North and South: a Divided America

During the colonial era America grew into two distinct regions: the North and the South. The North was established as a hub for trades and commerce while the South was largely agricultural.  Following the Revolutionary War, the regional divides that developed during the colonial era became more distinct leading into the 1800s.  During the years of the early republic, two competing ideologies emerged about how America should develop as a country, specifically whether America should develop as an agrarian or industrial society.  These ideologies were predominantly championed by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. 

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Thomas Jefferson was a founding father and intellectual figurehead who had a great amount of influence at the time.  He believed that America should develop to be an agricultural nation run by small farmers who lived off the land because urban life caused “a canker which soon eats to the heart of [government’s] laws and constitution.”  To further his agrarian vision, Jefferson facilitated the Louisiana purchase from Napoleon in 1803 and by 1804 commissioned Merriweather Lewis and William Clark west to discover what the rest of America had to offer.  Jefferson also encouraged citizens to move west and settle the land as small farmers. 

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Conversely, Alexander Hamilton wanted America to be built on industry and innovation.  He was concerned that if America did not advance its industrial economy it would fall behind as Europe advanced through their industrial revolution.  Not only did industrializing the manufacturing process produce higher quality goods, factories gave poor American farmers an alternative to living in poverty.  Factory work did not necessarily guarantee a better quality of life, but it did offer stable wages.  The industrial economy also gave women the opportunity to gain economic freedom and work outside the home.  This was sometimes romanticized or sometimes even scorned as “white slavery”; however the experience was neither of these extremes and consisted of tedious work with a minimal amount of time to enjoy the small pleasures offered in early American life.

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The competing ideologies of Jefferson and Hamilton furthered the regional divide as the South became a large agricultural economy while the North industrialized its urban centers.  James Madison implored congress that the way to bring America together was through infrastructure spending for internal improvements such as roads, canals and bridges to unite the regional economies into one.  This created a way for farmers in the South to move their raw materials north to factories, where it would be turned into a marketable product in the factories of the north.  The result of this was the Market Revolution and America's first Industrial Revolution. 

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The combination of the Market and Industrial Revolution led to great innovations such as the Cotton Gin, which aided in turning the failing southern tobacco industry into a thriving cotton industry.  The thriving cotton industry created vast amounts of wealth for a small number of southern slaveowners who owned the majority of the arable land.  In contrast, the northern industrial economy was primarily run by white working-class Americans, resulting in the end of slavery in the majority of the northern states.  However, the majority of the North supported the idea of colonization and the removal of freed blacks to Africa instead of granting them American citizenship.

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By the 1830s, the different needs and political agendas of the North and South prevented the two distinct regions from forming a united nation.  This was partially due to the formation of two opposing political parties, the federalists and anti-federalists, as well as the introduction of Henry Clay’s American System.  Henry Clay believed that the state of America was due to an obsession with foreign affairs and that America “depended too much upon foreign sources of supply.”  His solution was to place high tariffs on foreign goods to promote spending on American goods to stimulate the American economy. 

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John C Calhoon opposed the American System and resented Andrew Jackson’s use of the Force Bill to enforce the collection of tariffs from southern plantation owners who also did not agree with the American System.  Calhoon promoted the idea of Nullification, which gave state governments the right to decide whether they would enforce the high tariffs on foreign goods, furthering the regional divide. Calhoon also promoted the idea of “Slavery as a positive good” which turned into a popular political stance among white Southerners as a way to defend chattel slavery. He believed that the system of slavery provided necessary care for slaves and that “Be it good or bad, [slavery] has grown up with our society and institutions, and is so interwoven with them that to destroy it would be to destroy us as a people.”  

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Calhoon’s loosely constructed the argument that slaves were better cared for under the yoke of slavery was incompatible with the reality in the North, which was that black individuals prospered when granted liberty. Some Black Americans during this time were able to advance in society to become property owners and briefly gained the right to vote. This right was stripped from them after Andrew Jackson secured voting rights for all white male Americans. This was another factor that contributed to the regional divide, causing unrest and resentment in the North for the influence slavery in the South had over national politics. James Forten and Robert Purvis of Pennsylvania defended their right to vote in Philadelphia, believing that the slavery of the South created unconstitutional conditions for freed Blacks in the North because their rights were “a sacrifice on the altar of slavery”  

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Congress continued to pass legislation that undermined the rights of black Americans in favor of placating the South in an effort to prevent secession. An example of this is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which allowed for southern slave owners to deputize northerners and demand aid in the recovery of runaway slaves. White northerners resisted the notion that Southerners could compel them to aid in a system they wished to abolish, while freed slaves feared being returned to former enslavers. Frederick Douglas addressed this concerning piece of legislation in his address to the Free Soil Party in 1852, claiming that a black man had less rights than a donkey or horse, since “A black man may be carried away without any reference to a jury. It is only necessary to claim him, and that some villain should swear to his identity.”   This caused all black Americans to live tenuously outside of the protections of law, which was neither a sustainable system nor compatible with the rights guaranteed by the constitution. 

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The regional identities established during the foundling years of America and strengthened by the Market and Industrial revolutions were unable to be reconciled.  At this point in history it was nearly impossible for congress to pass legislation that appeased the North and South due to the vastly different political beliefs and socioeconomic needs of the regions.  This furthered the divide between the North and South that led to the Civil War.

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