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Alexander Hamilton's financial plan was created because of the revolutionary war, lots of states in massive debt. The plan was the federal government paying off all state debt through selling security bonds, and a national bank. This was opposed by anti-federalists such as Thomas Jefferson who thought it benefited the rich.

Source: https://www.ushistory.org/us/18b.asp

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Severely repressed domestic protest, allowed deportation of immigrants, and made it harder for immigrants to vote since John Adams opponents had large amounts of immigrant voters. Fines against anyone who posted negative things about the government

Source: https://www.ushistory.org/us/19e.asp

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Washington didn't think the U.S was strong enough to participate in a European war and declared the U.S neutral. This caused Jefferson to resign in protest.

Source: https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/neutrality-proclamation/

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There was a tax on whiskey implemented by Alexander Hamilton and farmers disliked paying for this so they revolted by refusing to pay the tax. Washington brought state militia in response and the rebellion collapsed and the government solidified its authority.

Source: https://www.history.com/topics/early-us/whiskey-rebellion

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This speech set the precedent for all future presidents to follow. A few examples include George Washington retired after 2 terms, starting the tradition of 2 terms. Also advised against permanent foreign alliances, and against creation of political parties.

Source: http://www.studyapush.com/2009/10/washingtons-farewell-address.html

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This was the peaceful transition of power from two different political parties. Thomas Jefferson won the election over John Adams. This legitimized the new democracy system of America.

Source: https://study.com/learn/lesson/revolution-of-1800-overview.html

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John Adams sent a diplomatic mission to France, once arrived three French foreign ministers said the only way to make negotiations with the French government was to give them a bribe. This angered Americans who wanted to wage war against France.

Source: https://www.ushistory.org/us/19d.asp

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Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798

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Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798

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Democratic-Republican response to the Alien and Sedition Act (and drafted by Thomas Jefferson) said the Alien and Sedition Act was unconstitutional and could be nulled by the state.

Source: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/877/virginia-and-kentucky-resolutions-of-1798#:~:text=Federalist%2Ddominated%20Congress.-,Drafted%20in%20secret%20by%20future%20Presidents%20Thomas%20Jefferson%20and%20James,they%20were%20null%20and%20void.

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Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798

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The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 were Democratic-Republican responses to the Alien and Sedition Acts passed earlier that same year by a Federalist-dominated Congress.

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Jeffersonian democracy was based upon western expansion and international markets for farmers. Despite being strict constitutionalism he allowed the purchase. France was willing to sell because it needed money for the war against Britain.

Source: https://www.ushistory.org/us/20c.asp

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One of the first colored illustrations to be put into print, John H.B. Latrobe's The Balise. Mississippi River captures the haunting image of a navigation station under a full moon at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

Jefferson's plans for the nation depended upon western expansion and access to international markets for American farm products. This vision was threatened, however, when France regained control of Louisiana. Napoleon, who had now risen to power in the French Revolution, threatened to block American access to the important port of New Orleans on the Mississippi River. New American settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains depended upon river transport to get their goods to market since overland trade to the east was expensive and impractical.

Blocking American access to New Orleans was such a grave threat to American interests that President Jefferson considered changing his traditional foreign policy stance to an anti-French alliance with the British. At the same time that he sent diplomats to France to bargain for continued trade access along the Mississippi, he also sent diplomats to Britain to pursue other policy options. James Monroe, the top person negotiating in Paris, was empowered to purchase New Orleans and West Florida for between two and ten million dollars.

Surprisingly, however, Napoleon offered much more. He was militarily overextended and needing money to continue his war against Britain. Knowing full well that he could not force Americans out of the land France possessed in North America, Napoleon offered all of Louisiana to the U.S. for 15 million dollars. The massive territory stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and more than doubled the size of the United States.

Napoleon with the King of Rome (Napoleon III) sitting on his lap. The elder Napolean was crowned Emperor of France by Pope Pius VII in 1804.

Napoleon's asking price worked out to be about four cents an acre.

The deal was struck in April 1803, but it brought a good deal of controversy. While American development in the 19th century depended on western expansion, it also raised controversial issues that might lead to the disunion of the United States. Some New England Federalists, for example, began to talk of seceding from the U.S. since their political power was dramatically reduced by the purchase.

Further, Jefferson had clearly not followed his own strict interpretation of the Constitution. Federalist critics howled that the Constitution nowhere permitted the federal government to purchase new land. Jefferson was troubled by the inconsistency, but in the end decided that the Constitution's treaty-making provisions allowed him room to act.

Most of the Senate agreed and the Louisiana Purchase easily passed 26 to 6. The dramatic expansion also contradicted Jefferson's commitment to reduce the national debt as swiftly as possible. Although 15 million dollars was a relatively small sum for such a large amount of land, it was still an enormous price tag for the modest federal budget of the day.

Thomas Jefferson's purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 - over 600 million acres at less than 4¢ an acre - was an economic as well as a political victory, as it avoided a possible war with the French.

The Louisiana Purchase demonstrates Jefferson's ability to make pragmatic political decisions. Although contrary to some of his central principles, guaranteeing western expansion was so important to Jefferson's overall vision that he took bold action. The gains were dramatic, as the territory acquired would in time add 13 new states to the union. In 1812, Louisiana became the first state to join the union from land bought in the purchase. Louisiana was allowed to enter the United States with its French legal traditions largely in place. Even today, Louisiana's legal code retains many elements that do not follow English common law traditions. The federal system could be remarkably flexible.

The Treaty of San Ildefonso was a secret treaty between France and Spain, which set the stage for an expansion of Napoleon's empire into America.
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Though the French are said to have "settled" Louisiana, many Native American groups maintained farming communities well before the French arrived.
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westward expansion: the louisiana purchase

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Westward Expansion: The Louisiana Purchase [ushistory.org]

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One of the first colored illustrations to be put into print, John H.B. Latrobe's The Balise. Mississippi River captures the haunting image of a navigation station under a full moon at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Jefferson's plans for the nation depended upon western expansion and access to international markets for American farm products.

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Landmark decision by supreme court justice John Marshall ruled the judiciary act of 1789 unconstitutional established judicial review. Judicial review allowed the federal court to determine if executive or legislative action was unconstitutional.

Source: https://www.ushistory.org/us/20e.asp

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Orders given by Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark were on a military expedition to explore the Louisiana purchase. The effects of the expedition include increased geographic and scientific knowledge of the western areas, expanded the fur trade, and increased U.S claims.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Lewis-and-Clark-Expedition/Pacific-Ocean-and-return

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They finally arrived at the Pacific Ocean in mid-November, with Clark recording in his journal, "Ocian in view! O! the joy." Fierce storms delayed their progress for nearly a month. The members conducted a democratic vote on where to spend the winter, with even York and Sacagawea casting votes. Near present-day Astoria, Oregon, the corps built Fort Clatsop and endured a wet, miserable winter by journal writing, drying meat, making salt, and traveling to see a beached whale. They hoped to encounter vessels along the Pacific that could transport them home, but, finding none, they did an about-face, planning to return along the Columbia and Missouri rivers. After stealing a Clatsop Indian canoe, they headed up the Columbia on March 23, 1806. They arrived at the Nez Percé villages, gathered up their horses, and waited for the snows to melt.

On July 3, after recrossing the Bitterroots, the expedition divided into several groups to better explore the region and two major tributaries of the Missouri. Several groups floated down to the Great Falls, digging up supplies they had cached on their outward journey. Meanwhile, Clark arrived at the Yellowstone River after crossing Bozeman Pass, the route suggested by Sacagawea. After constructing two canoes, he carved his name and the date in a sandstone outcropping, Pompey's Tower (now Pompey's Pillar), named for Sacagawea's son, whom Clark called Pomp. In the meantime, Lewis and three men met eight Blackfeet on July 26 on a tributary of Maria's River near present-day Cut Bank, Montana. A deadly altercation occurred the next morning when the explorers shot two warriors who had stolen their horses and guns. Fleeing on horseback for 24 hours straight, the foursome arrived at the Missouri River to rejoin other members of the expedition who were floating downstream. Farther on, this group reunited with Clark, bid farewell to the Charbonneaus, and floated downstream, completing the journey.

The Corps of Discovery met with a grand reception at St. Louis on September 23. Congress rewarded them with double pay and public land. The captains each received 1,600 acres (650 hectares), and their men received 320 acres (130 hectares). The final cost for the expedition totaled $38,000. Jefferson appointed Lewis governor of Upper Louisiana Territory and appointed Clark an Indian agent. Some of the expedition stayed in the military, others entered the fur trade, while still others took to farming in the region or returned to the East.

Legacy

Some insist Lewis and Clark's legacy is insignificant because they were not the first non-Indians to explore the area, did not find an all-water route across the continent, and failed to publish their journals in a timely fashion. Although the first official account appeared in 1814, the two-volume narrative did not contain any of their scientific achievements. Nevertheless, the expedition contributed significant geographic and scientific knowledge of the West, aided the expansion of the fur trade, and strengthened U.S. claims to the Pacific. Clark's maps portraying the geography of the West, printed in 1810 and 1814, were the best available until the 1840s.

No American exploration looms larger in U.S. history. The Lewis and Clark Expedition has been commemorated with stamps, monuments, and trails and has had numerous places named after it. St. Louis hosted the 1904 World's Fair during the expedition's centennial, and Portland, Oregon, sponsored the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition. In 1978 Congress established the 3,700-mile (6,000-km) Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail. While Lewis and Clark had a great interest in documenting Indian cultures, they represented a government whose policies can now be seen to have fostered dispossession and cultural genocide. This dichotomy was on display during the event's bicentennial, commemorated by two years of special events across the expedition route.
Jay H. Buckley

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Lewis and Clark Expedition - Pacific Ocean and return

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Lewis and Clark Expedition - Lewis and Clark Expedition - Pacific Ocean and return: They finally arrived at the Pacific Ocean in mid-November, with Clark recording in his journal, "Ocian in view! O! the joy." Fierce storms delayed their progress for nearly a month.

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Because Britain and France kept impressing U.S sailors into their navy's Jefferson responded by restricting all U.S exports and imports from Britain. Wildly unpopular and increased prices of all goods.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/facts/Embargo-Act

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Embargo Act (1807), U.S. President Thomas Jefferson's nonviolent resistance to British and French molestation of U.S. merchant ships carrying, or suspected of carrying, war materials and other cargoes to European belligerents during the Napoleonic Wars. Tensions between the U.S. and Britain led to the War of 1812.

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War was declared by James Madison against Great Britain because of the forced impressment of U.S sailors and Britain restricting U.S trade. When Baltimore’s Fort McHenry withstood hours of bombing they placed a flag and inspired the national anthem.

Source: https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/war-of-1812

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Table of Contents

1. Causes of the War of 1812

2. The War of 1812 Breaks Out

3. War of 1812: Mixed Results for American Forces

4. Inspiration for 'The Star Spangled Banner'

5. End of the War of 1812 and Its Impact

6. Impact of the War of 1812

In the War of 1812, the United States took on the greatest naval power in the world, Great Britain, in a conflict that would have an immense impact on the young country's future. Causes of the war included British attempts to restrict U.S. trade, the Royal Navy's impressment of American seamen and America's desire to expand its territory.

The United States suffered many costly defeats at the hands of British, Canadian and Native American troops over the course of the War of 1812, including the capture and burning of the nation's capital, Washington, D.C., in August 1814. Nonetheless, American troops were able to repulse British invasions in New York, Baltimore and New Orleans, boosting national confidence and fostering a new spirit of patriotism. The ratification of the Treaty of Ghent on February 17, 1815, ended the war but left many of the most contentious questions unresolved. Nonetheless, many in the United States celebrated the War of 1812 as a "second war of independence," beginning an era of partisan agreement and national pride.

Causes of the War of 1812

At the outset of the 19th century, Great Britain was locked in a long and bitter conflict with Napoleon Bonaparte's France. In an attempt to cut off supplies from reaching the enemy, both sides attempted to block the United States from trading with the other. In 1807, Britain passed the Orders in Council, which required neutral countries to obtain a license from its authorities before trading with France or French colonies. The Royal Navy also outraged Americans by its practice of impressment, or removing seamen from U.S. merchant vessels and forcing them to serve on behalf of the British.

In 1809, the U.S. Congress repealed Thomas Jefferson 's unpopular Embargo Act, which by restricting trade had hurt Americans more than either Britain or France. Its replacement, the Non-Intercourse Act, specifically prohibited trade with Britain and France. It also proved ineffective, and in turn was replaced with a May 1810 bill stating that if either power dropped trade restrictions against the United States, Congress would in turn resume non-intercourse with the opposing power.

After Napoleon hinted he would stop restrictions, President James Madison blocked all trade with Britain that November. Meanwhile, new members of Congress elected that year-led by Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun-had begun to agitate for war, based on their indignation over British violations of maritime rights as well as Britain's encouragement of Native American hostility against American westward expansion.

Did you know? The War of 1812 produced a new generation of great American generals, including Andrew Jackson, Jacob Brown and Winfield Scott, and helped propel no fewer than four men to the presidency: Jackson, John Quincy Adams, James Monroe and William Henry Harrison.

The War of 1812 Breaks Out

In the fall of 1811, Indiana's territorial governor William Henry Harrison led U.S. troops to victory in the Battle of Tippecanoe. The defeat convinced many Indians in the Northwest Territory (including the celebrated Shawnee chief Tecumseh) that they needed British support to prevent American settlers from pushing them further out of their lands.

Meanwhile, by late 1811 the so-called "War Hawks" in Congress were putting more and more pressure on Madison, and on June 18, 1812, the president signed a declaration of war against Britain. Though Congress ultimately voted for war, both House and Senate were bitterly divided on the issue. Most Western and Southern congressmen supported war, while Federalists (especially New Englanders who relied heavily on trade with Britain) accused war advocates of using the excuse of maritime rights to promote their expansionist agenda.

In order to strike at Great Britain, U.S. forces almost immediately attacked Canada, which was then a British colony. American officials were overly optimistic about the invasion's success, especially given how underprepared U.S. troops were at the time. On the other side, they faced a well-managed defense coordinated by Sir Isaac Brock, the British soldier and administrator in charge in Upper Canada (modern Ontario).

On August 16, 1812, the United States suffered a humiliating defeat after Brock and Tecumseh's forces chased those led by Michigan William Hull across the Canadian border, scaring Hull into surrendering Detroit without any shots fired.

War of 1812: Mixed Results for American Forces

Things looked better for the United States in the West, as Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry's brilliant success in the Battle of Lake Erie in September 1813 placed the Northwest Territory firmly under American control. Harrison was subsequently able to retake Detroit with a victory in the Battle of Thames (in which Tecumseh was killed). Meanwhile, the U.S. navy had been able to score several victories over the Royal Navy in the early months of the war. With the defeat of Napoleon's armies in April 1814, however, Britain was able to turn its full attention to the war effort in North America.

As large numbers of troops arrived, British forces raided the Chesapeake Bay and moved in on the U.S. capital, capturing Washington, D.C., on August 24, 1814, and burning government buildings including the Capitol and the White House.

Inspiration for 'The Star Spangled Banner'

On September 11, 1814, at the Battle of Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain in New York, the American navy soundly defeated the British fleet. And on September 13, 1814, Baltimore's Fort McHenry withstood 25 hours of bombardment by the British Navy.

The following morning, the fort's soldiers hoisted an enormous American flag, a sight that inspired Francis Scott Key to write a poem that would later be set to music and become known as " The Star-Spangled Banner." (Set to the tune of an old English drinking song, it would later be adopted as the U.S. national anthem.) British forces subsequently left the Chesapeake Bay and began gathering their efforts for a campaign against New Orleans.

