Industrially Bound: One Nation Under Capitalism In early nineteenth century America, the fragile cotton threads binding

the northern Lords of the Loom to the southern Lords of the Lash were fraying and just barely capable of holding the nation together. Under the expansionary pressures of powerful market forces and utilizing the political power of a growing middle class demanding liberal democracy, the new Lords of Capital supplanted the fragile alliance with a much stronger national union based on their vision. This paper will explore the class dimensions of the American political evolution in the antebellum period. It will focus on the question of the Union, and how America went from a threadbare-cotton alliance between an emerging northern commercial elite and a mature southern slave-owning elite, to an industrially-bound union under the victorious northern capitalists. An examination of the role played by the middle class in the industrial capitalists victory will show how their political influence dovetailed with the capitalists economic strength to make national consolidation possible.

The Rise of the Cotton Kingdom The first half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of the Cotton Kingdom and its expansion westward.1 Widespread utilization of Eli Whitneys 1793 invention, the cotton gin, allowed for one man to process fifty times more cotton than previously possible, by automating the labor intensive process of separating the seeds from the cotton. This caused an explosion in cotton production, stimulating a corresponding increase in the southern slave population to keep up with greater demand. Between 1790 and 1800 the southern slave population increased by nearly 33%. By 1837 there were two million slaves in the South, and double the number at the outset of the Civil
1

Sean Wilentz. The Market Revolution, in Sean Wilentz and Jonathan Halperin, eds. 2nd ed. Major problems in the early republic, 1787-1848: documents and essays. 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), p. 3.

War.2 The price of slaves also increased, rising from $200 in 1790 to $1,000 in 1850 and $2,000 in 1860. By 1860, cotton was the single largest U.S. export, grown and harvested by approximately four million slaves whose own value represented a total $3 billion in asset, or as much as all the countrys factories, railroads, and livestock combined.3 The primary beneficiaries of this massive wealth-producing venture were the owners of the cotton plantations throughout the South, of which there were 75,000 in 1850.4 Of central importance, sending North and South on diverging trajectories (and eventually a collision course), was the market revolution.5 Despite the market revolution enriching a select few merchants and capitalists in the North (the number of millionaires in New York City jumped from 10 in 1845 to 115 in 1860), in 1850, slave-state Mississippi led the pack with more millionaires per capita in Natchez than anywhere else on the planet.6 The market revolution fed off of the slave labor of millions, and allowed America to catch up with countries like England (who had started their industrial revolutions much earlier).7 Using surplus funds gathered from slave labor and the cotton trade, America revolutionized the nations transportation system and began to industrialize the manufacturing process.8 The most notable example of manufacturing industrialization, intricately tied to southern slave cotton production, was the creation of new textile mills in New England.9 In this way the slave holding planter-class that ruled the Cotton Kingdom were linked to capitalist markets and benefited from the improvement of American commerce and finance.10

2 3

Anne Farrow, Complicity, (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005), p. 205. Farrow, Complicity, p. 215. 4 Farrow, Complicity, p. 10. 5 Wilentz, The Market Revolution, p. 3. 6 Christopher Clark, Social change in America. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), p. 196. 7 Farrow, Complicity, p. 215. 8 Wilentz, The Market Revolution, p. 3. 9 Wilentz, The Market Revolution, p. 4. 10 Wilentz, The Market Revolution, p. 7.

The Economic Basis of Early Complicity This link between slavery and finance formed the economic basis of early complicity between the southern plantation elite (who benefited directly from slave labor), and the northern commercial elite (who benefited indirectly). The northern elites ability to capitalize on southern slave cotton was no accident. Its genesis was very much by design, thanks to one of the more farsighted of the Founding Fathers. While men like Thomas Jefferson held romantic agrarian notions, there were a few who understood that the future belonged to industry. Alexander Hamilton was one of the earliest proponents of industrialization. As the first Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton worked alongside his Assistant Secretary Tench Coxe to set pro-industrialization plans into motion. Together they championed protectionist measures such as tariffs to protect nascent industries. Coxe, who headed the Manufacturing Society of Philadelphia, together with Hamilton used their political positions to promote cotton as a profitable commercial crop.11 Their efforts helped turn Northern cities like Philadelphia into centers of textile manufacturing. A political alliance between North and South emerged from this economic foundation of cotton in the South and textiles in the North. The political stance which made this alliance possible was the assertion that federal interference with slavery in the states was unconstitutional. This position would be supported dogmatically by the political agents of the northern elite well up to the Civil War. Ironically, some of the northerners espousing this dogma would eventually form the conservative wing in the Republican Party, turning on the southern plantation elite when it finally became clear to them that slavery had become a hindrance to ambitions of empire.12 Prior to extensive industrialization or the emergence of the national market, the country lacked powerful capitalists to finance major works, so government officials bolstered the earliest stages of the industrial revolution with internal improvement projects. Small but ambitious
11 12

