Abolitionists:
- Objected to the cruel treatment of slaves.
- Admired the spirit and strength of the enslaved people.
- Northern states had outlawed slavery but it was still valued in the South do to economic need.
- Lloyd Garrison publishes an anti-slavery newspaper and calls for emancipation.
- Frederick Douglas and other freed slaves fought against slavery.
- Many Northerners agree with the South's right to have slaves as well.
- This issue divides the nation!!!
1. There were many progressive movements active in the pre-civil war era.
2. The abolition and women's rights movement were two of the most important. See page 286
3. The two movements tied together as many women involved in early abolition became leaders in the women's rights and suffrage movements.
4. The women's rights movement applied the arguments for human rights and equality used in the abolition movement to their own lives and demanded equal consideration for women.
5. There were divisions within the abolition movement over the role of women, and whether they should be subordinate, or if it was appropriate for women to take more public or leadership roles in the movement.
6. In 1848, the first Woman's Rights Convention was held in Seneca Falls, NY.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 formally gave the United States half-a-million square miles of additional territory – California and much of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado and Nevada – in return for a payment of $15 million.
- Mexico accepted the loss of Texas, and the line of the Rio Grande and the Gila River became the international border in the south.
- The new territory needed to be developed and there were rival plans for a transcontinental railroad to the Pacific coast, including one to run along the 32nd parallel from Texas to California. This was a comparatively cheap route, but it would need to dip south of the Gila River.
- In 1853 President Pierce sent Gadsden to Mexico to negotiate a redefinition of the border. The Mexican regime was urgently in need of money and for $10 million sold the required strip of territory south of the Gila River, in what is now southern New Mexico and Arizona. This is known as the Gadsden Purchase. (It was only a mere 30,000 square miles, about the size of Scotland, but it was the country through which the Southern Pacific Railroad would be built.)
The project was delayed by the Civil War, but Collis P. Huntington, the piratical self-made Californian tycoon, drove the railroad from Los Angeles east through desert country to El Paso, San Antonio and New Orleans in the 1870s and ’80s .