End of the War of 1812 and Its Impact

By that time, peace talks had already begun at Ghent (modern Belgium), and Britain moved for an armistice after the failure of the assault on Baltimore. In the negotiations that followed, the United States gave up its demands to end impressment, while Britain promised to leave Canada's borders unchanged and abandon efforts to create an Indian state in the Northwest. On December 24, 1814, commissioners signed the Treaty of Ghent, which would be ratified the following February.

On January 8, 1815, unaware that peace had been concluded, British forces mounted a major attack in the Battle of New Orleans, only to meet with defeat at the hands of future U.S. president Andrew Jackson 's army. News of the battle boosted sagging U.S. morale and left Americans with the taste of victory, despite the fact that the country had achieved none of its pre-war objectives.

Impact of the War of 1812

Though the War of 1812 is remembered as a relatively minor conflict in the United States and Britain, it looms large for Canadians and for Native Americans, who see it as a decisive turning point in their losing struggle to govern themselves. In fact, the war had a far-reaching impact in the United States, as the Treaty of Ghent ended decades of bitter partisan infighting in government and ushered in the so-called "Era of Good Feelings."

The war also marked the demise of the Federalist Party, which had been accused of being unpatriotic for its antiwar stance, and reinforced a tradition of Anglophobia that had begun during the Revolutionary War. Perhaps most importantly, the war's outcome boosted national self-confidence and encouraged the growing spirit of American expansionism that would shape the better part of the 19th century.

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War of 1812 - Winner, Summary & Causes | HISTORY

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The War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain was ignited by British attempts to restrict U.S. trade and America's desire to expand its territory.

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The treaty failed to mention the main causes of the War of 1812, such as the impressment of U.S sailors, but it did expand the Great Lakes Region for America.

Source: https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/treaty-of-ghent

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Secret meeting of federalists who were dissatisfied with the way James Madison was handling the war of 1812. The people at the meeting discussed the session and states rights. Americans disliked the federalists behavior and the party was unpopular until it dissolved.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Hartford-Convention

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Hartford Convention, (December 15, 1814-January 5, 1815), in U.S. history, a secret meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, of Federalist delegates from Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont who were dissatisfied with Pres. James Madison's mercantile policies and the progress of the War of 1812 ("Mr. Madison's War"), as well as long resentful over the balance of political power that gave the South, particularly Virginia, effective control of the national government.

The more extreme delegates raised the possibility of secession, but others sought only to dictate amendments to the Constitution that would protect their interests. Ultimately, the convention adopted a strong states' rights position and expressed its grievances in a series of resolutions against military conscription and commercial regulations (along with some stringent criticisms of Madison's administration) that were agreed to on January 4, 1815.

Even as the convention finished its business, however, a British sloop of war was beating its way across the Atlantic with dispatches containing the peace terms that had been agreed to in the Treaty of Ghent, ending the war. Moreover, as the convention's emissaries approached Washington, D.C., they were met by the news of Gen. Andrew Jackson's unexpected victory in the Battle of New Orleans. By the time the emissaries arrived, it was no longer possible to serve the kind of ultimatum contained in the convention's report. The war, along with the national crisis it had brought about, had ended. The secrecy of the Hartford proceedings also contributed to discrediting the convention, and its unpopularity was a factor in the demise of the Federalist Party.

Jeff Wallenfeldt.

Learn More in these related Britannica articles:

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Hartford Convention | United States history

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This article was most recently revised and updated by Hartford Convention, (December 15, 1814-January 5, 1815), in U.S. history, a secret meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, of Federalist delegates from Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont who were dissatisfied with Pres.

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Founded in 1817 and the goal was to send free African Americans to Africa instead of emancipation in America. This organization established the country Liberia. The Society was attacked by abolitionist such as William Lloyd Garrison who believed colonization benefited slaveholders.

Source: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african/afam002.html

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Characterized by a sense of optimism and positivity in the American people. The victory in the war of 1812, western expansion, etc. all add to those feelings while panic, economic instability, etc. leads to doubt if it really was a good time.

Source: https://politicaldictionary.com/words/era-of-good-feeling/#:~:text=The%20%E2%80%9CEra%20of%20Good%20Feeling,terms%20from%201817%20to%201825.

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The "Era of Good Feeling" refers to a period in U.S. history from about 1815 until about 1825, characterized by a sense of optimism and positivity.

The era is closely associated with the presidency of James Monroe, who served two terms from 1817 to 1825.

Monroe easily won the presidential election of 1816, garnering 183 electoral votes while the opposing Federalist party won just 34. His victory signaled the effective end of the Federalist party and ushered in a period of total dominance by Monroe's Democratic-Republican party.

After the election, Monroe went on a prolonged victory tour throughout New England. It was during this tour that one newspaper, the Columbian Centinel, published an article titled "The Era of Good Feeling."

The piece described a festive, upbeat mood which was shared by "eminent men of all political parties."

The era was marked by America's victory in the War of 1812. In Europe, the Napoleonic Wars were at an end, which also left Americans free to concentrate on their own affairs. The age is characterized by a growing isolationism.

Historians say that the Era of Good Feeling was also shored up by economic prosperity.

During Monroe's first term, America put in place its first protective tariffs and established the Second National Bank. Congress, at Monroe's request, also put an end to property taxes and other federal taxes. The federal government was able to pay off the nation's extensive war debt using the money from tariffs.

At the same time, America continued to expand across the continent.

In 1819, Andrew Jackson invaded Florida, which eventually led to a treaty with Spain that handed Florida over to the United States. During this period, America also stepped up its western expansion.

In 1823, the president also articulated the Monroe Doctrine, which defined the Western Hemisphere as the United States' sphere of influence and warned Europeans not to interfere in the region.

The era of good feeling was at an end by 1825.

Even during Monroe's second term, the sense of national goodwill was beginning to fade, and major conflicts over slavery and national expansion were making themselves felt. The period of one-party rule was also coming to an end.

Since the Federalist party had collapsed, the presidential election of 1824 featured candidates who were all from the Democratic-Republican party.

Four candidates vied for the presidency: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Treasury Secretary William Crawford, and House Speaker Henry Clay. None of the candidates was able to win a majority in the electoral college, so that decision went to the House of Representatives. The choice was between Adams and Jackson; neither Crawford nor clay had enough votes to compete.

The House handed the presidency to Adams, although Andrew Jackson had won the most popular votes and the most electoral votes.

The election marked a split in the party, leading Americans to re-organize into two new parties: the Democrats, loyal to Jackson, and the Whigs, who were allied to Adams.

In 1828, Andrew Jackson ran again and, this time, defeated Adams in his re-election bid.

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Era of Good Feeling - Political Dictionary

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The "Era of Good Feeling" refers to a period in U.S. history from about 1815 until about 1825, characterized by a sense of optimism and positivity. The era is closely associated with the presidency of James Monroe, who served two terms from 1817 to 1825.

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Minister Onis of Spain and the Secretary John Adams reached an agreement in which Spain would give up control of Florida to the U.S and Oregon as long as it keeps Texas.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Transcontinental-Treaty

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Made by president James Monroe in which it discouraged European countries from interfering in western affairs.

Source: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/monroe-doctrine

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Debate held about whether Missouri should be a slave or free state since it would make the balance unequal, Henry Clay proposed a solution. Missouri slave state and Maine free state. Slavery is banned pass the 36º 30' latitude.

Source: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/missouri-compromise#:~:text=This%20legislation%20admitted%20Missouri%20as,remainder%20of%20the%20Louisiana%20Territory.

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Tariff passed by John Quincy Adams to protect northern/western products from competing with foreign goods. This was wildly unpopular and hurt the Souths economy.

Source: https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1800-1850/The-Tariff-of-Abominations/#:~:text=The%20tariff%20sought%20to%20protect,profits%20of%20New%20England's%20industrialists.

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Milling places would hire young unmarried women to work with cotton and other textiles. The conditions were brutal and the women worked long hours. Earning money on their own gave the women economic independence. The women would live together in a single home. Other companies copied this practice.

Source: https://www.nps.gov/lowe/learn/historyculture/the-mill-girls-of-lowell.htm#:~:text=Beginning%20in%201823%2C%20with%20the,a%20measure%20of%20economic%20independence.

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Introduction

Who were the "mill girls"? The term "mill girls" was occasionally used in antebellum newspapers and periodicals to describe the young Yankee women, generally 15 - 30 years old, who worked in the large cotton factories. They were also called "female operatives." Female textile workers often described themselves as mill girls, while affirming the virtue of their class and the dignity of their labor. During early labor protests, they asserted that they were "the daughters of freemen" whose rights could not be "trampled upon with impunity."

Despite the hardship of mill work, women remained an important part of the textile workforce for many years. In the late 19th century, women held nearly two-thirds of all textile jobs in Lowell, with many immigrant women joining Yankee mill girls in the textile industry

To find workers for their mills in early Lowell, the textile corporations recruited women from New England farms and villages. These "daughters of Yankee farmers" had few economic opportunities, and many were enticed by the prospect of monthly cash wages and room and board in a comfortable boardinghouse. Beginning in 1823, with the opening of Lowell's first factory, large numbers of young women moved to the growing city.

In the mills, female workers faced long hours of toil and often grueling working conditions. Yet many female textile workers saved money and gained a measure of economic independence. In addition, the city's shops and religious institutions, along with its educational and recreational activities, offered an exciting social life that most women from small villages had never experienced.

A Recruitment Poster For Mill Workers
Baker Library, Harvard University

Most of the women who came to Lowell were from farms and small villages. Some had labored in small textile mills. Others had produced cotton or woolen goods or shoes for merchants who employed men and women in their homes and paid them by the pieces they produced.

On many farms the father was the property owner and head of household. Family members shared daily and seasonal tasks. In addition to strenuous chores outdoors, mothers and daughters toiled in the home, cooking, cleaning, and making clothes. This hardscrabble life proved increasingly difficult for young women, and by the early 1800s a growing number of Yankee farm families faced severe economic difficulties. For many young, rural women, the decision to leave home for a city like Lowell was often born of necessity.

A New Way to Live and Work

An illustration of the Boott Cotton Mills in the 1850s

For most young women, Lowell's social and economic opportunities existed within the limits imposed by the powerful textile corporations. Most pronounced was the control corporations exerted over the lives of their workers. The men who ran the corporations and managed the mills sought to regulate the moral conduct and social behavior of their workforce. Within the factory, overseers were responsible for maintaining work discipline and meeting production schedules. In the boardinghouses, the keepers enforced curfews and strict codes of conduct. Male and female workers were expected to observe the Sabbath, and temperance was strongly encouraged.

The clanging factory bell summoned operatives to and from the mill, constantly reminding them that their days were structured around work. Most textile workers toiled for 12 to 14 hours a day and half a day on Saturdays; the mills were closed on Sundays. Typically, mill girls were employed for nine to ten months of the year, and many left the factories during part of the summer to visit back home.

A long brick boardinghouse with workers posed outside

The majority of mill girls in Lowell lived in boardinghouses. These large, corporation-owned buildings were often run by a female keeper, or a husband and wife. A typical boardinghouse consisted of eight units, with 20 to 40 women living in each unit.

For most young women, life in the boardinghouse was dramatically different from life on the farm. Usually they shared a room with three other women, sleeping two to a bed. A fireplace in each room provided warmth in the colder seasons. The keeper prepared three meals a day, and the women dined together in a common room. Women formed many new friendships with other female boarders. The bonds created through daily social intercourse helped new workers adjust to the demands of factory life. And during the strife of labor protests, boardinghouses often became informal centers of organizing activity.

A weaver stands at a loom on a factory floor

Lowell's textile corporations paid higher wages than those in other textile cities, but work was arduous and conditions were frequently unhealthy. Although the city's corporations threatened labor reformers with firing or blacklisting, many mill girls protested wage cuts and working conditions. Female workers struck twice in the 1830s. In the 1840s, female labor reformers banded together to promote the ten-hour day, in the face of strong corporate opposition. Few strikes succeeded, however, and Lowell's workforce remained largely unorganized.

Adding to the difficulties of organizing Lowell's operatives was the changing ethnic composition of the workforce. The number of Irish employed in Lowell's mills rose dramatically in the 1840s, as Irish men and women fled their faminestricken land. Thousands of immigrants from many other countries settled in Lowell in the decades after the Civil War, yet women remained a major part of the Lowell's textile workforce. In large strikes against the textile manufacturers in 1903 and 1912, women workers played prominent roles.

One Mill Girl's Story: Sarah Bagley

One of Lowell's early leading labor reformers was a mill girl named Sarah Bagley. Born on a New Hampshire farm in 1806, Bagley arrived in Lowell in 1836 and worked in a number of mills. She became a powerful speaker on behalf of male and female workers, promoted the 10-hour workday, and edited the labor newspaper The Voice of Industry.

In a letter to a friend in 1846, Bagley promoted the labor reform publication Factory Tracts as representing the interests of those "who are not willing to see our sex made into living machines to do the bidding of the incorporated aristocrats and reduced to a sum for their bodily services hardly sufficient to keep soul and body together." Although the struggles of Bagley and other mill girls to achieve legislation for a 10-hour day failed, Lowell's textile corporations did reduce the workday to 11 hours.

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The Mill Girls of Lowell - Lowell National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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Who were the "mill girls"? The term "mill girls" was occasionally used in antebellum newspapers and periodicals to describe the young Yankee women, generally 15 - 30 years old, who worked in the large cotton factories. They were also called "female operatives."

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The shift in the American economy from traditional sustenance farming to a capitalist system. This happened because the spread of new technology (ex. steamboat by Robert Fulton, Cumberland road, etc.).

Source: https://www.americanyawp.com/text/08-the-market-revolution/

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In the early years of the nineteenth century, Americans' endless commercial ambition-what one Baltimore paper in 1815 called an "almost universal ambition to get forward "-remade the nation. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, an old subsistence world died and a new more-commercial nation was born. Americans integrated the technologies of the Industrial Revolution into a new commercial economy. Steam power, the technology that moved steamboats and railroads, fueled the rise of American industry by powering mills and sparking new national transportation networks. A "market revolution" remade the nation.

The revolution reverberated across the country. More and more farmers grew crops for profit, not self-sufficiency. Vast factories and cities arose in the North. Enormous fortunes materialized. A new middle class ballooned. And as more men and women worked in the cash economy, they were freed from the bound dependence of servitude. But there were costs to this revolution. As northern textile factories boomed, the demand for southern cotton swelled, and American slavery accelerated. Northern subsistence farmers became laborers bound to the whims of markets and bosses. The market revolution sparked explosive economic growth and new personal wealth, but it also created a growing lower class of property-less workers and a series of devastating depressions, called "panics." Many Americans labored for low wages and became trapped in endless cycles of poverty. Some workers, often immigrant women, worked thirteen hours a day, six days a week. Others labored in slavery. Massive northern textile mills turned southern cotton into cheap cloth. And although northern states washed their hands of slavery, their factories fueled the demand for slave-grown southern cotton and their banks provided the financing that ensured the profitability and continued existence of the American slave system. And so, as the economy advanced, the market revolution wrenched the United States in new directions as it became a nation of free labor and slavery, of wealth and inequality, and of endless promise and untold perils.