James A. Scherer, Cotton as a world power, (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1916), pp. 122-123. Eric Foner, Free Soil, free labor, free men. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 79.

merchants collaborated with the government on these transportation projects, as well as on economic issues such as the expansion of credit.13 Results were mostly poor. Many people, especially among the social strata rapidly becoming the American middle class, felt government corruption was the culprit.

The Emergence of a Middle Class From the beginning, it was the independent artisan and family farmer who stood for action and change. These groups were destined to become the middle class as American society became differentiated between wage laborers and capitalists throughout the nineteenth century. Already in the 1770s, as the thirteen colonies came into conflict with Britain, it was artisans motivated by popular radicalism who led the movement. In Philadelphia they pushed the city in the direction of independence from Britain despite the resistance of its merchant leaders.14 In the 1820s they took advantage of slacking restrictions on voting property requirements, and gave rise to the populist democratic radicalism that brought Andrew Jackson to power in 1828. Subsequently, they organized themselves as the radical democratic base of the modern Democratic Party established in the 1830s around Jackson. The push to form the new Democratic Party had been led by Martin Van Buren who conceived of the new party as an alliance of these northern democratic forces with the southern planters in order to ward of sectionalism and maintain a strong national union. Such an alliance was possible because the middle class was leery of the nascent capitalists. As such, the Democratic Party came to oppose protective tariff, perceived as government aid to the capitalist class.15 The growing southern planter class, for their part, favored free trade because tariffs negatively impacted their principal export of cotton to England. The fact that Van Buren was able to forge such an alliance in time to get Jackson elected
13 14

Wilentz, The Market Revolution, p. 4. Clark, Social change in America, p. 44. 15 Foner, Free Soil, p. 18.

president was due in great part to opposition generated in reaction to the pro-business Kentucky Senator Henry Clay who stood for a nation bound together through economic development.16 Back in 1821, Henry Clay had seen how the fight over Missouris statehood had awoken sectional feelings, and had engineered a compromise that balanced slave Missouri with free Maine, and barred slavery from the Louisiana Purchase north of the parallel 3630.17 But in 1824, backed by northern manufacturing elites, Clay led the Congress in enacting a tariff that southern planters deemed oppressive.18 Making matters worse, Clay became President Adams Secretary of State the following year. Adams grand vision in the mid-1820s aroused the suspicion of people like Thomas Jefferson who saw in it the specter of an aristocracy, founded on banking institutions, and moneyed corporations threatening the idealized yeomen, who were by then fast becoming the nations middle class.19 Unsustainable yeoman small-scale capitalism was supplanted because the market revolution driving economic growth favored industrial development.20 In line with Jefferson, this nascent middle class hoped a union of the Old Republicanism of southern planters with their resurgent radical democracy up north would suffice to contain what they termed the Money Power.21 Motivated by the yeomans romantic agrarianism, and fearful of rapid modernization, urbanization, and class polarization, the Democrats minimized conflicts over slavery in their struggle against the Money Power.22 They hoped to thus sustain their northern-southern alliance. Ironically, the threat they incorrectly suspected from the government, they failed to perceive as it actually arose in the private sphere. As a result, the supposed struggle between

16 17

Foner, Free Soil, p. 191. John Lauritz Larson, Internal improvement. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001, p. 135. 18 Sean Wilentz, Andrew Jackson, (New York: Times Books., 2005), p. 63. 19 Larson, Internal improvement, p. 161. 20 Larson, Internal improvement, p. 192. 21 Charles Grier Sellers, The market revolution: Jacksonian America, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 113. 22 Thomas Hietala, The Anxieties of Manifest Destiny, in Wilentz and Halperin, eds. 2nd ed. Major problems, pp. 479-480.

democracy and aristocracy in the government blinded them to the actual rising lords of capital who for the time being were well disguised under democratic politics in their own ranks.

