Name: ______
US History Reading Article:
Two Americas Emerge or Sectionaliam
Geography Divides
In the first half of the 19th century, the United States and its people found themselves evolving in two very different directions. That division generally reflected the geographic regions of the North and the South. As a result of their varied geography, those two regions had developed vastly contrasting economic, social, and cultural features.
The North
Rocky terrain and a short growing season produced a trade-based economy in the North. Shipping became a key industry in the mid-1800s, while Northern merchants bought and sold raw products from the South and West. In addition, manufacturing blossomed in the North as mass-production methods spread. Improving transportation and communication fostered industry by enabling factories to obtain materials and send their products over greater and greater distances.
Northern political opinions often favored the Whig Party's view of federal supremacy and leadership of the nation's economy. Northern Protestants believed that communities should set moral standards, and they supported government intervention in economic and even social issues. Many wanted, for example, to allow states to outlaw alcohol and enforce Sabbath observation. Northern Protestants also extolled the virtues of hard work and education, both of which supported urban, industrial culture.
The South
With its warm climate and fertile soil, the South welcomed agriculture. Settlers grew tobacco, rice, sugarcane, and cotton. By the 1800s, the plantation system, dependent on the unpaid labor of enslaved Africans, firmly supported this expanding agricultural economy. Plantations dominated the South, which therefore developed little industry. Most Southern trade involved the export of raw materials—largely to Northern and British textile factories—in exchange for manufactured goods.
Southern political opinions grew out of the region's cultural lifestyle. Based on rural aristocracy, with wealthy planters holding nearly all the influence, the Southern culture favored an easygoing, gracious way of life that rested on tradition. People frowned on overly eager efforts to accumulate wealth and viewed Northern bankers as corrupt. They also opposed the idea that government, or anyone else, should dictate morality or regulate banking and trade. Southerners cherished their history and faced the nation's rapid modernization and industrialization with suspicion.
Civil War Looms Ahead
Sectionalism grew increasingly pronounced during the first half of the 19th century as slavery arose as a hot-button issue. Southerners defended their way of life by justifying slavery on Biblical grounds. Hoping to gain access to fresh lands, they also pushed for the expansion of slavery into new territories. Northerners increasingly disapproved of slavery on moral grounds and disliked the South's headstrong attitude toward the federal government. They worked against the expansion of slavery into new territories. Those issues festered alarmingly as the nation lurched toward war.
Nullification crisis- an example of regional differences
Ratification of the U.S. Constitution (1787) left unresolved the issue of whether the federal or state governments were sovereign. Some assumed that the federal government was a subordinate creation of the states, which reserved the power to render null and void any federal law. In 1832, to resist the enactment of a protective tariff and to affirm states' rights, Vice President John C. Calhoun resigned his position and returned to South Carolina, which nullified the tariff. After the federal government threatened to use force and President Jackson threatened to hang Mr. Calhoun, Henry Clay worked out a compromise that allowed the sectional crisis to cool.
Imposing tariffs was a federal power based on the constitutional power to raise revenue. The U.S. Congress began using it in 1824 to protect the newly emerging industries of the northeast. (Protective tariffs were also a component of Clay's "American System," which aimed to tie disparate U.S. regions together through internal improvements.) In 1828, Congress passed a highly protective tariff, which its opponents dubbed the Tariff of Abominations.
As agricultural exporters and importers of finished products, Southerners objected to the fact that the protective tariff raised the costs of their purchases and reduced their volume of exports. Southerners also understood that a federal government that could impose an unacceptable law had the potential to impose the most unacceptable of all, an outlawing of slavery. Southerners like South Carolina senator Robert Y. Hayne and Calhoun promptly raised questions about the tariff's constitutionality and claimed the right of a state to nullify an unacceptable federal law. They cited James Madison's Virginia Resolution and Thomas Jefferson's Kentucky Resolution, written during the debates over the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798.
In January 1830, a series of debates between Hayne and Daniel Webster defined the terms of the argument over the nature of the federal union that would persist for the next 30 years. In 1832, Andrew Jackson won the presidency with Calhoun as his vice president. At a Jefferson Day celebration, Jackson toasted, "Our Federal Union—it must be preserved." Calhoun responded, "The Union—next to our liberty most dear."
When Jackson signed the modified Tariff Act of 1832, Calhoun resigned in protest and went to South Carolina to interpose the state against federal enforcement of the tariff. Congress passed the Force Act, and Jackson threatened to send troops to enforce the tariff. Clay averted a collision by enacting a compromise that produced a degree of tariff reduction in 1833. Sectional tension, however, remained and would eventually culminate in the Civil War, the victory of the Jackson-Webster definition of the Union, and the domination of the industrial region over the agricultural sector.
Questions:
1. What is sectionalism?
2. How are the North and South different in the pre-Civil war era?
3. Why does the North want tariffs and why does the south not want them?
4. What is nullification?
5. Who won the nullification crisis, in your opinion?
6. Do you agree with the last in bold and underlined sentence and why or why not?