The growth of the American economy reshaped American life in the decades before the Civil War. Americans increasingly produced goods for sale, not for consumption. Improved transportation enabled a larger exchange network. Labor-saving technology improved efficiency and enabled the separation of the public and domestic spheres. The market revolution fulfilled the revolutionary generation's expectations of progress but introduced troubling new trends. Class conflict, child labor, accelerated immigration, and the expansion of slavery followed. These strains required new family arrangements and transformed American cities.

American commerce had proceeded haltingly during the eighteenth century. American farmers increasingly exported foodstuffs to Europe as the French Revolutionary Wars devastated the continent between 1793 and 1815. America's exports rose in value from $20.2 million in 1790 to $108.3 million by 1807. But while exports rose, exorbitant internal transportation costs hindered substantial economic development within the United States. In 1816, for instance, $9 could move one ton of goods across the Atlantic Ocean, but only thirty miles across land. An 1816 Senate Committee Report lamented that "the price of land carriage is too great" to allow the profitable production of American manufactures. But in the wake of the War of 1812, Americans rushed to build a new national infrastructure, new networks of roads, canals, and railroads. In his 1815 annual message to Congress, President James Madison stressed "the great importance of establishing throughout our country the roads and canals which can best be executed under national authority." State governments continued to sponsor the greatest improvements in American transportation, but the federal government's annual expenditures on internal improvements climbed to a yearly average of $1,323,000 by Andrew Jackson's presidency..

Economic growth, however, proceeded unevenly. Depressions devastated the economy in 1819, 1837, and 1857. Each followed rampant speculation in various commodities: land in 1819, land and enslaved laborers in 1837, and railroad bonds in 1857. Eventually the bubbles all burst. The spread of paper currency untethered the economy from the physical signifiers of wealth familiar to the colonial generation, namely land. Counterfeit bills were endemic during this early period of banking. With so many fake bills circulating, Americans were constantly on the lookout for the "confidence man" and other deceptive characters in the urban landscape. Con men and women could look like regular honest Americans. Advice literature offered young men and women strategies for avoiding hypocrisy in an attempt to restore the social fiber. Intimacy in the domestic sphere became more important as duplicity proliferated in the public sphere. Fear of the confidence man, counterfeit bills, and a pending bust created anxiety in the new capitalist economy. But Americans refused to blame the logic of their new commercial system for these depressions. Instead, they kept pushing " to get forward."

The so-called Transportation Revolution opened the vast lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. In 1810, before the rapid explosion of American infrastructure, Margaret Dwight left New Haven, Connecticut, in a wagon headed for Ohio Territory. Her trip was less than five hundred miles but took six weeks to complete. The journey was a terrible ordeal, she said. The roads were "so rocky & so gullied as to be almost impassable." Ten days into the journey, at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Dwight said "it appeared to me that we had come to the end of the habitable part of the globe." She finally concluded that "the reason so few are willing to return from the Western country, is not that the country is so good, but because the journey is so bad." Nineteen years later, in 1829, English traveler Frances Trollope made the reverse journey across the Allegheny Mountains from Cincinnati to the East Coast. At Wheeling, Virginia, her coach encountered the National Road, the first federally funded interstate infrastructure project. The road was smooth and her journey across the Alleghenies was a scenic delight. "I really can hardly conceive a higher enjoyment than a botanical tour among the Alleghany Mountains," she declared. The ninety miles of the National Road was to her "a garden."

If the two decades between Margaret Dwight's and Frances Trollope's journeys transformed the young nation, the pace of change only accelerated in the following years. If a transportation revolution began with improved road networks, it soon incorporated even greater improvements in the ways people and goods moved across the landscape.

New York State completed the Erie Canal in 1825. The 350-mile-long human-made waterway linked the Great Lakes with the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean. Soon crops grown in the Great Lakes region were carried by water to eastern cities, and goods from emerging eastern factories made the reverse journey to midwestern farmers. The success of New York's "artificial river" launched a canal-building boom. By 1840 Ohio created two navigable, all-water links from Lake Erie to the Ohio River.

Robert Fulton established the first commercial steamboat service up and down the Hudson River in New York in 1807. Soon thereafter steamboats filled the waters of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Downstream-only routes became watery two-way highways. By 1830, more than two hundred steamboats moved up and down western rivers.

The United States' first long-distance rail line launched from Maryland in 1827. Baltimore's city government and the state government of Maryland provided half the start-up funds for the new Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Rail Road Company. The B&O's founders imagined the line as a means to funnel the agricultural products of the trans-Appalachian West to an outlet on the Chesapeake Bay. Similar motivations led citizens in Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, and Charleston, South Carolina to launch their own rail lines. State and local governments provided the means for the bulk of this initial wave of railroad construction, but economic collapse following the Panic of 1837 made governments wary of such investments. Government supports continued throughout the century, but decades later the public origins of railroads were all but forgotten, and the railroad corporation became the most visible embodiment of corporate capitalism.

By 1860 Americans had laid more than thirty thousand miles of railroads. The ensuing web of rail, roads, and canals meant that few farmers in the Northeast or Midwest had trouble getting goods to urban markets. Railroad development was slower in the South, but there a combination of rail lines and navigable rivers meant that few cotton planters struggled to transport their products to textile mills in the Northeast and in England.

Such internal improvements not only spread goods, they spread information. The transportation revolution was followed by a communications revolution. The telegraph redefined the limits of human communication. By 1843 Samuel Morse had persuaded Congress to fund a forty-mile telegraph line stretching from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. Within a few short years, during the Mexican-American War, telegraph lines carried news of battlefield events to eastern newspapers within days. This contrasts starkly with the War of 1812, when the Battle of New Orleans took place nearly two full weeks after Britain and the United States had signed a peace treaty.

The consequences of the transportation and communication revolutions reshaped the lives of Americans. Farmers who previously produced crops mostly for their own family now turned to the market. They earned cash for what they had previously consumed; they purchased the goods they had previously made or gone without. Market-based farmers soon accessed credit through eastern banks, which provided them with the opportunity to expand their enterprise but left also them prone before the risk of catastrophic failure wrought by distant market forces. In the Northeast and Midwest, where farm labor was ever in short supply, ambitious farmers invested in new technologies that promised to increase the productivity of the limited labor supply. The years between 1815 and 1850 witnessed an explosion of patents on agricultural technologies. The most famous of these, perhaps, was Cyrus McCormick's horse-drawn mechanical reaper, which partially mechanized wheat harvesting, and John Deere's steel-bladed plow, which more easily allowed for the conversion of unbroken ground into fertile farmland.

Most visibly, the market revolution encouraged the growth of cities and reshaped the lives of urban workers. In 1820, only New York had over one hundred thousand inhabitants. By 1850, six American cities met that threshold, including Chicago, which had been founded fewer than two decades earlier. New technology and infrastructure paved the way for such growth. The Erie Canal captured the bulk of the trade emerging from the Great Lakes region, securing New York City's position as the nation's largest and most economically important city. The steamboat turned St. Louis and Cincinnati into centers of trade, and Chicago rose as it became the railroad hub of the western Great Lakes and Great Plains regions. The geographic center of the nation shifted westward. The development of steam power and the exploitation of Pennsylvania coalfields shifted the locus of American manufacturing. By the 1830s, for instance, New England was losing its competitive advantage to the West.

Meanwhile, the cash economy eclipsed the old, local, informal systems of barter and trade. Income became the measure of economic worth. Productivity and efficiencies paled before the measure of income. Cash facilitated new impersonal economic relationships and formalized new means of production. Young workers might simply earn wages, for instance, rather than receiving room and board and training as part of apprenticeships. Moreover, a new form of economic organization appeared: the business corporation.

States offered the privileges of incorporation to protect the fortunes and liabilities of entrepreneurs who invested in early industrial endeavors. A corporate charter allowed investors and directors to avoid personal liability for company debts. The legal status of incorporation had been designed to confer privileges to organizations embarking on expensive projects explicitly designed for the public good, such as universities, municipalities, and major public works projects. The business corporation was something new. Many Americans distrusted these new, impersonal business organizations whose officers lacked personal responsibility while nevertheless carrying legal rights. Many wanted limits. Thomas Jefferson himself wrote in 1816 that "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." But in Dartmouth v. Woodward (1819) the Supreme Court upheld the rights of private corporations when it denied the attempt of the government of New Hampshire to reorganize Dartmouth College on behalf of the common good. Still, suspicions remained. A group of journeymen cordwainers in New Jersey publically declared in 1835 that they "entirely disapprov[ed] of the incorporation of Companies, for carrying on manual mechanical business, inasmuch as we believe their tendency is to eventuate and produce monopolies, thereby crippling the energies of individual enterprise."

Slave labor helped fuel the market revolution. By 1832, textile companies made up 88 out of 106 American corporations valued at over $100,000. These textile mills, worked by free labor, nevertheless depended on southern cotton, and the vast new market economy spurred the expansion of the plantation South.

By the early nineteenth century, states north of the Mason-Dixon Line had taken steps to abolish slavery. Vermont included abolition as a provision of its 1777 state constitution. Pennsylvania's emancipation act of 1780 stipulated that freed children must serve an indenture term of twenty-eight years. Gradualism brought emancipation while also defending the interests of northern enslavers and controlling still another generation of Black Americans. In 1804 New Jersey became the last of the northern states to adopt gradual emancipation plans. There was no immediate moment of jubilee, as many northern states only promised to liberate future children born to enslaved mothers. Such laws also stipulated that such children remain in indentured servitude to their mother's enslaver in order to compensate the enslaver's loss. James Mars, a young man indentured under this system in Connecticut, risked being thrown in jail when he protested the arrangement that kept him bound to his mother's enslaver until age twenty-five.

Quicker routes to freedom included escape or direct emancipation by enslavers. But escape was dangerous and voluntary manumission rare. Congress, for instance, made the harboring of a freedom-seeking enslaved person a federal crime as early as 1793. Hopes for manumission were even slimmer, as few northern enslavers emancipated their own enslaved laborers. Roughly one fifth of the white families in New York City owned enslaved laborers, and fewer than eighty enslavers in the city voluntarily manumitted their enslaved laborers between 1783 and 1800. By 1830, census data suggests that at least 3,500 people were still enslaved in the North. Elderly enslaved people in Connecticut remained in bondage as late as 1848, and in New Jersey slavery endured until after the Civil War.

Emancipation proceeded slowly, but proceeded nonetheless. A free Black population of fewer than 60,000 in 1790 increased to more than 186,000 by 1810. Growing free Black communities fought for their civil rights. In a number of New England locales, free African Americans could vote and send their children to public schools. Most northern states granted Black citizens property rights and trial by jury. African Americans owned land and businesses, founded mutual aid societies, established churches, promoted education, developed print culture, and voted.

Nationally, however, the enslaved population continued to grow, from less than 700,000 in 1790 to more than 1.5 million by 1820. The growth of abolition in the North and the acceleration of slavery in the South created growing divisions. Cotton drove the process more than any other crop. Eli Whitney's cotton gin, a simple hand-cranked device designed to mechanically remove sticky green seeds from short staple cotton, allowed southern planters to dramatically expand cotton production for the national and international markets. Water-powered textile factories in England and the American Northeast rapidly turned raw cotton into cloth. Technology increased both the supply of and demand for cotton. White southerners responded by expanding cultivation farther west, to the Mississippi River and beyond. Slavery had been growing less profitable in tobacco-planting regions like Virginia, but the growth of cotton farther south and west increased the demand for human bondage. Eager cotton planters invested their new profits in more enslaved laborers.

The cotton boom fueled speculation in slavery. Many enslavers leveraged potential profits into loans used to purchase ever increasing numbers of enslaved laborers. For example, one 1840 Louisiana Courier ad warned, "it is very difficult now to find persons willing to buy slaves from Mississippi or Alabama on account of the fears entertained that such property may be already mortgaged to the banks of the above named states."

New national and international markets fueled the plantation boom. American cotton exports rose from 150,000 bales in 1815 to 4,541,000 bales in 1859. The Census Bureau's 1860 Census of Manufactures stated that "the manufacture of cotton constitutes the most striking feature of the industrial history of the last fifty years." Enslavers shipped their cotton north to textile manufacturers and to northern financers for overseas shipments. Northern insurance brokers and exporters in the Northeast profited greatly.

While the United States ended its legal participation in the global slave trade in 1808, slave traders moved one million enslaved people from the tobacco-producing Upper South to cotton fields in the Lower South between 1790 and 1860. This harrowing trade in human flesh supported middle-class occupations in the North and South: bankers, doctors, lawyers, insurance brokers, and shipping agents all profited. And of course it facilitated the expansion of northeastern textile mills.

While industrialization bypassed most of the American South, southern cotton production nevertheless nurtured industrialization in the Northeast and Midwest. The drive to produce cloth transformed the American system of labor. In the early republic, laborers in manufacturing might typically have been expected to work at every stage of production. But a new system, piecework, divided much of production into discrete steps performed by different workers. In this new system, merchants or investors sent or "put out" materials to individuals and families to complete at home. These independent laborers then turned over the partially finished goods to the owner to be given to another laborer to finish.

As early as the 1790s, however, merchants in New England began experimenting with machines to replace the putting-out system. To effect this transition, merchants and factory owners relied on the theft of British technological knowledge to build the machines they needed. In 1789, for instance, a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, contracted twenty-one-year-old British immigrant Samuel Slater to build a yarn-spinning machine and then a carding machine. Slater had apprenticed in an English mill and succeeded in mimicking the English machinery. The fruits of American industrial espionage peaked in 1813 when Francis Cabot Lowell and Paul Moody re-created the powered loom used in the mills of Manchester, England. Lowell had spent two years in Britain observing and touring mills in England. He committed the design of the powered loom to memory so that, no matter how many times British customs officials searched his luggage, he could smuggle England's industrial know-how into New England.

Lowell's contribution to American industrialism was not only technological, it was organizational. He helped reorganize and centralize the American manufacturing process. A new approach, the Waltham-Lowell System, created the textile mill that defined antebellum New England and American industrialism before the Civil War. The modern American textile mill was fully realized in the planned mill town of Lowell in 1821, four years after Lowell himself died. Powered by the Merrimack River in northern Massachusetts and operated by local farm girls, the mills of Lowell centralized the process of textile manufacturing under one roof. The modern American factory was born. Soon ten thousand workers labored in Lowell alone. Sarah Rice, who worked at the nearby Millbury factory, found it "a noisy place" that was "more confined than I like to be." Working conditions were harsh for the many desperate "mill girls" who operated the factories relentlessly from sunup to sundown. One worker complained that "a large class of females are, and have been, destined to a state of servitude." Female workers went on strike. They lobbied for better working hours. But the lure of wages was too much. As another worker noted, "very many Ladies . . . have given up millinery, dressmaking & school keeping for work in the mill." With a large supply of eager workers, Lowell's vision brought a rush of capital and entrepreneurs into New England. The first American manufacturing boom was under way.

The market revolution shook other industries as well. Craftsmen began to understand that new markets increased the demand for their products. Some shoemakers, for instance, abandoned the traditional method of producing custom-built shoes at their home workshops and instead began producing larger quantities of shoes in ready-made sizes to be shipped to urban centers. Manufacturers wanting increased production abandoned the old personal approach of relying on a single live-in apprentice for labor and instead hired unskilled wage laborers who did not have to be trained in all aspects of making shoes but could simply be assigned a single repeatable aspect of the task. Factories slowly replaced shops. The old paternalistic apprentice system, which involved long-term obligations between apprentice and master, gave way to a more impersonal and more flexible labor system in which unskilled laborers could be hired and fired as the market dictated. A writer in the New York Observer in 1826 complained, "The master no longer lives among his apprentices [and] watches over their moral as well as mechanical improvement." Masters-turned-employers now not only had fewer obligations to their workers, they had a lesser attachment. They no longer shared the bonds of their trade but were subsumed under new class-based relationships: employers and employees, bosses and workers, capitalists and laborers. On the other hand, workers were freed from the long-term, paternalistic obligations of apprenticeship or the legal subjugation of indentured servitude. They could theoretically work when and where they wanted. When men or women made an agreement with an employer to work for wages, they were "left free to apportion among themselves their respective shares, untrammeled . . . by unwise laws," as Reverend Alonzo Potter rosily proclaimed in 1840. But while the new labor system was celebrated throughout the northern United States as "free labor," it was simultaneously lamented by a growing powerless class of laborers.