Jacksonian Democracy and the Winners of the Market Revolution The ability of the rising capitalist class to pass under the radar in political developments was no doubt facilitated by Jacksons administration, which while supposedly waging a war on the Money Power had nonetheless kept much of Adams American System, and commitment to internal improvements, which more clearly favored the rising commercial class.23 Toward the end of his presidency, Jackson reemphasized small scale agrarian capitalism in opposition to the American System, but by then he had passed the initiative from the government to the private sphere. In the face of renewed southern demand for free trade and Western middle class demand for free land, he reverted to minimum government interference.24 The perception of government failure in the economic sphere was compounded by widespread failures caused by the panic following the 1837 collapse of worldwide credit markets. Only then did private capitalists, especially the few who had grown stronger (at the expense of the majority) from the panic, finally take over as the architects of the nations economic infrastructure, as the Jacksonians abdicated government responsibility.25 The capitalists praised the radical Democrats who, in a misguided effort to thwart the money power, had cleared the path for them.26 They had assured that the merchants, manufacturers, and successful commercial farmers would benefit most from the market revolution.27 Among the biggest winners were a powerful group of Massachusetts businessmen known by historians as the Boston Associates. They were responsible for establishing much of Americas textile industry earlier in the nineteenth century. Textiles were at the heart of the New
23 24

Larson, Internal improvement, pp. 173-174. Larson, Internal improvement, p. 192. 25 Larson, Internal improvement, p. 193. 26 Larson, Internal improvement, p. 238. 27 Wilentz, The Market Revolution, p. 5.

England economy with its 472 cotton mills by 1860. The core group of the Boston Associates consisted of about 70 members who, by the 1850s, had re-invested their enormous profits into banks, insurance companies, and railroads. They came to control some 40 percent of banking capital in Boston, but their base was in the textile mills, and entire textile cities, such as Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts.28 For which some decried them as Lords of the Loom -- the most notable of whom were the mill-owners Nathan Appleton and Abbott and Amos Lawrence.29

Southern Sectionalism and the Formation of New Parties But sectional conflict, inflamed by Clays pro-business tariffs, and the Democratic Party response to it, had left the capitalists feeling politically underrepresented. Clay founded the Whig Party in 1832 in response to their need for representation. The Whigs represented an uneasy alliance between northern and southern elites.30 The 1830s and 1840s came to be known as the Golden Age of Massachusetts Whiggery.31 During this period, Massachusetts industrialists worked hard to keep together their fragile coalition with the southerner elite. Observing this, Charles Sumner declaimed the alliance between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote cotton thread holds the union together, unites [South Carolinian] John C. Calhoun and Abbott Lawrence. 32 Despite efforts by the Whigs for unity, the market revolution continued to widen the differences between the interests of North and South.33 The mounting economic pressure had political ramifications. In 1789 the doctrine of States-rights had been accepted by both North and the South. With the southern need to protect its Cotton Kingdom from the encroaching Northern industrial revolution, however, the states rights doctrine became one of the Souths
28 29

Farrow, Complicity, p. 6. Reinhard H. Luthin, Abraham Lincoln and the Massachusetts Whigs in 1848, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Dec., 1941): p. 620. 30 Larson, Internal improvement, p. 239. 31 Luthin, Abraham Lincoln and the Massachusetts Whigs in 1848, p. 621. 32 Farrow, Complicity, p. 37. 33 Wilentz, The Market Revolution, p. 7.

