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, and the 1860
election of Abraham Lincoln and the subsequent secession of the South.
The nation’s people were divided on
whether California, upon admittance to the union, and the territories of New
Mexico and Utah, should be allowed to become a slave state or should remain
free (Norton, 2015). A compromise was
made, and the Compromise of 1850 became law.
It stated that California was to be a free state, that Texas boundaries
were set at what they are today and that Texas was to be paid compensation for
losing New Mexico territory, that New Mexico and Utah territories received
popular sovereignty (allowing them to choose for themselves whether slavery was
permitted), that the fugitive slave law was to be strengthened in a number of
ways, and that slave trade would be abolished in D.C. (Norton, 2015). During this time period, the Republican Party
was born, after the Whig Party nearly extinguished after splitting in North and
South sects (Norton, 2015). The
Republican Party received most of the votes the Whig Party would have formerly
(Norton, 2015). The new party was made up of former antislavery Whigs and
Democrats, Free-Soilers, and reformers in the Northwest (Norton, 2015). The party won a “stunning victory,” in the
1854 elections, filling most of the North’s House seats (Norton, 2015). The party was morally repulsed by slavery,
hailed free labor and hated slavery’s threat to such, thought the
slave-blanketed, low industrious South was the antithesis of progress, and
resented the South’s “Slave Power” political power. Abraham Lincoln was a symbol for the party
(Norton, 2015). During 1855-1859, the
opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act grew. Several Northern free states passed
personal liberty laws, which provided counsel for fugitives and required jury
trials, since the strengthening of the law had caused so much controversy and
conflict, even leading to free blacks in the North to flee to Canada (Norton,
2015). The Northerner’s new liberty laws greatly angered Southerners (Norton,
2015).
The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed
in 1854, ruling in favor of popular sovereignty for the Kansas and Nebraska
territories, so they could decide whether or not they wanted to permit slavery
(Norton, 2015). It conflicted with the
Missouri Compromise and effectively made it null; whereas slavery had been
banned for thirty-four years from the southern Missouri border up to Canada,
the Kansas-Nebraska Act now allowed for it (Norton, 2015). This law wrecked political parties. Worst of all, it led to what became known as
“Bleeding Kansas,” terrible and violent conflicts between slaveholders and
abolitionists and anti-slavery settlers (Norton, 2015). It was more or less a war zone. The LeCompton Constitution was written,
making Kansas proslavery, demonstrating Slave Power working in the government,
overriding the majority of Kansas’ antislavery population (Norton, 2015).
Southerners started thinking slavery
would only be protected in a separate nation (Norton, 2015).
During the 1860 election, Republican
Abraham Lincoln won the presidency by electoral college vote, though he won
only forty percent of the popular vote, with the remainder divided between
three other candidates (Norton, 2015). South
Carolina seceded from the U.S. on December 20, 1860. By February 1861, the states of South
Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had all
seceded and formed a new government, which they named the Confederate States of
America, and had elected Jefferson Davis as their president (Norton,
2015). After the war started a couple
months later, the states of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas
joined. Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland,
and Delaware, though slave states, stayed loyal to the U.S. (Norton,
2015). Lincoln was inaugurated as
president in March 1861 and indicated the nation must maintain power over the
forts while trying to convince the other states to rejoin the union (Norton,
2015). When food supplies ran low at
Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, in April, Lincoln sent a ship, but
Confederate forces attacked and overcame U.S. forces but allowed them to sail
away after surrender (Norton, 2015). The
Civil War had begun.
D. References
Norton, M.B. (2015). A
people & a nation. Retrieved from https://lrps.wgu.edu/provision/53540310
WGU
(2016) "First Party System." [Video] Retrieved from https://wgu.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=2ffee8e8-0522-4053-af44-ba8922ef25f4
WGU (2016)
"Partisan Politics." [Video] Retrieved from https://wgu.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=b91759fe-67fe-468d-8c43-15eacbf1874d