As the northern United States rushed headlong toward commercialization and an early capitalist economy, many Americans grew uneasy with the growing gap between wealthy businessmen and impoverished wage laborers. Elites like Daniel Webster might defend their wealth and privilege by insisting that all workers could achieve "a career of usefulness and enterprise" if they were "industrious and sober," but labor activist Seth Luther countered that capitalism created "a cruel system of extraction on the bodies and minds of the producing classes . . . for no other object than to enable the 'rich' to 'take care of themselves' while the poor must work or starve."

Americans embarked on their Industrial Revolution with the expectation that all men could start their careers as humble wage workers but later achieve positions of ownership and stability with hard work. Wage work had traditionally been looked down on as a state of dependence, suitable only as a temporary waypoint for young men without resources on their path toward the middle class and the economic success necessary to support a wife and children ensconced within the domestic sphere. Children's magazines-such as Juvenile Miscellany and Parley's Magazine -glorified the prospect of moving up the economic ladder. This "free labor ideology" provided many northerners with a keen sense of superiority over the slave economy of the southern states.

But the commercial economy often failed in its promise of social mobility. Depressions and downturns might destroy businesses and reduce owners to wage work. Even in times of prosperity unskilled workers might perpetually lack good wages and economic security and therefore had to forever depend on supplemental income from their wives and young children.

Wage workers-a population disproportionately composed of immigrants and poorer Americans-faced low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions. Class conflict developed. Instead of the formal inequality of a master-servant contract, employer and employee entered a contract presumably as equals. But hierarchy was evident: employers had financial security and political power; employees faced uncertainty and powerlessness in the workplace. Dependent on the whims of their employers, some workers turned to strikes and unions to pool their resources. In 1825 a group of journeymen in Boston formed a Carpenters' Union to protest their inability "to maintain a family at the present time, with the wages which are now usually given." Working men organized unions to assert themselves and win both the respect and the resources due to a breadwinner and a citizen.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, families in the northern United States increasingly participated in the cash economy created by the market revolution. The first stirrings of industrialization shifted work away from the home. These changes transformed Americans' notions of what constituted work and therefore shifted what it meant to be an American woman and an American man. As Americans encountered more goods in stores and produced fewer at home, the ability to remove women and children from work determined a family's class status. This ideal, of course, ignored the reality of women's work at home and was possible for only the wealthy. The market revolution therefore not only transformed the economy, it changed the nature of the American family. As the market revolution thrust workers into new systems of production, it redefined gender roles. The market integrated families into a new cash economy. As Americans purchased more goods in stores and produced fewer at home, the purity of the domestic sphere-the idealized realm of women and children-increasingly signified a family's class status.

Women and children worked to supplement the low wages of many male workers. Around age eleven or twelve, boys could take jobs as office runners or waiters, earning perhaps a dollar a week to support their parents' incomes. The ideal of an innocent and protected childhood was a privilege for middle- and upper-class families, who might look down upon poor families. Joseph Tuckerman, a Unitarian minister who served poor Bostonians, lamented the lack of discipline and regularity among poor children: "At one hour they are kept at work to procure fuel, or perform some other service; in the next are allowed to go where they will, and to do what they will." Prevented from attending school, poor children served instead as economic assets for their destitute families.

Education equipped young women with the tools to live sophisticated, genteel lives. After sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Davis left home in 1816 to attend school, her father explained that the experience would "lay a foundation for your future character & respectability." After touring the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville praised the independence granted to the young American woman, who had "the great scene of the world . . . open to her" and whose education prepared her to exercise both reason and moral sense. Middling young women also used their education to take positions as schoolteachers in the expanding common school system. Bristol Academy in Taunton, Massachusetts, for instance, advertised "instruction . . . in the art of teaching" for female pupils. In 1825, Nancy Denison left Concord Academy with references indicating that she was "qualified to teach with success and profit" and "very cheerfully recommend[ed]" for "that very responsible employment."

And so, during the early nineteenth century, opportunities for education and employment often depended on a given family's class. In colonial America, nearly all children worked within their parent's chosen profession, whether it be agricultural or artisanal. During the market revolution, however, more children were able to postpone employment. Americans aspired to provide a "Romantic Childhood"-a period in which boys and girls were sheltered within the home and nurtured through primary schooling. This ideal was available to families that could survive without their children's labor. As these children matured, their early experiences often determined whether they entered respectable, well-paying positions or became dependent workers with little prospects for social mobility.

Just as children were expected to be sheltered from the adult world of work, American culture expected men and women to assume distinct gender roles as they prepared for marriage and family life. An ideology of "separate spheres" set the public realm-the world of economic production and political life-apart as a male domain, and the world of consumers and domestic life as a female one. (Even nonworking women labored by shopping for the household, producing food and clothing, cleaning, educating children, and performing similar activities. But these were considered "domestic" because they did not bring money into the household, although they too were essential to the household's economic viability.) While reality muddied the ideal, the divide between a private, female world of home and a public, male world of business defined American gender hierarchy.

The idea of separate spheres also displayed a distinct class bias. Middle and upper classes reinforced their status by shielding "their" women from the harsh realities of wage labor. Women were to be mothers and educators, not partners in production. But lower-class women continued to contribute directly to the household economy. The middle- and upper-class ideal was feasible only in households where women did not need to engage in paid labor. In poorer households, women engaged in wage labor as factory workers, pieceworkers producing items for market consumption, tavern- and innkeepers, and domestic servants. While many of the fundamental tasks women performed remained the same-producing clothing, cultivating vegetables, overseeing dairy production, and performing any number of other domestic labors-the key difference was whether and when they performed these tasks for cash in a market economy.

Domestic expectations constantly changed and the market revolution transformed many women's traditional domestic tasks. Cloth production, for instance, advanced throughout the market revolution as new mechanized production increased the volume and variety of fabrics available to ordinary people. This relieved many better-off women of a traditional labor obligation. As cloth production became commercialized, women's home-based cloth production became less important to household economies. Purchasing cloth and, later, ready-made clothes began to transform women from producers to consumers. One woman from Maine, Martha Ballard, regularly referenced spinning, weaving, and knitting in the diary she kept from 1785 to 1812. Martha, her daughters, and her female neighbors spun and plied linen and woolen yarns and used them to produce a variety of fabrics to make clothing for her family. The production of cloth and clothing was a year-round, labor-intensive process, but it was for home consumption, not commercial markets.

In cities, where women could buy cheap imported cloth to turn into clothing, they became skilled consumers. They stewarded money earned by their husbands by comparing values and haggling over prices. In one typical experience, Mrs. Peter Simon, a captain's wife, inspected twenty-six yards of Holland cloth to ensure that it was worth the £130 price. Even wealthy women shopped for high-value goods. While servants or enslaved people routinely made low-value purchases, the mistress of the household trusted her discriminating eye alone for expensive or specific purchases.

Women might also parlay their skills into businesses. In addition to working as seamstresses, milliners, or laundresses, women might undertake paid work for neighbors or acquaintances or combine clothing production with management of a boardinghouse. Even enslaved laborers with particular skill at producing clothing could be hired out for a higher price or might even negotiate to work part-time for themselves. Most enslaved people, however, continued to produce domestic items, including simpler cloths and clothing, for home consumption.

Similar domestic expectations played out in the slave states. Enslaved women labored in the fields. Whites argued that African American women were less delicate and womanly than white women and therefore perfectly suited for agricultural labor. The southern ideal meanwhile established that white plantation mistresses were shielded from manual labor because of their very whiteness. Throughout the slave states, however, aside from the minority of plantations with dozens of enslaved laborers, most white women by necessity continued to assist with planting, harvesting, and processing agricultural projects despite the cultural stigma attached to it. White southerners continued to produce large portions of their food and clothing at home. Even when they were market-oriented producers of cash crops, white southerners still insisted that their adherence to plantation slavery and racial hierarchy made them morally superior to greedy northerners and their callous, cutthroat commerce. Southerners and northerners increasingly saw their ways of life as incompatible.

While the market revolution remade many women's economic roles, their legal status remained essentially unchanged. Upon marriage, women were rendered legally dead by the notion of coverture, the custom that counted married couples as a single unit represented by the husband. Without special precautions or interventions, women could not earn their own money, own their own property, sue, or be sued. Any money earned or spent belonged by law to their husbands. Women shopped on their husbands' credit and at any time husbands could terminate their wives' access to their credit. Although a handful of states made divorce available-divorce had before only been legal in Congregationalist states such as Massachusetts and Connecticut, where marriage was strictly a civil contract rather than a religious one-it remained extremely expensive, difficult, and rare. Marriage was typically a permanently binding legal contract.

Ideas of marriage, if not the legal realities, began to change. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century marked the beginning of the shift from "institutional" to "companionate" marriage. Institutional marriages were primarily labor arrangements that maximized the couple's and their children's chances of surviving and thriving. Men and women assessed each other's skills as they related to household production, although looks and personality certainly entered into the equation. But in the late eighteenth century, under the influence of Enlightenment thought, young people began to privilege character and compatibility in their potential partners. Money was still essential: marriages prompted the largest redistributions of property prior to the settling of estates at death. But the means of this redistribution was changing. Especially in the North, land became a less important foundation for matchmaking as wealthy young men became not only farmers and merchants but bankers, clerks, or professionals. The increased emphasis on affection and attraction that young people embraced was facilitated by an increasingly complex economy that offered new ways to store, move, and create wealth, which liberalized the criteria by which families evaluated potential in-laws.

To be considered a success in family life, a middle-class American man typically aspired to own a comfortable home and to marry a woman of strong morals and religious conviction who would take responsibility for raising virtuous, well-behaved children. The duties of the middle-class husband and wife would be clearly delineated into separate spheres. The husband alone was responsible for creating wealth and engaging in the commerce and politics-the public sphere. The wife was responsible for the private-keeping a good home, being careful with household expenses, and raising children, inculcating them with the middle-class virtues that would ensure their future success. But for poor families, sacrificing the potential economic contributions of wives and children was an impossibility.

More than five million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1820 and 1860. Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants sought new lives and economic opportunities. By the Civil War, nearly one out of every eight Americans had been born outside the United States. A series of push and pull factors drew immigrants to the United States.

While the Irish settled mostly in coastal cities, most German immigrants used American ports and cities as temporary waypoints before settling in the rural countryside. Over 1.5 million immigrants from the various German states arrived in the United States during the antebellum era. Although some southern Germans fled declining agricultural conditions and repercussions of the failed revolutions of 1848, many Germans simply sought steadier economic opportunity. German immigrants tended to travel as families and carried with them skills and capital that enabled them to enter middle-class trades. Germans migrated to the Old Northwest to farm in rural areas and practiced trades in growing communities such as St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee, three cities that formed what came to be called the German Triangle.

Catholic and Jewish Germans transformed regions of the republic. Although records are sparse, New York's Jewish population rose from approximately five hundred in 1825 to forty thousand in 1860. Similar gains were seen in other American cities. Jewish immigrants hailing from southwestern Germany and parts of occupied Poland moved to the United States through chain migration and as family units. Unlike other Germans, Jewish immigrants rarely settled in rural areas. Once established, Jewish immigrants found work in retail, commerce, and artisanal occupations such as tailoring. They quickly found their footing and established themselves as an intrinsic part of the American market economy. Just as Irish immigrants shaped the urban landscape through the construction of churches and Catholic schools, Jewish immigrants erected synagogues and made their mark on American culture.

The sudden influx of immigration triggered a backlash among many native-born Anglo-Protestant Americans. This nativist movement, especially fearful of the growing Catholic presence, sought to limit European immigration and prevent Catholics from establishing churches and other institutions. Popular in northern cities such as Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities with large Catholic populations, nativism even spawned its own political party in the 1850s. The American Party, more commonly known as the Know-Nothing Party, found success in local and state elections throughout the North. The party even nominated candidates for president in 1852 and 1856. The rapid rise of the Know-Nothings, reflecting widespread anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment, slowed European immigration. Immigration declined precipitously after 1855 as nativism, the Crimean War, and improving economic conditions in Europe discouraged potential migrants from traveling to the United States. Only after the American Civil War would immigration levels match and eventually surpass the levels seen in the 1840s and 1850s.

In industrial northern cities, Irish immigrants swelled the ranks of the working class and quickly encountered the politics of industrial labor. Many workers formed trade unions during the early republic. Organizations such as Philadelphia's Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers or the Carpenters' Union of Boston operated within specific industries in major American cities. These unions worked to protect the economic power of their members by creating closed shops-workplaces wherein employers could only hire union members-and striking to improve working conditions. Political leaders denounced these organizations as unlawful combinations and conspiracies to promote the narrow self-interest of workers above the rights of property holders and the interests of the common good. Unions did not become legally acceptable until 1842 when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of a union organized among Boston bootmakers, arguing that the workers were capable of acting "in such a manner as best to subserve their own interests." Even after the case, unions remained in a precarious legal position.

In the 1840s, labor activists organized to limit working hours and protect children in factories. The New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics and Other Workingmen (NEA) mobilized to establish a ten-hour workday across industries. They argued that the ten-hour day would improve the immediate conditions of laborers by allowing "time and opportunities for intellectual and moral improvement." After a citywide strike in Boston in 1835, the Ten-Hour Movement quickly spread to other major cities such as Philadelphia. The campaign for leisure time was part of the male working-class effort to expose the hollowness of the paternalistic claims of employers and their rhetoric of moral superiority.

Women, a dominant labor source for factories since the early 1800s, launched some of the earliest strikes for better conditions. Textile operatives in Lowell, Massachusetts, "turned out" (walked off) their jobs in 1834 and 1836. During the Ten-Hour Movement of the 1840s, female operatives provided crucial support. Under the leadership of Sarah Bagley, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association organized petition drives that drew thousands of signatures from "mill girls." Like male activists, Bagley and her associates used the desire for mental improvement as a central argument for reform. An 1847 editorial in the Voice of Industry, a labor newspaper published by Bagley, asked, "who, after thirteen hours of steady application to monotonous work, can sit down and apply her mind to deep and long continued thought?" Despite the widespread support for a ten-hour day, the movement achieved only partial success. President Martin Van Buren established a ten-hour-day policy for laborers on federal public works projects. New Hampshire passed a statewide law in 1847, and Pennsylvania followed a year later. Both states, however, allowed workers to voluntarily consent to work more than ten hours per day.

Male workers sought to improve their income and working conditions to create a household that kept women and children protected within the domestic sphere. But labor gains were limited, and the movement remained moderate. Despite its challenge to industrial working conditions, labor activism in antebellum America remained largely wedded to the free labor ideal. The labor movement later supported the northern free soil movement, which challenged the spread of slavery in the 1840s, simultaneously promoting the superiority of the northern system of commerce over the southern institution of slavery while trying, much less successfully, to reform capitalism.