most important political weapons in defense of slavery.34 Once ardent advocates of nationalism, Calhoun and Democratic Senator Thomas Morris of Ohio, in the South and the North respectively, turned their backs on it.35 By the mid-1830s, however, some Democrats, believing that Jacksons Bank War had stalled the Money Power, turned their attention to their southern party allies, the growing Slave Power menace. It didnt help that in the name of profits a thousand cotton threads seemed to connect this Slave Power to the New England textile barons. Morris, in his vituperation against the 1836 slavery gag rule, declared to the Senate the slave power of the South and the banking power of the North, are now uniting to rule this country The cotton bale and the bank note have at last met and embraced each other, looking to the same object-to live upon the unrequited labor of others.36 As the alliance between the Northern and the Southern elites weakened in the face of divergent interests, Democratic partisans like Morris found common cause with the Northern elite against the southern elite found within his own party. In 1839, Morris insisted that having fought the power of concentrated wealth, he was ready to oppose slavery, more powerful and dangerous to the peace and prosperity of the country than Banks or any other interest, that has ever existed among us.37 Seward, in his famous Irreconcilable Conflict speech, suggested that an explosion of Northern growth and industry was the explanation for the turn of events. He declared that collisions occurred as increase of population together with a new and extended network of railroads and an internal commerce which daily becomes more intimate, is rapidly bringing the States [and therefore also their antagonistic systems] into closer contact.38
34

Scherer, Cotton as a world power, p. 136. Clinton L. Rossiter, Nationalism and American Identity in the Early Republic, in Wilentz and Halperin, eds. 2nd ed. Major problems, p.10. 36 Jonathan Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Roots of Free Soil, in Wilentz and Halperin, eds. 2nd ed. Major problems, p. 488. 37 Foner, Free Soil, pp. 90-91. 38 William H. Seward, On The Irrepressible Conflict, October 25, 1858.
35

Sewards speech also shed light on why these two systems were so antagonistic. According to him, the slave system was intolerable because it weighed its laborers down with chains and converted them into merchandise, while it expelled the freemen who it couldnt enslave and convert into merchandise.39

Slavery Expansionism Seward faulted the Democratic party for aggressively enlarging its slave power by precipitating Texas admission into the Union, not only without that condition [relinquish slavery], but even with a covenant that the State might be divided and reorganized so as to constitute four slave States instead of one.40 Disputes with Mexico about the borders of the newly acquired Texas seemed to be at the heart of the Mexican war. But many abolitionists believed slavery was at the heart of the conflict. For Frederick Douglass, northern involvement in Mexico had amounted to fighting the battle of Slavery in Mexico, a monument of infamy, he declared the fruit of compromise of a union of freedom with slavery dating back to the foundation of the nation.41 Charles Sumner wrote to Robert Winthrop of the war with Mexico that it was an aggressive unjust war made possible by an unconstitutional Act of Congress for the purpose of extending slavery.42 Even the most conservative northern forces perceived that the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War, by supplying the South with additional slave territory, threatened to tip the balance of power in the Souths favor.43 By this point, disenchanted Democrats in the Congress had had enough. They saw southerner President Polks August 1846 request for $2 million for dealings with Mexico and the purchase of California and New Mexico as further evidence that their southern Democratic
39 40

Seward, On The Irrepressible Conflict, October 25, 1858. Seward, On The Irrepressible Conflict, October 25, 1858. 41 Abolitionist Frederick Douglass Decries the War, 1846, in Wilentz and Halperin, eds. 2nd ed. Major problems, p. 466. 42 Northern Whig Charles Sumner Protests the War, 1846, in Wilentz and Halperin, eds. 2nd ed. Major problems, p. 468. 43 Foner, Free Soil, p. 192.

counterparts were poised to snatch yet more territory for slavery. Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania fired the opening shot. While endorsing the ongoing war with Mexico and conceding the annexation of Texas as a slave state, he demanded in a proviso that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory acquired as a result of the war. Its introduction was polarizing, the northwest and northeast stood together nearly unanimous behind Wilmots proviso and against southern expansion. The vote on the proviso placed slavery squarely at the center of American politics.44 Political pressure arising from the Mexican War also polarized the Whig Party, splitting the Massachusetts Whigs into two hostile factions: the Cotton' Whigs and the anti-slavery Conscience Whigs. The Cotton Whigs were led by the likes of Winthrop, Appleton, and Abbott Lawrence, who fully beholden to southern cotton, and the southern market for their finished product, demanded their party keep peace with the South. Conscience Whigs, on the other hand, supported "Free Soil" candidate Van Buren to combat the Cotton Whigs in the upcoming 1848 Presidential election.45 Longtime Whig Abraham Lincoln opposed the war in Mexico and found himself numbered among the Conscience Whigs.46 For their part, southern planters couldnt agree to the policy of containment of slavery because to do so would be to admit fault with the slaveholding system in general. As the delegates to the South Carolina secession convention declared if it is right to preclude or abolish slavery in a Territory, why should it be allowed to remain in the States? there can be but one end by the submission of the South to the rule of a sectional anti-slavery government at Washington the emancipation of the slaves of the South.47 But even before matters had reached that point, Calhoun captured the southern anger regarding containment in an 1847 letter to the President addressing non-extension. Referring to the delicate balance of power
44

Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, pp. 486-487. Luthin, Abraham Lincoln, pp. 621-623. 46 George S. McGovern, Abraham Lincoln. (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt and Co., 2009), p. 4. 47 Foner, Free Soil, pp. 312-315.
45

between North and South, he warned that the day that the balance is destroyed, is a day that will not be far removed from political revolution, anarchy, civil war, and widespread disaster.48

Emerging Political Ideologies The 1848 Democratic Party platform blamed Mexico for the war and denied that Congress had constitutional authority to interfere with or control the domestic institutions of the several States. Northern Democratic dissidents concluded that southern aristocrats had hijacked their party for the purpose of expanding slavery.49 The Whig Party platform spoke of the urgency of industrys restoration. The Free Soil Party platform advocated the rights of Free Labor against the aggressions of the Slave Power, from whose control it was determined to rescue the Federal Government. But it was careful to vow no interference with slavery where it already existed. In other words, they stood for the non-extension of slavery.50 The stage was set for the beginnings of the merger between these Conscience Whigs and the more radical Van Buren Democrat dissidents that would lead to the foundation of the Republican Party. The ex-Whigs, who formed the conservative and moderates within the Republican Party, viewed the problem of slavery as one of political economy, not moral abstraction.51 The merger, however, required de-emphasis of economic questions because, while the ex-Whig element believed in government action to support economic development (such as tariffs and internal improvements), Democratic forces were hostile to it.52 In 1858, Gideon Welles reflected the view of his fellow ex-Democrat Republicans when he wrote that there was no disposition in their ranks of being carried into the ex-Whigs whirlpool of

48

Senator John C. Calhoun Offers a Southern Perspective, 1847, in Wilentz and Halperin, eds. 2nd ed. Major problems, p. 470. 49 Jonathan Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Roots of Free Soil, in Wilentz and Halperin, eds. 2nd ed. Major problems, p. 490. 50 The Political Systems Fractures: Party Platforms, 1848, in Wilentz and Halperin, eds. 2nd ed. Major problems, p. 472. 51 Foner, Free Soil, p. 189. 52 Foner, Free Soil, p. 168.

consolidation. The success of Gelles and others like him in the temporary suppression of economic issues allowed for the emergence of a unifying anti-southern, pro-Unionist Republican outlook.53 Within this new Republican alliance, however, there existed a range of views regarding slavery. Moderates fought for a non-extension platform, while more radical elements demanded denationalization of slavery, and conservatives wished only to restore the Missouri Compromise.54 Besides providing the anti-slavery basis for unity, the ex-Democrat Republicans swelled the new Partys ranks with hundreds of thousands of new voters by linking opposition to slavery with a land reform agenda that called for homesteads or free land for settlers.55 While the for political reasons the former Whigs entering into the Republican coalition had been forced to accept anti-slavery as the partys main focus, largely ignoring economic issues, the free soil homestead issue was the one exception. It was acceptable to all involved parties because it went along with the wishes of the middle class and massively strengthened the partys electability.56 One of the last obstacles to gathering most of the old Northern political forces of the capitalist elite into the ranks of the new Republican Party was removed when northern Whigs watched the 1850 Compromise they made with the southern Democrats destroyed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854.57 The Kansas-Nebraska Act turned Bleeding Kansas into ground zero for a showdown between slavery and free-labor. Seward attributed this showdown to the incompatibility of the northern and southern economies, which he felt forced every new state to make its first political act a choice of the one and the exclusion of the other, even at the cost of civil war.58 Although a northern Whig in 1850, Seward had become less prone to

53 54

Foner, Free Soil, p. 184. Foner, Free Soil, pp. 205-206. 55 Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, p. 488. 56 Foner, Free Soil, p. 304. 57 Foner, Free Soil, p. 193. 58 Seward, On The Irrepressible Conflict, October 25, 1858.

