Pre-Civil War

12/4/17

In the North, we had transportation (railroads and steamboats)

- Growing cities

o Overpopulation, disease and filth, immigrants, competition for jobs

- The North was industrialized: factories, telegraph, etc. (this is a huge reason why the North

won the war

- The Plantation Legend was a stereotype invented by popular writers in the north that described

the South as a land of aristocratic planters, beautiful southern belles, poor white trash, faithful

household slaves, and superstitious field hands.

In the south, slavery boomed with the cotton gin in 1792.

- Prices of slaves doubled and number of slaves rose by 33%

- Thanks to Eli Whitney’s cotton gin

- The south was wildly diverse and complex opposite of the Plantation Legend

o Many places had no slaves

o Variety of crops grown

o Many small slave owners, few large ones Average holding of slaves was 4-6, most had

fewer than 6

o Diversity among slave owners 1/10th were women, many were workers, some free

black men, very few lived lives of leisure.

Southern economy was based largely on cotton

- Enormous wealth richer than any country in the world, except for England

- The south grew 60% of the worlds cotton

- However, it impeded industry & development, high debts, soil exhaustion, little innovation
Southern Nationalism promoted economic self-sufficiency

- Defense of slaveryit’s beneficial, even necessary, for their economy

o South argued that Northern factory workers were “slaves without masters”

 Belief that capitalism is “wage slavery”; worse than slavery

o Pseudo-scientific basis for racial inferiority

 Justification for imperialism

- Belief that the North is too democratic, belief that the North was a “strange and distant land”

- Southerners wanted to fight back against “northern economic dominance”

o Railroads quadrupled

o More crop output

o More exports

- Southern education was different; written to favor the south

o Did away with slurs against slavery in textbooks

o By 1960, more southern colleges than northern colleges

- Southern Radicalism, 1850s

o Calls for reopening of the slave trade

o With the annexation of Latin America, Cuba, Caribbean, it was believed that

Pre-Civil War Problems

- The Crisis of 1850 on July 1849

o Texas slave owners brought slaves to California to pan for gold

o White miners displeased because they couldn’t compete with slave labor

 They forcibly kicked the Texans out of gold fields

o California applied for statehood and outlawed slavery and indentured servitude,

adopted quickly and unanimously

Slavery in the West was unrealistic, so why did it worry southerners?

- The climate and geography did not allow for slave labor to prosper

- But Southerners knew that slavery was on the decline, and they were “surrounded” by free

states

- Compromise of 1850

o Expansion of slavery was debated; Congress had the ability to abolish slavery

 Southerners did not agree with congress having this much power

 State power vs. Federal power

o Final Comprise:

 California was admitted as a free state,

 allowed the territorial legislatures of New Mexico and Utah to settle question of

slavery,

 Set federal law for the return of runaway slaves. (Fugitive Slave Law of 1793),

 Abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia,

 Gave Texas $10 million to abandon claims to territory in New Mexico east of the

Rio Grande