During the early nineteenth century, southern agriculture produced by enslaved labor fueled northern industry produced by wage workers and managed by the new middle class. New transportation, new machinery, and new organizations of labor integrated the previously isolated pockets of the colonial economy into a national industrial operation. Industrialization and the cash economy tied diverse regions together at the same time that ideology drove Americans apart. By celebrating the freedom of contract that distinguished the wage worker from the indentured servant of previous generations or the enslaved laborer in the southern cotton field, political leaders claimed the American Revolution's legacy for the North. But the rise of industrial child labor, the demands of workers to unionize, the economic vulnerability of women, and the influx of non-Anglo immigrants left many Americans questioning the meaning of liberty after the market revolution.
1. James Madison asks Congress to support internal improvements, 1815 After the War of 1812, Americans looked to strengthen their nation through government spending on infrastructure, or what were then called internal improvements. In his seventh annual address to congress, Madison called for public investment to create national roads, canals, and even a national seminary. He also called for a tariff, or tax on certain imports, designed to make foreign goods more expensive, giving American producers an advantage in domestic markets. 2. A traveler describes life along the Erie Canal, 1829 Basil Hall, a British visitor traveled along the Erie Canal and took careful notes on what he found. In this excerpt, he described life in Rochester, New York. Rochester, and other small towns in upstate New York, grew rapidly as a result of the Erie Canal. 3. Blacksmith apprentice contract, 1836 The factories and production of the Market Revolution eroded the wealth and power of skilled small business owners called artisans. This indenture contract illustrated the former way of doing things, where a young person would agree to serve for a number of years as an apprentice to a skilled artisan before venturing out on his own. 4. Maria Stewart bemoans the consequences of racism, 1832
Maria Stewart electrified audiences in Boston with a number of powerful speeches. Her most common theme was the evil of slavery. However, here she attacks the soul-crushing consequences of racism in American capitalism, claiming that the lack of social and economic equality doomed Black Americans to a life of suffering and spiritual death.
5. Rebecca Burlend recalls her emigration from England to Illinois, 1848 Rebecca Burlend, her husband, and children emigrated to Illinois from England in 1831. These reflections describe her reaction to landing in New Orleans, sailing up the Mississippi to St. Louis, and finally arriving at her new home in Illinois. This was her first experience encountering American slavery, the American landscape, and the rugged living conditions of her new home. 6. Harriet H. Robinson remembers a mill workers' strike, 1836 The social upheavals of the Market Revolution created new tensions between rich and poor, particularly between the new class of workers and the new class of managers. Lowell, Massachusetts was the location of the first American factory. In this document, a woman reminisces about a strike that she participated in at a Lowell textile mill. 7. Alexis de Toqueville, "How Americans Understand the Equality of the Sexes," 1840
The French political thinker Alexis de Toqueville travelled extensively through the United States in gathering research for his book Democracy In America. In this excerpt, he described the belief that American men and women lived in "separate spheres:" men in public, women in the home. This expectation justified the denial of rights to women. All women were denied political rights in nineteenth century America, but only a small number of wealthy families could afford to remove women from economic production, like de Toqueville claimed.
8. Abolitionist sheet music cover page, 1844 The "transportation revolution" shaped economic change in the early 1800s, but the massive construction of railroads also had a profound impact on American politics and culture. This sheet music title page shows how abolitionists used railroad imagery to advocate for the immediate emancipation of enslaved people and to promote their political platform before the 1844 presidential election. 9. Anti-Catholic cartoon, 1855 Irish immigration transformed American cities. Yet many Americans greeted the new arrivals with suspicion or hostility. Nathanial Currier's anti-Catholic cartoon reflected the popular American perception that Irish Catholic immigrants posed a threat to the United States. This chapter was edited by Jane Fiegen Green, with content contributions by Kelly Arehart, Myles Beaurpre, Kristin Condotta, Jane Fiegen Green, Nathan Jeremie-Brink, Lindsay Keiter, Brenden Kennedy, William Kerrigan, Christopher Sawula, David Schley, and Evgenia Shayder Shoop.
Recommended citation: Kelly Arehart et al., "Market Revolution," Jane Fiegen Green, ed., in The American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

Recommended Reading

Balleisen, Edward J. Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Blewett, Mary H. Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Dublin, Thomas. Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Faler, Paul G. Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1760-1860. Albany: SUNY Press, 1981.

Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Greenberg, Joshua R. Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800-1840. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. Yale University Press, 1982.

Hartigan-O'Connor, Ellen. The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Innes, Stephen, ed. Work and Labor in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Jabour, Anya. Marriage in the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Larson, John Lauritz. The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Levy, Jonathan. Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Luskey, Brian P. On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: New York University Press, 2010.

Matson, Cathy, and Wendy A. Woloson. Risky Business: Winning and Losing in the Early American Economy, 1780-1850. Philadelphia: Library Company of Philadelphia, 2003.

McNeur, Catherine. Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Melish, Joanne Pope. Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Mihm, Stephen. A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Murphy, Teresa Anne. Ten Hours' Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Early New England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.

Rice, Stephen P. Minding the Machine: Languages of Class in Early Industrial America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Rothenberg, Winifred Barr. From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750-1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Ryan, Mary P. Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Sellers, Charles Grier. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Tucker, Barbara M. Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790-1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Notes

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In the early years of the nineteenth century, Americans' endless commercial ambition-what one Baltimore paper in 1815 called an "almost universal ambition to get forward "-remade the nation. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, an old subsistence world died and a new more-commercial nation was born.

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Built in New York it expanded the markets for products and decreased the amount of time it took for transportation. Allowed for America to be settled and increased the spread of people and ideas.

Source: https://eriecanalway.org/learn/history-culture#:~:text=Built%20between%201817%20and%201825,%2C%20industry%2C%20and%20economic%20strength.

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Signed into law by Andrew Jackson this allowed him to sell lands west of Mississippi river to Native Americans in exchange for Native land in U.S borders. Tribes that resisted the move were forcibly moved on "Trail of Tears."

Source: https://guides.loc.gov/indian-removal-act#:~:text=The%20Indian%20Removal%20Act%20was,many%20resisted%20the%20relocation%20policy.

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The Tariff of Abominations angered many southern states and with little done to repeal it completely South Carolina declared the Tariff of 1828 and 1832 null. Andrew Jackson saw this as a treason and threatened South Carolina. The Force Bill ended this crisis, but made South aware they didn't have power in the union.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/nullification-crisis/Jacksons-Proclamation-to-the-People-of-South-Carolina

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Andrew Jackson disliked the national bank system as he saw it was corrupt, and vetoed the recharter of the 2nd Bank of U.S created by Henry Clay. Jackson divided up the big bank into smaller pet banks for states to control.

Source: https://www.americanhistoryusa.com/topic/pet-banks/

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The wives of the cabinet members refused to interact with Secretary of War John Henry Eaton and his wife because of rumors they had an affair. Andrew Jackson didn't believe those rumors, and fired anyone who shunned the couple. Jackson then relied on a kitchen cabinet, unofficial group, for support.

Source: https://www.americanhistorycentral.com/entries/petticoat-affair/#:~:text=The%20Petticoat%20Affair%20%E2%80%94%20also%20known,wives%20of%20his%20cabinet%20members.

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Caused by bad financial decisions by Andrew Jackson such as the specie circular collapsed the economy. As foreign investors started calling back loans banks were forced to close to repay those loans and unemployment increased. People lost life savings and were forced to go to soup kitchens.

Source: https://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/index.php?title=Panic_of_1837

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Philosophy based upon the idea of unity between all beings on Earth, humans were innately good, and using insight instead of logical reasoning. These ideas were spread in America by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Transcendentalism-American-movement

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What is Transcendentalism?

What inspired Transcendentalism?

This article was most recently revised and updated by

Transcendentalism, 19th-century movement of writers and philosophers in New England who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of humanity, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths. German transcendentalism (especially as it was refracted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle), Platonism and Neoplatonism, the Indian and Chinese scriptures, and the writings of such mystics as Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme were sources to which the New England Transcendentalists turned in their search for a liberating philosophy.

Eclectic and cosmopolitan in its sources and part of the Romantic movement, New England Transcendentalism originated in the area around Concord, Massachusetts, and from 1830 to 1855 represented a battle between the younger and older generations and the emergence of a new national culture based on native materials. It attracted such diverse and highly individualistic figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Orestes Brownson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and James Freeman Clarke, as well as George Ripley, Bronson Alcott, the younger W.E. Channing, and W.H. Channing. In 1840 Emerson and Margaret Fuller founded The Dial (1840-44), the prototypal "little magazine" wherein some of the best writings by minor Transcendentalists appeared. The writings of the Transcendentalists and those of contemporaries such as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, for whom they prepared the ground, represent the first flowering of the American artistic genius and introduced the American Renaissance in literature ( see also American literature: American Renaissance).

In their religious quest, the Transcendentalists rejected the conventions of 18th-century thought, and what began in a dissatisfaction with Unitarianism developed into a repudiation of the whole established order. They were leaders in experimental schemes for living (Thoreau at Walden Pond, Alcott at Fruitlands, Ripley at Brook Farm); women's suffrage; better conditions for workers; temperance for all; modifications of dress and diet; the rise of free religion; educational innovation; and other humanitarian causes.

Heavily indebted to the Transcendentalists' organic philosophy, aesthetics, and democratic aspirations were the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey, the environmental planning of Benton MacKaye and Lewis Mumford, the architecture (and writings) of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, and the American "modernism" in the arts promoted by Alfred Stieglitz.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Adam Augustyn.

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Transcendentalism | Definition, Characteristics, Beliefs, Authors, & Facts

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Transcendentalism, 19th-century movement of writers and philosophers in New England who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of humanity, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience.

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Brook Farm was a Utopian experiment about communal living based on transcendental ideologies. Brook Farm consisted of multiple philosopher thinkers living together in harmony, such as Margaret Fuller.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Brook-Farm

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Second Great Awakening (1830's - 1840's)

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Second Great Awakening (1830's - 1840's)

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A spiritual resurgence that changed American religion. Using camp meetings with enthusiastic preaching and audience participation increased conversion. Charles Finney was a traveling preacher converting many through emotion.

Source: https://www.ushistory.org/us/22c.asp

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Both blacks and women began to participate in evangelical revivals associated with the Second Great Awakening at the end of the 18th century. From these revivals grew the roots of the both the feminist and abolitionist movements.

The American Revolution had largely been a secular affair. The Founding Fathers clearly demonstrated their opposition to the intermingling of politics and religion by establishing the separation of church and state in the first amendment to the Constitution.

In part because religion was separated from the control of political leaders, a series of religious revivals swept the United States from the 1790s and into the 1830s that transformed the religious landscape of the country. Known today as the Second Great Awakening, this spiritual resurgence fundamentally altered the character of American religion. At the start of the Revolution the largest denominations were Congregationalists (the 18th-century descendants of Puritan churches), Anglicans (known after the Revolution as Episcopalians), and Quakers. But by 1800, Evangelical Methodism and Baptists, were becoming the fasting-growing religions in the nation.

The Second Great Awakening is best known for its large camp meetings that led extraordinary numbers of people to convert through an enthusiastic style of preaching and audience participation. A young man who attended the famous 20,000-person revival at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1802, captures the spirit of these camp meetings activity:

The noise was like the roar of Niagara. The vast sea of human beings seemed to be agitated as if by a storm. I counted seven ministers, all preaching at one time, some on stumps, others on wagons ... Some of the people were singing, others praying, some crying for mercy. A peculiarly strange sensation came over me. My heart beat tumultuously, my knees trembled, my lips quivered, and I felt as though I must fall to the ground.

This young man was so moved that he went on to become a Methodist minister. As this quotation suggests, evangelical ministers reached their audience at an emotional level that powerfully moved large crowds.

In 1839, J. Maze Burbank presented this image to the Royal Society in London with the caption: "A camp meeting, or religious revival in America, from a sketch taken on the spot."

The evangelical impulse at the heart of the Second Great Awakening shared some of the egalitarian thrust of Revolutionary ideals. Evangelical churches generally had a populist orientation that favored ordinary people over elites. For instance, individual piety was seen as more important for salvation than the formal university training required for ministers in traditional Christian churches.

The immense success of the Second Great Awakening was also furthered by evangelical churches innovative organizational techniques. These were well suited to the frontier conditions of newly settled territories. Most evangelical churches relied on itinerant preachers to reach large areas without an established minister and also included important places for lay people who took on major religious and administrative roles within evangelical congregations.

Religion was a central theme of the 1830s; American Protestants branched off into many different denominations, holding in common the need for meetings and revivals.

The Second Great Awakening marked a fundamental transition in American religious life. Many early American religious groups in the Calvinist tradition had emphasized the deep depravity of human beings and believed they could only be saved through the grace of God. The new evangelical movement, however, placed greater emphasis on humans' ability to change their situation for the better. By stressing that individuals could assert their "free will" in choosing to be saved and by suggesting that salvation was open to all human beings, the Second Great Awakening embraced a more optimistic view of the human condition. The repeated and varied revivals of these several decades helped make the United States a much more deeply Protestant nation than it had been before.

Finally, the Second Great Awakening also included greater public roles for white women and much higher African-American participation in Christianity than ever before.

Evangelicalism as a Social Movement
Why did so many people flock to evangelicalism in the early 19th century? The Second Great Awakening was more than just a religious movement; it provided a new social outlet. There was an excitement to it, and a sense of belonging. People even changed denomination if they felt one preacher was more interesting than the last. This essay puts a social twist on early evangelicalism.

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Peter Cartwright on Cane Ridge and the New Lights
No matter whether they were saints or sinners, they would be taken under a warm song or sermon and seized with a convulsive jerking all over, which they could not by any possibility avoid... -from Autobiography of Peter Cartwright. What were revivals really like? Find out from someone who was there! Peter Cartwright was about 16 years old when he went to the Cane Ridge Camp Meeting. He went on to become a Methodist preacher and lead his own revivals.

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What makes Methodism different from other Christian denominations? Find out at the homepage of the United Methodist Church.
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Jonathan Edwards was a big name in the First Great Awakening, which began in the 1740s. His writings were also instrumental in the Second Great Awakening, more than 30 years after his death.
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religious transformation and the second great awakening

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Religious Transformation and the Second Great Awakening [ushistory.org]

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Both blacks and women began to participate in evangelical revivals associated with the Second Great Awakening at the end of the 18th century. From these revivals grew the roots of the both the feminist and abolitionist movements. The American Revolution had largely been a secular affair.

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The case was Boston Journeymen Bootmakers’ Society getting an employee fired, and the employee complained. Justice Lemuel Shaw used this case to legalize American labor unions, and had a right to strike to increase wages. Before this case labor unions were restricted.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Commonwealth-v-Hunt

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Commonwealth v. Hunt, (1842), American legal case in which the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that the common-law doctrine of criminal conspiracy did not apply to labour unions. Until then, workers' attempts to establish closed shops had been subject to prosecution. Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw asserted, however, that trade unions were legal and that they had the right to strike or take other steps of peaceful coercion to raise wages and ban nonunion workers.

The case stemmed from a demand by the Boston Journeymen Bootmakers' Society that an employer fire one of its members who had disobeyed the society's rules. The employer, fearing a strike, complied, but the dismissed employee complained to the district attorney, who then drew an indictment charging the society with conspiracy. The Boston Municipal Court found the union guilty.

Justice Shaw, hearing the case on appeal, altered the traditional criteria for conspiracy by holding that the mere act of combining for some purpose was not illegal. Only those combinations intended "to accomplish some criminal or unlawful purpose, or to accomplish some purpose, not in itself criminal or unlawful, by criminal or unlawful means" could be prosecuted. Shaw, in effect, legalized the American labour union movement by this decision.