compromising, and had not supported the Compromise of 1850. So in 1855 when that the experience of Kansas-Nebraska Act had made more Whigs less willing to compromise, he was able to take many with him into an alliance with the Free Soil Democrats in establishing the Republican Party. After publicly denouncing the Kansas-Nebraska Act in the hopes of mobilizing fellow northern Whigs against the expansion of slavery,59 Lincoln joined Seward in joining the Republicans. He had come to agree with Sewards 1958 declaration that faulted so many unsuccessful attempts at final compromises on the failure to understand that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding nation or entirely a freelabor nation.60 For many northerners, the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision confirmed the correctness of their decision to turn away from compromise. The Scott decision denied the federal government the power to prohibit slavery in the territories and sought to undo the Missouri Compromise.61 Seward voiced the fears of the more progressive capitalists when he warned that the South aimed at no less than to use the Dred Scott decision as means of carrying slavery into all the territories of the United States now existing and hereafter to be organized.62 Such a retrogression in the economic fortunes of the North were they to be overtaken by slavery would have upset the larger ambitions of the capitalists, who, like Seward, saw an industrial base as necessary for an overseas empire. In 1857, Seward declared that whosoever interfered with America becoming a grand consolidated empire would be met with northern indignation.63 The Lords of Capital backed by the middle class took in earnest the struggle to contain the spread of slavery even at the risk of war. Seward declared the

59

George M. Fredrickson, Big enough to be inconsistent. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 60. 60 Seward, On The Irrepressible Conflict, October 25, 1858. 61 Fredrickson, Big enough to be inconsistent, p. 35. 62 Seward, On The Irrepressible Conflict, October 25, 1858. 63 Foner, Free Soil, p. 51.

slaveholders must and can be defeated, calling for the now wholly southern Democratic Party to be permanently dislodged from the government.64 This became a reality in 1860 when Lincoln, at the head of the Republican Party, was elected president. The South recognizing the significance of Lincolns victory and the northern political force arrayed against began the process of secession. Only urban centers such as New York and Boston remained a source of concessionist sentiment from among ex-Whigs still very much reliant on southern cotton.65 Under the pressure of the radical middle class, and moderate representatives of the capitalists such as Lincoln, who considered secession nothing but a fiction promulgated by rebels bent on insurrection,66 the war of secession would be transformed into a second American Revolution.67

Conclusion The policy of non-extension did exactly what southern slave-owners feared it would, and put slavery everywhere into question. Once formally accepted by the northern elite, nonextension constituted a complete political break between North and South. This political break led inevitably to war, war being only the continuation of politics by other means. The northern capitalist elite had been forced into the non-extension position because it needed to be allied with the large middle class to wage a political battle against the South, and this alliance could only exist on the basis of anti-slavery. Non-extension, as embodied in the Republican Party, therefore, became a declaration of war on slavery.68 The market revolutions importance69 in this matter cannot be understated, it having given rise to liberal democracy (through the Jacksonian political revolution which radicalized the
64 65

Seward, On The Irrepressible Conflict, October 25, 1858. Foner, Free Soil, p. 219. 66 McGovern, Abraham Lincoln, p. 6. 67 McGovern, Abraham Lincoln, p. 1. 68 Foner, Free Soil, p. 315. 69 Wilentz, The Market Revolution, p. 3.

middle class while abdicating government responsibility for economic development), and having fueled the rise of a capitalist class. The political power of the middle class was combined with the economic strength of the capitalists, who were finally able to take up the task of national consolidation.70

70

Larson, Internal improvement, p. 224.

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Senator John C. Calhoun Offers a Southern Perspective, 1847. In Major problems in the early republic, 1787-1848: documents and essays. 2nd ed. Wilentz, Sean, and Jonathan Halperin Earle, 470. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008. Seward, William H. 1858. "On The Irrepressible Conflict." Delivered at Rochester, NY, October 25, 1858. http://www.nyhistory.com/central/conflict.htm. The Political Systems Fractures: Party Platforms, 1848. In Major problems in the early republic, 1787-1848: documents and essays. 2nd ed. Wilentz, Sean, and Jonathan Halperin Earle, 472. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008. Wilentz, Sean. Andrew Jackson. New York: Times Books., 2005. Wilentz, Sean. "The Market Revolution." In Major problems in the early republic, 1787-1848: documents and essays. 2nd ed. Wilentz, Sean, and Jonathan Halperin Earle, 3-8. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.