Amy Tikkanen.

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Commonwealth v. Hunt, (1842), American legal case in which the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that the common-law doctrine of criminal conspiracy did not apply to labour unions. Until then, workers' attempts to establish closed shops had been subject to prosecution. Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw

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Value system that was mainly for upper and middle class women, it also excluded African American and immigrant women. Women were expected to stay in the private sphere and not work, while fullfilling domestic duties such as cooking or cleaning.

Source: https://sites.uw.edu/twomn347/2022/03/19/the-cult-of-domesticity/

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The Culture of Domesticity, or "Cult of Domesticity" for short, was a value system that was influential to the upper and middle class during the 19 th century (Keister, 2011, p. 228). It is important to note that Black and immigrant women were often excluded from the Cult of Domesticity, and the culture demanded control over virtues women were said to have needed such as piety, purity, submission, and domesticity.

Based on the idea of having "separate spheres," Barbara Welter in her "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860" describes four cardinal virtues. The virtues Welter describes are seen as the sphere or domain that women belonged in (Carroll, 2003, p. 120). Women were expected to remain in this private sphere and refrain from working or being engaged in the public sphere. These virtues, in no specific order, are piety, or women being religious; purity, meaning that women retain their virginity until marriage and remain faithful to their husbands was one of the most defining and important characteristics of a true woman; domesticity, or tending to the home and not deviating from chores such as cooking or cleaning, which were seen as being naturally feminine activities; and sastly there was submission, meaning that a true woman was inferior to a man "by God's appointment" and she ought to act as submissive and as obedient as a child (Welter, 1966, p. 151-174).

Since the above cultural norms were baked into society at the time, it is quite apparent how this could influence the first wave of feminism. Men saw women who didn't adhere to the virtues mentioned above as not true women. Women even saw themselves as needing to fill this role society told them to fill. When certain women such as Harriet Martineau or Frances Wright began to advocate for women's rights, it was postulated that they were unfeminine and were disrupting the natural order of how woman should be (Welter, 1966, p. 151-174).

The Cult of Domesticity, according to Susan Cruea, set restrictions at the societal level that, when imposed, limited women to having a lack of freedom and working rights. An interesting twist in perspective on this issue is that perhaps this culture may have been a factor in laying a groundwork for the development of feminism. Cruea's perspective is that since women were seen as a means to continue their husband's legacy, this also placed a lot of value on women. A woman was seen as the moral guide to her family, and with these four cardinal virtues, virginity was also seen as a "pearl of great price" which was her greatest asset. Perhaps the most influential to the identity of women was that they were to guide their boys who would eventually grow up to be very influential in society (Cruea, 2005, p. 187-204). After voting rights were extended to all men, however, this was seen as an opportunity for women to obtain the same rights. The earliest feminist opposition to this social structure was at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 which called for suffrage and independence.

"Woman's great mission is to train immature, weak, and ignorant creatures to obey the laws of God... first in the family, then in the school, then in the neighborhood, then in the nation, then in the world..."
- Catherine Beecher (Beecher, 1871)

All in all, I believe the Cult of Domesticity was a significant constraint of women's liberties that is seen historically as something that could have not only empowered women in their private sphere, but also given them something to push back on. Society was at a point in time where they truly could not imagine women being on the same levels intellectually or being able to perform the same duties as men. To rally movements for causes, it is important for large amounts of people to feel compelled to act. The way society had been conditioned to restricting women could have emboldened the resistance even more or given them a rallying cry so to speak. It is hard to imagine this level of societal imprisonment being enforced on half of our population, but with how relatively recent it has been, some of the attitudes probably do carry over. It is important we address the history of this phenomenon and understand that social norms are fluid and can be broken and should be challenged.

A New Court of Queen's Bench. (1811). [Illustration]. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1849-Cruikshank-feminism-caricature-Queens-Bench.jpg

Beecher, C. E. (1871). Woman suffrage and woman's profession. Hartford: Brown & Gross.

Carroll, B. (2003). American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia (Sage Reference Publication) (1st ed.). SAGE Publications, Inc.

Cruea, Susan (2005). Changing Ideals of Womanhood During the Nineteenth-Century Woman Movement. American Transcendental Quarterly. 19 (3): 187-204.

Keister, L. A., & Southgate, D. E. (2011). Inequality: A Contemporary Approach to Race, Class, and Gender (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press.

The Complete Godey's Lady's Book - 1830-1896. (2015, December 11). Accessible Archives Inc. https://www.accessible-archives.com/collections/godeys-ladys-book/

Welter, B. (1966). The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860. American Quarterly, 18(2), 151. https://doi.org/10.2307/2711179

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The Culture of Domesticity, or "Cult of Domesticity" for short, was a value system that was influential to the upper and middle class during the 19 th century (Keister, 2011, p. 228).

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Dorothea Dix spoke about the inhumane conditions in hospitals for the mentally ill, and called for state supported facilities. The idea that society was responsible for crime and not the individual was spreading.

Source: https://www.exploros.com/summary/Prison-and-Asylum-Reform

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Horace Mann was elected Secretary of the Board of Education in Massachusetts and enacted major reform in public schools. Funded basic education for every child through taxes, and training of teachers in schools.

Source: https://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/horace.html

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PBS Online: Only A Teacher: Schoolhouse Pioneers

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Mann’s commitment to the Common School sprang from his belief that political stability and social harmony depended on education: a basic level of literacy and the inculcation of common public ideals. He declared, “Without undervaluing any other human agency, it may be safely affirmed that the Common…

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This meeting in New York was the first women's right convention in the U.S. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the organizers and the group discussed the 11 resolutions for women's rights.

Source: https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/seneca-falls-convention

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What Was the Seneca Falls Convention?

Originally known as the Woman's Rights Convention, the Seneca Falls Convention fought for the social, civil and religious rights of women. The meeting was held from July 19 to 20, 1848 at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York.

Despite scarce publicity, 300 people-mostly area residents-showed up. On the first day, only women were allowed to attend (the second day was open to men).

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the meeting's organizers, began with a speech on the convention's goals and purpose:
"We are assembled to protest against a form of government, existing without the consent of the governed-to declare our right to be free as man is free, to be represented in the government which we are taxed to support, to have such disgraceful laws as give man the power to chastise and imprison his wife, to take the wages which she earns, the property which she inherits, and, in case of separation, the children of her love."
The convention proceeded to discuss the 11 resolutions on women's rights. All passed unanimously except for the ninth resolution, which demanded the right to vote for women. Stanton and African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave impassioned speeches in its defense before it eventually (and barely) passed.

Who Organized the Seneca Falls Convention

The five women who organized the Seneca Falls Convention were also active in the abolitionist movement, which called for an end to slavery and racial discrimination. They included:

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a leading women's rights advocate who was a driving organizer of the Seneca Falls Convention. Stanton first became invested in women's rights after talking to her father, a law professor, and his students. She studied at Troy Female Seminary and worked on women's property rights reform in the early 1840s.

Lucretia Mott, a Quaker preacher from Philadelphia, was known for her anti-slavery, women's rights and religious reform activism.

Mary M'Clintock, the daughter of Quaker anti-slavery, temperance and women's rights activists. In 1833, M'Clintock and Mott organized the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. At the Seneca Falls Convention, M'Clintock was appointed secretary.

Martha Coffin Wright, Lucretia Mott's sister. In addition to being a lifelong proponent of women's rights, she was an abolitionist who ran a station on the Underground Railroad from her Auburn, New York, home.

Jane Hunt, another Quaker activist, was a member of M'Clintock's extended family through marriage.

Stanton and Mott first met in London in 1840, where they were attending the World Anti-Slavery Convention with their husbands. When the convention excluded women delegates solely based on their sex, the pair resolved to hold a women's rights convention.

Did you know? Susan B. Anthony did not attend the Seneca Falls Convention. She would meet Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851 and spend the next fifty years fighting for women's rights alongside her, including co-founding the American Equal Rights Association.

Back in the United States, women's rights reformers had already begun contending for women's rights to speak out on moral and political issues beginning in the 1830s. Around the same time in New York, where Stanton lived, legal reformers had been discussing equality and challenging state laws prohibiting married women from owning property. By 1848, equal rights for women was a divisive issue.

In July of 1848, Stanton, frustrated with her role staying at home raising kids, convinced Mott, Wright and M'Clintock to help organize the Seneca Falls Convention and write its main manifesto, the Declaration of Sentiments.

Together, the five women drafted a notice to announce "a Convention to discuss the social, civic and religious condition and rights of Woman" around Hunt's tea table.
READ MORE: Early Women's Rights Activists Wanted Much More than Suffrage
Declaration of Sentiments

The Declaration of Sentiments was the Seneca Falls Convention's manifesto that described women's grievances and demands. Written primarily by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, it distilled the importance of the Seneca Falls Convention: for women to fight for their Constitutionally guaranteed right to equality as U.S. citizens.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal," the document stated. Inspired by the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Sentiments asserted women's equality in politics, family, education, jobs, religion and morals.

The declaration began with 19 "abuses and usurpations" that were destined to destroy a woman's "confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life."

Because women didn't have the right to vote-a right given to "the most ignorant and degraded men"-they were forced to submit to laws to which they did not consent. Women were denied an education and issued an inferior role in the church.

Moreover, women were required to be obedient to their husbands and prevented from owning property, including the wages they earned (which technically belonged to their husbands). And they received unequal rights upon divorce.

In light of these abuses, the declaration called on women to "throw off such government."

The Resolutions

Next came a list of 11 resolutions, which demanded women be regarded as men's equals. The resolutions called on Americans to regard any laws that placed women in an inferior position to men as having "no force or authority." They resolved for women to have equal rights within the church and equal access to jobs.

The ninth resolution was the most controversial, as it called women "to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise," or the right to vote.

Although its passage led many women's rights proponents to withdraw their support, the ninth resolution went on to become the cornerstone of the women's suffrage movement.

Reactions to the Seneca Falls Convention

In New York and across the U.S., newspapers covered the convention, both in support and against its objectives.

Horace Greely, the influential editor of The New York Tribune, echoed the opinion of many people at the time. While skeptical of giving women the right to vote, he argued that if Americans really believed in the Constitution, women must attain equal rights:
"When a sincere republican is asked to say in sober earnest what adequate reason he can give, for refusing the demand of women to equal participation with men in political rights, he must answer, None at all. However unwise and mistaken the demand, it is but the assertion of a natural right, and such must be conceded."
The Fight for Women's Rights

Two weeks later, on August 2, 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention reconvened at the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, New York, to reaffirm the movement's goals with a larger audience.

In the following years, the convention's leaders continued to campaign for women's rights at state and nationwide events. Reformers frequently referred to the Declaration of Sentiments as they campaigned for women's rights.

Between 1848 and 1862, the participants of the Seneca Falls Convention used the Declaration of Sentiments to "employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and national Legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf."

After 72 years of organized struggle, American women finally achieved the same rights as men at the polling box when, in 1920, women won the right to vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In November 1920, more than 8 million American women cast their vote in the presidential election. These voters included many Black women, though many others were prevented from voting by discriminatory laws, intimidation and other tactics of disenfranchisement. Native American women (and men) did not secure suffrage until four years later, when the Indian Citizen Act made Native Americans U.S. citizens. By 1965, the Voting Rights Act protected the right to vote for all American citizens-men and women.
READ MORE: 7 Things You Might Not Know About the Women's Suffrage Movement
SOURCES

Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions. Rutgers University.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton. National Park Service.
Jane Hunt. National Park Service.
Lucretia Mott. National Park Service.
Mary M'Clintock. National Park Service.
Martha C. Wright. National Park Service.
Report of the Women's Rights Convention. National Park Service.
Second Day of Seneca Falls Convention, July 20, 1848. Library of Congress.
Seneca Falls Convention. The Encyclopedia of New York State.
The Declaration of Sentiments, Seneca Falls Conference, 1848. Fordham University.
The Seneca Falls Convention. Library of Congress.
The Seneca Falls Convention: Setting the National Stage for Women's Suffrage. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

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Originally known as the Woman's Rights Convention, the Seneca Falls Convention fought for the social, civil and religious rights of women. The meeting was held from July 19 to 20, 1848 at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. Despite scarce publicity, 300 people-mostly area residents-showed up.

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Created by formerly enslaved African American Fredrick Douglas, the newspaper was about abolition and the improvement of the lives of African Americans. Mostly about ending slavery, it was also pro-women's rights.

Source: https://www.loc.gov/collections/frederick-douglass-newspapers/about-this-collection/

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This was the idea, created by John O'Sullivan, that the United States was destined by God to expand westward and spread democracy and capitalism to the continent.

Source: https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/manifest-destiny

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Louisiana Purchase

Thanks to a high birth rate and brisk immigration, the U.S. population exploded in the first half of the 19th century, from around 5 million people in 1800 to more than 23 million by 1850.

Such rapid growth-as well as two economic depressions in 1819 and 1839-would drive millions of Americans westward in search of new land and new opportunities.

President Thomas Jefferson kicked off the country's westward expansion in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase, which at some 828,000 square miles nearly doubled the size of the United States and stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. In addition to sponsoring the western expedition of Lewis and Clark of 1805-07, Jefferson also set his sights on Spanish Florida, a process that was finally concluded in 1819 under President James Monroe.

But critics of that treaty faulted Monroe and his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, for yielding to Spain what they considered legitimate claims on Texas, where many Americans continued to settle.

In 1823, Monroe invoked Manifest Destiny when he spoke before Congress to warn European nations not to interfere with America's Westward expansion, threatening that any attempt by Europeans to colonize the "American continents" would be seen as an act of war. This policy of an American sphere of influence and of non-intervention in European affairs became known as the " Monroe Doctrine." After 1870, it would be used as a rationale for U.S. intervention in Latin America.

Texas Independence

Cries for the "re-annexation" of Texas increased after Mexico, having won its independence from Spain, passed a law suspending U.S. immigration into Texas in 1830.

Nonetheless, there were still more Anglo settlers in Texas than Hispanic ones, and in 1836, after Texas won its own independence, its new leaders sought to join the United States. The administrations of both Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren resisted such calls, fearing both war with Mexico and opposition from Americans who believed calls for annexation were linked with the desire to expand slavery in the Southwest.

But John Tyler, who won the presidency in 1840, was determined to proceed with the annexation. An agreement concluded in April 1844 made Texas eligible for admission as a U.S. territory, and possibly later as one or more states.

Despite opposition to this agreement in Congress, the pro-annexation candidate James K. Polk won the 1844 election, and Tyler was able to push the bill through and sign it before he left office.

The Coining of 'Manifest Destiny'

By the time Texas was admitted to the Union as a state in December 1845, the idea that the United States must inevitably expand westward all the way to the Pacific Ocean had taken firm hold among people from different regions, classes and political persuasions.

The phrase "Manifest Destiny," which emerged as the best-known expression of this mindset, first appeared in an editorial published in the July-August 1845 issue of The Democratic Review.

In it, the writer criticized the opposition that still lingered against the annexation of Texas, urging national unity on behalf of "the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions."

As the phrase also appeared in a nearly identical context in a July 1845 article in the New York Morning News, its originator is believed to be John O'Sullivan, the editor of both the Democratic Review and the Morning News at the time. That December, another Morning News article mentioned "manifest destiny" in reference to the Oregon Territory, another new frontier over which the United States was eager to assert its dominion.

Oregon Territory

An 1842 treaty between Great Britain and the United States partially resolved the question of where to draw the Canadian border, but left open the question of the Oregon Territory, which stretched from the Pacific Coast to the Rocky Mountains over an area including what is now Oregon, Idaho, Washington State and most of British Columbia.

Polk, an ardent proponent of Manifest Destiny, had won election with the slogan "54˚ 40' or fight!" (a reference to the potential northern boundary of Oregon as latitude 54˚ 40') and called U.S. claims to Oregon "clear and unquestionable" in his inaugural address.

But as president, Polk wanted to get the issue resolved so the United States could move on to acquiring California from Mexico. In mid-1846, his administration agreed to a compromise whereby Oregon would be split along the 49th parallel, narrowly avoiding a crisis with Britain.

Impact of Manifest Destiny: The Civil War, Native American Wars

By the time the Oregon question was settled, the United States had entered into all-out war with Mexico, driven by the spirit of Manifest Destiny and territorial expansion.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War in 1848, added an additional 525,000 square miles of U.S. territory, including all or parts of what is now California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.

Despite the lofty idealism of Manifest Destiny, the rapid territorial expansion over the first half of the 19th century resulted not only in war with Mexico, but in the dislocation and brutal mistreatment of Native American, Hispanic and other non-European occupants of the territories now being occupied by the United States.

U.S. expansion also fueled the growing debate over slavery, by raising the pressing question of whether new states being admitted to the Union would allow slavery or not-a conflict that would eventually lead to the Civil War.

Sources

Julius W. Pratt, "The Origin of 'Manifest Destiny'," The American Historical Review (July 1927).
Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005).
Michael Golay, The Tide of Empire: America's March to the Pacific
Era of U.S. Continental Expansion, History, Art & Archives: U.S House of Representatives.

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Manifest Destiny - Definition, Facts & Significance | HISTORY

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Manifest Destiny, a phrase coined in 1845, expressed the philosophy that drove 19th-century U.S. territorial expansion. It contended that the United States was destined by God to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent.

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Land boundaries were being disputed, and Mexican cavalry attacked U.S soldiers in the disputed land zone. General Zachary Taylor called in reinforcements and defeated the Mexican soldiers. After many losses in battle Mexico finally surrendered.

Source: https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/mexican-american-war

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Table of Contents

1. Causes of the Mexican-American War

2. The Mexican-American War Begins

3. U.S. Army Advances Into Mexico

4. Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo&nbsp;

The Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848 marked the first U.S. armed conflict chiefly fought on foreign soil. It pitted a politically divided and militarily unprepared Mexico against the expansionist-minded administration of U.S. President James K. Polk, who believed the United States had a "Manifest Destiny" to spread across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. A border skirmish along the Rio Grande that started off the fighting was followed by a series of U.S. victories. When the dust cleared, Mexico had lost about one-third of its territory, including nearly all of present-day California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico.

Causes of the Mexican-American War

Texas gained its independence from Mexico in 1836. Initially, the United States declined to incorporate it into the union, largely because northern political interests were against the addition of a new state that supported slavery. The Mexican government was also encouraging border raids and warning that any attempt at annexation would lead to war.

Did you know? Gold was discovered in California just days before Mexico ceded the land to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Nonetheless, annexation procedures were quickly initiated after the 1844 election of Polk, a firm believer in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, who campaigned that Texas should be "re-annexed" and that the Oregon Territory should be "re-occupied." Polk also had his eyes on California, New Mexico and the rest of what is today the American Southwest.

When his offer to purchase those lands was rejected, he instigated a fight by moving troops into a disputed zone between the Rio Grande and Nueces River that both countries had previously recognized as part of the Mexican state of Coahuila.

The Mexican-American War Begins

On April 25, 1846, Mexican cavalry attacked a group of U.S. soldiers in the disputed zone under the command of General Zachary Taylor, killing about a dozen. They then laid siege to Fort Texas along the Rio Grande. Taylor called in reinforcements, and-with the help of superior rifles and artillery-was able to defeat the Mexicans at the Battle of Palo Alto and the Battle of Resaca de la Palma.

Following those battles, Polk told the U.S. Congress that the "cup of forbearance has been exhausted, even before Mexico passed the boundary of the United States, invaded our territory, and shed American blood upon American soil." Two days later, on May 13, Congress declared war, despite opposition from some northern lawmakers. No official declaration of war ever came from Mexico.

U.S. Army Advances Into Mexico

At that time, only about 75,000 Mexican citizens lived north of the Rio Grande. As a result, U.S. forces led by Col. Stephen Watts Kearny and Commodore Robert Field Stockton were able to conquer those lands with minimal resistance. Taylor likewise had little trouble advancing, and he captured the city of Monterrey in September.

With the losses adding up, Mexico turned to old standby General Antonio López de Santa Anna, the charismatic strongman who had been living in exile in Cuba. Santa Anna convinced Polk that, if allowed to return to Mexico, he would end the war on terms favorable to the United States.

But when Santa Anna arrived, he immediately double-crossed Polk by taking control of the Mexican army and leading it into battle. At the Battle of Buena Vista in February 1847, Santa Anna suffered heavy casualties and was forced to withdraw. Despite the loss, he assumed the Mexican presidency the following month.

Meanwhile, U.S. troops led by Gen. Winfield Scott landed in Veracruz and took over the city. They then began marching toward Mexico City, essentially following the same route that Hernán Cortés followed when he invaded the Aztec empire.

The Mexicans resisted at the Battle of Cerro Gordo and elsewhere, but were bested each time. In September 1847, Scott successfully laid siege to Mexico City's Chapultepec Castle. During that clash, a group of military school cadets-the so-called ni ños héroes -purportedly committed suicide rather than surrender.

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

Guerrilla attacks against U.S. supply lines continued, but for all intents and purposes the war had ended. Santa Anna resigned, and the United States waited for a new government capable of negotiations to form.

Finally, on Feb. 2, 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, establishing the Rio Grande (and not the Nueces River) as the U.S.-Mexican border. Under the treaty, Mexico also recognized the U.S. annexation of Texas, and agreed to sell California and the rest of its territory north of the Rio Grande for $15 million plus the assumption of certain damage claims.

The net gain in U.S. territory after the Mexican-American War was roughly 525,000 square miles, an enormous tract of land-nearly as much as the Louisiana Purchase's 827,000 square miles-that would forever change the geography, culture and economy of the United States.

Though the war with Mexico was over, the battle over the newly acquired territories-and whether or not slavery would be allowed in those territories-was just beginning. Many of the U.S. officers and soldiers in the Mexican-American War would in just a few years find themselves once again taking up arms, but this time against their own countrymen in the Civil War.

HISTORY Vault

Sources

The Mexican American War. PBS: American Experience.
The Mexican-American war in a nutshell. Constitution Daily.
The Mexican-American War. Northern Illinois University Digital Library..

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Mexican-American War: Causes & Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo | HISTORY

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The Mexican-American War was a 1846-1848 conflict over vast territories in the American West, which the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave to the United States.

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Series of compromises by Henry Clay to settle the issue of slavery between regions. California would be a free state, some states would use popular soverignty to decide slavery, and a stronger fugitive slave act.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Compromise-of-1850

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Compromise of 1850, in U.S. history, a series of measures proposed by the "great compromiser," Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky, and passed by the U.S. Congress in an effort to settle several outstanding slavery issues and to avert the threat of dissolution of the Union. The crisis arose from the request of the territory of California (December 3, 1849) to be admitted to the Union with a constitution prohibiting slavery. The problem was complicated by the unresolved question of slavery's extension into other areas ceded by Mexico the preceding year ( see Mexican-American War).

The issue of whether the territories would be slave or free came to a boil following the election of Zachary Taylor as president in 1848. In his first annual message to Congress, Taylor endorsed statehood for California and urged that "those exciting topics" that had caused such apprehension be left to the courts. He opposed any legislative plan that would address the problems that so agitated Northerners and Southerners, thus preventing Henry Clay from pushing ahead with another compromise plan that, he hoped, would settle the issue for at least a generation, as had the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Then Taylor died just 16 months into his term, and his successor, Millard Fillmore, saw the wisdom of Clay's proposal and encouraged him to continue.

Clay's purpose was to maintain a balance between free and slave states and to satisfy both proslavery and antislavery forces. The plan adopted by Congress had several parts: California was admitted as a free state, upsetting the equilibrium that had long prevailed in the Senate; the boundary of Texas was fixed along its current lines; Texas, in return for giving up land it claimed in the Southwest, had $10 million of its onerous debt assumed by the federal government; areas ceded by Texas became the recognized territories of New Mexico and Utah, and in neither case was slavery mentioned, ostensibly leaving these territories to decide the slavery question on their own by the principle of popular sovereignty; the slave trade, but not slavery itself, was abolished in the District of Columbia; and finally, Congress passed a new and stronger Fugitive Slave Act, taking the matter of returning runaway slaves out of the control of states and making it a federal responsibility.

With the influential support of Sen. Daniel Webster and the concerted unifying efforts of Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, the five compromise measures were enacted in September. These measures were accepted by moderates in all sections of the country, and the secession of the South was postponed for a decade. Indeed, the political system had seemed to work, and many Americans greeted the Compromise of 1850 with relief. President Fillmore called it "a final settlement," and the South certainly had nothing to complain about. It had secured the type of fugitive slave law it had long demanded, and although California came in as a free state, it elected proslavery representatives. Moreover, New Mexico and Utah enacted slave codes, technically opening the territories to slavery.

The compromise, however, contained the seeds of future discord. The precedent of popular sovereignty led to a demand for a similar provision for the Kansas Territory in 1854, causing bitterness and violence there ( see Bleeding Kansas). Furthermore, the application of the new Fugitive Slave Act triggered such a strong reaction throughout the North that many moderate antislavery elements became determined opponents of any further extension of slavery into the territories. While the Compromise of 1850 succeeded as a temporary expedient, it also proved the failure of compromise as a permanent political solution when vital sectional interests were at stake.

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Compromise of 1850 | Summary, Map, Facts, & Significance

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Compromise of 1850, in U.S. history, a series of measures proposed by the 'great compromiser,' Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky, and passed by Congress in an effort to settle several outstanding slavery issues and to avert the threat of dissolution of the Union.

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Political party that was against the expansion of slavery into western territory. The party attracted small farmers, village merchants, etc. who disliked competition between them and free African American labor. In 1852 nominated John P. Hale and the party dissolved into the Republican party.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Free-Soil-Party

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Matthew C. Perry of the U.S Navy sailed to Tokyo and forced Japan to start trading with the U.S and demanded a treaty allowing trade and opening the ports for U.S ships. This was because America wanted new markets for manufactured goods.

Source: http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/japan_1750_perry.htm

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Uncle Tom's Cabin was a book written by Harriet Beecher. It was an anti-slavery novel that was extremely popular, especially in the North. It showed how brutal the conditions of slavery were. The book Aunt Phillis's Cabin was made in response and was pro-slavery.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Uncle-Toms-Cabin/Major-themes-and-influences

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

A major theme in Uncle Tom's Cabin is the problem of slavery and the treatment of humans as property, concepts that Stowe counterbalanced against the morality of Christianity. Stowe's depiction of slavery in her novel was informed by her Christianity and by her immersion in abolitionist writings. She also drew on her personal experience during the 1830s and '40s while living in Cincinnati, Ohio, which was a destination for those escaping slavery in Kentucky and other Southern states. In Uncle Tom's Cabin she made her case against slavery by cataloging the suffering experienced by enslaved people and by showing that their owners were morally broken. Stowe also published a collection of documents and testimony, A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), that she used to prove the truth of her novel's representation of slavery.

Uncle Tom's Cabin combined the elements of contemporary humour and sentimental fiction in such a powerful manner that, according to some, it helped to precipitate the Civil War. The role of Uncle Tom's Cabin as a cause of the American Civil War is rooted in a statement-typically rendered as "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!"-that is spuriously attributed to U.S. Pres. Abraham Lincoln. According to scholar Daniel R. Vollaro, this comment, supposedly made by Lincoln to Stowe in December 1862, originated in Stowe family tradition and did not appear in print until 1896 (albeit as "Is this the little woman who made the great war?" ). That Lincoln almost certainly did not say these words, however, has not prevented them from being cited repeatedly as Uncle Tom's Cabin's legacy.

Another noted theme in Uncle Tom's Cabin is female virtue, with its portrayal of women in stereotypical domestic roles and with less-conventional characters. Several of the story's female characters show ethical and moral dignity, including Emily Shelby, the wife of an enslaver who has moral influence over her husband's enslaved people. Mrs. Shelby's maid, a young woman named Eliza, is a bold character, whose actions are motivated by fear and maternal love. Eliza successfully escapes slavery with her son, fleeing to the North and eventually making her way to Liberia with her son and husband. Eva is the embodiment of moral purity, a young, innocent girl. Although sometimes regarded as cliché, Stowe's empowerment of women in Uncle Tom's Cabin nonetheless drew attention to the influence of women and the importance of women's rights.

Criticism

The novel's reputation became problematic during the 20th century. In a 1952 introduction to the novel, Langston Hughes referred to Uncle Tom's Cabin as "a moral battle cry," but his introduction's effort to redeem the novel came after Richard Wright and James Baldwin, among other Black writers, had attacked it during the 1930s and '40s. The term Uncle Tom also became an insult used to describe a Black person who shows subservience to whites or is otherwise considered complicit with oppression by whites. This sense can be traced to at least the early 20th century, and early public use of it (c. 1920) has been attributed variously to Marcus Garvey and George Alexander McGuire. Today Uncle Tom's Cabin's depiction of its Black characters is seen as racist and patronizing.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Kara Rogers.

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Uncle Tom's Cabin - Slavery, Abolitionism, Christianity

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Uncle Tom's Cabin - Slavery, Abolitionism, Christianity: A major theme in Uncle Tom's Cabin is the problem of slavery and the treatment of humans as property, concepts that Stowe counterbalanced against the morality of Christianity. Stowe's depiction of slavery in her novel was informed by her Christianity and by her immersion in abolitionist writings.

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Gave the U.S more Mexican territory and states such as Arizona and New Mexico in exchange for $10 million. The purchase was negotiated by James Gadsden. The land would be used for a transcontinental railroad in the south.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Gadsden-Purchase

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Gadsden Purchase | History, Facts, & Map

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Gadsden Purchase, also called Treaty of La Mesilla, (December 30, 1853), transaction that followed the conquest of much of northern Mexico by the United States in 1848. Known in Mexican history as the sale of the Mesilla Valley, it assigned to the United States nearly 30,000 additional square miles…

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The debate over slavery's expansion into new territories led to violence in Kansas as states were allowed to decide if slavery was legal based off popular sovereignty. Pro-slavery groups and anti-slavery groups flooded into Kansas to vote on the legality of slavery. An antislavery group led by John Brown retaliated.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Bleeding-Kansas-United-States-history

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Bleeding Kansas, (1854-59), small civil war in the United States, fought between proslavery and antislavery advocates for control of the new territory of Kansas under the doctrine of popular sovereignty. Sponsors of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (May 30, 1854) expected its provisions for territorial self-government to arrest the "torrent of fanaticism" that had been dividing the nation regarding the slavery issue. Instead, free-soil forces from the North formed armed emigrant associations to populate Kansas, while proslavery advocates poured over the border from Missouri. Regulating associations and guerrilla bands were formed by each side, and only the intervention of the governor prevented violence in the Wakarusa War, launched in December 1855 over the murder of an antislavery settler.

"Bleeding Kansas" became a fact with the Sack of Lawrence (May 21, 1856), in which a proslavery mob swarmed into the town of Lawrence and wrecked and burned the hotel and newspaper office in an effort to wipe out the "hotbed of abolitionism." The day after the attack on Lawrence, the conflict spread to the floor of the U.S. Senate, where U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was viciously beaten with a cane by U.S. Rep. Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina in response to Sumner's impassioned address regarding the "Crime Against Kansas" committed by supporters of slavery.

Three days after the Sack of Lawrence, an antislavery band led by John Brown retaliated in the Pottawatomie Massacre. After the attack Brown's name evoked fear and rage in slavery apologists in Kansas. Periodic bloodshed along the border followed as the two factions fought battles, captured towns, and set prisoners free.

A political struggle to determine the future state's position on slavery ensued, centred on the Lecompton Constitution proposed in 1857. The question was finally settled when Kansas was admitted as a free state in January 1861, but, meanwhile, "Bleeding Kansas" had furnished the newly formed Republican Party with a much needed antislavery issue in the national election of 1860. Claims for $400,000 in damages sustained in the border war were later approved by territorial commissioners.

Jeff Wallenfeldt.

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Bleeding Kansas | History, Effects, & John Brown

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Bleeding Kansas (1854-59), small civil war fought between proslavery and antislavery advocates for control of the new territory of Kansas under the doctrine of popular sovereignty. Kansas-Nebraska Act sponsors wrongly expected that territorial self-government would arrest the 'torrent of fanaticism' over slavery.

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This was a secret document written by Americans that outlined a plan that would allow the U.S to take Cuba from Spain. Secretary of State William Marcy was forced to reveal the manifesto and angered Northerners because they saw it as a way to expand slavery.

Source: https://mrnussbaum.com/ostend-manifesto

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Stephen Douglas, senator of Illinois, implemented a bill that would use popular sovereignty to decide if slavery would be legal in a state which could reverse anti-slavery states from the Missouri compromise. This bill was opposed by abolitionist.

Source: https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/kansas-nebraska-act

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Kansas-Nebraska Act - Definition, Date & Significance | HISTORY

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The Kansas-Nebraska Act was an 1854 bill that allowed settlers of Kansas and Nebraska to decide whether slavery would be allowed within their state’s borders. The conflicts that arose between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers in the aftermath of the act’s passage led to the period of violence known as Bleeding Kansas, and contributed to unrest that led to the American Civil War (1861-65).

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A group of abolitionists led by John Brown attacked Harper's Ferry. The plan was to free enslaved African Americans and give them the weapons at the arsenal. This plan failed. It scared the South because of the extreme method to end slavery.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Harpers-Ferry-Raid

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Harpers Ferry Raid | Definition, Date, History, & Facts

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Harpers Ferry Raid: Harpers Ferry Raid, assault that took place October 16-18, 1859, by an armed band of abolitionists led by John Brown on the federal armory located at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia). It was a main precipitating incident to the American Civil War.

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Dred Scott was an enslaved African American who lived in a free state and then a slave state. He later sued for his freedom saying since he lived in a free state he was free. This removed the Missouri compromise of 1820 and slaves were property.

Source: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1850-1900/60us393

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A series of debates between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln that mostly consisted of the expansion of slavery. These political debates and the responses of Douglas further divided the nation.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Lincoln-Douglas-debates

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Lincoln-Douglas debates, series of seven debates between the Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas and Republican challenger Abraham Lincoln during the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign, largely concerning the issue of slavery extension into the territories.

The slavery extension question had seemingly been settled by the Missouri Compromise nearly 40 years earlier. The Mexican War, however, had added new territories, and the issue flared up again in the 1840s. The Compromise of 1850 provided a temporary respite from sectional strife, but the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854-a measure Douglas sponsored-brought the slavery extension issue to the fore once again. Douglas's bill in effect repealed the Missouri Compromise by lifting the ban against slavery in territories north of the 36°30′ latitude. In place of the ban, Douglas offered popular sovereignty, the doctrine that the actual settlers in the territories and not Congress should decide the fate of slavery in their midst.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act spurred the creation of the Republican Party, formed largely to keep slavery out of the western territories. Both Douglas's doctrine of popular sovereignty and the Republican stand on free soil were seemingly invalidated by the Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which the Supreme Court said that neither Congress nor the territorial legislature could exclude slavery from a territory.

When Lincoln and Douglas debated the slavery extension issue in 1858, therefore, they were addressing the problem that had divided the nation into two hostile camps and that threatened the continued existence of the Union. Their contest, as a consequence, had repercussions far beyond determining who would win the senatorial seat at stake.

When Lincoln received the Republican nomination to run against Douglas, he said in his acceptance speech that "A house divided against itself cannot stand" and that "this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." Douglas thereupon attacked Lincoln as a radical, threatening the continued stability of the Union. Lincoln then challenged Douglas to a series of debates, and the two eventually agreed to hold joint encounters in seven Illinois congressional districts.

The debates, each three hours long, were convened in Ottawa (August 21), Freeport (August 27), Jonesboro (September 15), Charleston (September 18), Galesburg (October 7), Quincy (October 13), and Alton (October 15). Douglas repeatedly tried to brand Lincoln as a dangerous radical who advocated racial equality and disruption of the Union. Lincoln emphasized the moral iniquity of slavery and attacked popular sovereignty for the bloody results it had produced in Kansas.

At Freeport Lincoln challenged Douglas to reconcile popular sovereignty with the Dred Scott decision. Douglas replied that settlers could circumvent the decision by not establishing the local police regulations-i.e., a slave code-that protected a master's property. Without such protection, no one would bring slaves into a territory. This became known as the " Freeport Doctrine."

Douglas's position, while acceptable to many Northern Democrats, angered the South and led to the division of the last remaining national political institution, the Democratic Party. Although he retained his seat in the Senate, narrowly defeating Lincoln when the state legislature (which then elected U.S. senators) voted 54 to 46 in his favour, Douglas's stature as a national leader of the Democratic Party was gravely diminished. Lincoln, on the other hand, lost the election but won acclaim as an eloquent spokesman for the Republican cause.

In 1860 the Lincoln-Douglas debates were printed as a book and used as an important campaign document in the presidential contest that year, which once again pitted Republican Lincoln against Democrat Douglas. This time, however, Douglas was running as the candidate of a divided party and finished a distant second in the popular vote to the triumphant Lincoln.

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Lincoln-Douglas debates | Summary, Dates, Significance, & Facts

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Lincoln-Douglas debates, series of seven debates between the Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas and Republican challenger Abraham Lincoln during the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign, largely concerning the issue of slavery extension into the territories. The slavery extension question had seemingly been settled by the Missouri Compromise nearly 40 years earlier.

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Created by Kentucky Senator John Crittenden, the goal was the fix the sectional divide. The compromise would permanently allow slavery in some states, but was rejected by Northerner Republicans.

Source: https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/crittenden-compromise

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In December 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, Kentucky Senator John J. Crittenden (1787-1863) introduced legislation aimed at resolving the looming secession crisis in the Deep South. The "Crittenden Compromise," as it became known, included six proposed constitutional amendments and four proposed Congressional resolutions that Crittenden hoped would appease Southern states and help the nation avoid civil war. The compromise would have guaranteed the permanent existence of slavery in the slave states by reestablishing the free-slave demarcation line drawn by the 1820 Missouri Compromise. Though Crittenden's plan drew support from Southern leaders, its rejection by many Northern Republicans, including President-elect Abraham Lincoln, led to its ultimate failure.

This was an unsuccessful effort to avert the Civil War during the winter of 1860-1861. Senator John J. Crittenden, a Kentucky Whig and disciple of Henry Clay, proposed six constitutional amendments and four resolutions. The amendments made major concessions to southern concerns. They forbade the abolition of slavery on federal land in slaveholding states, compensated owners of runaway slaves, and restored the Missouri Compromise line of 36 degree 30′, which had been repealed in the Kansas-Nebraska Act. One amendment guaranteed that future constitutional amendments could not change the other five amendments or the three-fifths and fugitive slave clauses of the Constitution. Crittenden's proposals also called for the repeal of northern personal liberty laws. Aware of congressional divisions, Crittenden urged that his plan be submitted to a nationwide vote.

Did you know? One of the most controversial aspects of the Critten Compromise was that it stipulated that the bills could never be changed or amended.

Despite considerable popular support for Crittenden's compromise, Congress failed to enact it. Although incoming secretary of state William Seward, viewed by southerners as a radical on slavery, backed the plan, most Republicans agreed with President-elect Abraham Lincoln, who opposed it.

The Reader's Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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In December 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, Kentucky Senator John J. Crittenden (1787-1863) introduced legislation aimed at resolving the looming secession crisis in the Deep South. The "Crittenden Compromise," as it became known, included six proposed constitutional amendments and four proposed Congressional resolutions that Crittenden hoped would appease Southern states and help the nation avoid civil war.

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Union general William Sherman, with the goal of crippling the Southern war production and decrease morale, marched from Savannah to Alanta burning military buildings, supplies, and businesses.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Shermans-March-to-the-Sea

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Sherman's March to the Sea, (November 15-December 21, 1864) American Civil War campaign that concluded Union operations in the Confederate state of Georgia. After seizing Atlanta, Union Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman embarked on a scorched-earth campaign intended to cripple the South's war-making capacity and wound the Confederate psyche. Sherman's army marched 285 miles (458 km) east from Atlanta to the coastal town of Savannah, which surrendered without a siege. Sherman's 37-day campaign is remembered as one of the most successful examples of " total war," and its psychological effects persisted in the postbellum South.

Context and strategy

In the spring of 1864, Union Lieut. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant conferred with his generals in order to devise a strategy to bring the Confederate war machine to its knees. Sherman was charged with three armies totaling some 100,000 men: the Army of the Cumberland, the Army of the Tennessee, and the Army of the Ohio. His primary objective was to capture and neutralize the city of Atlanta, which was a major railroad centre, supply depot, and manufacturing hub for both Georgia and the Confederacy. The ensuing campaign and siege occupied most of the summer, with Sherman finally forcing a surrender on September 2.

Sherman remained in Atlanta for a little over a month. During this time he ordered the evacuation of some 3,000 civilians and seized their homes for his soldiers' living quarters. Confederate forces were not stationary, however. On September 21, 1864, Confederate Gen. John B. Hood moved his battered Army of Tennessee northwest from their southerly position to Palmetto, Georgia. On September 29 Hood set out again, this time with the goal of cutting off Sherman's supply lines along the Western & Atlantic Railroad in northern Georgia. Sherman moved against Hood on October 5. Union men successfully defended the supply depot northwest of Atlanta at Allatoona Pass, but Hood seized Dalton with little resistance. Sherman pursued the smaller Confederate army west and south until mid-October, when Hood crossed into Alabama. Hood's new strategy was to recoup before striking north at Union-occupied Nashville, Tennessee.

Having anticipated Confederate designs against Nashville, Sherman had already sent two divisions to the Tennessee capital. He now dispatched the IV and XXIII Corps to Chattanooga, located along the railroad to Nashville. Sherman then turned his attention back to the pacification of Georgia. On October 9, while still chasing Hood, he had sent the following in a telegram to Grant:

I propose we break up the railroad from Chattanooga, and strike out with wagons for Milledgeville, Millen, and Savannah. Until we can repopulate Georgia it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources. By attempting to hold the roads we will lose a thousand men monthly and will gain no result. I can make the march and make Georgia howl. We have over 8,000 cattle and 3,000,000 pounds of bread but no corn, but we can forage in the interior of the state.

Though he had his reservations about the plan, Grant gave his official approval on November 7. Through this "March to the Sea," Sherman hoped to deny Georgia's resources to the Confederacy. In a November 6 telegram to Grant, he had argued that to every onlooker, the destruction of Georgia's economic and industrial potential would be "proof positive that the North can prevail in this contest, leaving only open the question of its willingness to use that power." Far more than a mere display of brute force, Sherman's wager would prove to be equal parts political and psychological.

On November 10, following Sherman's orders, Union troops began torching buildings that were of military or industrial value in Atlanta. By the following day, soldiers were setting unauthorized fires, and the flames spread to business and residential districts. Within a week, some 40 percent of the city was in ashes. On the morning of November 16, Sherman set out for the coast at the head of roughly 62,000 men. Atlanta smoldered in his rear.

The march

Although clearly headed eastward, Sherman was determined to conceal his movements from Confederate eyes. For this reason, he divided his expeditionary force into two infantry groups. The Army of the Tennessee, headed by Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard, comprised the right wing. On the left, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Slocum commanded the Army of Georgia. Brig. Gen. Judson Kilpatrick led the force's single cavalry division. With Kilpatrick as a mobile screen, Howard took the right wing southeast of Atlanta in the direction of Macon, while Slocum's left wing marched east toward Augusta.

Sherman gave explicit instructions to his troops regarding their conduct while on the march. In Special Field Order No. 120 he encouraged foraging and the confiscation of livestock but forbade home invasions. However, if antagonized by Confederate soldiers, Union officers could destroy private and industrial property. The field order also permitted able-bodied Black labourers to join the march, but commanding officers were instructed to remain cognizant of supplies intended for their army group.

Most Union soldiers complied with Sherman's orders. However, some men, called "bummers," roamed the countryside to intentionally terrorize and loot Confederate civilians. Although bummers engaged in prohibited activity, the overall psychological impact on the local population was precisely the purpose of the march. This effect was likely compounded by the army's continued railroad destruction. Railroads doubled as a conduit for industrial growth and transportation for the military. By ripping up and melting down tracks, Union soldiers slowly crippled the state's industrial and military potential in full view of its civilians.

Confederate leadership was unable to discern the final destination of the two-pronged Union force. Observing the movements of Howard's right wing, Confederate Lieut. Gen. William J. Hardee initially assumed that its goal was to capture Macon. However, a turn eastward convinced him that Augusta was the target. Accordingly, on November 19, he dispatched Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler 's cavalry corps and some local militiamen to slow the Union's right flank. Sherman's true objective, hidden from even his own rank and file, was to seize the state capital of Milledgeville.

Just before pivoting east past Macon, Howard's right wing came upon the industrial town of Griswoldville. Union troops burned it to the ground. On November 22 three Confederate militia brigades (comprising some 4,500 men) from Macon discovered the carnage before chancing upon 1,500 Union soldiers. The Union defensive position was strong and Howard's men were equipped with repeating rifles. Despite an overwhelming numerical advantage, the Confederate militiamen were thoroughly squashed, suffering more than 1,000 casualties to fewer than 100 for the Union. To the north of this action, Sherman advanced with the left wing into Milledgeville on November 23. His force faced little resistance. With the Georgia state legislature having quit the capital, Union troops held a mock legislative session and voted to repeal Georgia's ordinance of secession.

On November 24 several Union prisoners of war caught up with the left wing, having escaped a Confederate camp at Andersonville. Many troops who heard of their arrival retaliated by burning civilian barns and slaughtering their livestock. Some bummers escalated their attacks on the local population. Wheeler's Confederate cavalry responded by killing Union prisoners. The violence abated only after Sherman threatened to shoot an equal number of his own captives. However, news of brutal prisoner treatment at Camp Lawton would later prompt Sherman to order the destruction of several miles of track along the Augusta & Savannah Railroad.

Slocum's left wing encountered some trouble once they broke camp to continue their eastward march. Wheeler's horsemen descended on the Federal column at Sandersonville on November 25-26, and on November 28 they sprang an attack on Kilpatrick's Union cavalry at Buckhead Creek. The Confederacy suffered only 70 losses to the Union's 100, with Kilpatrick himself narrowly escaping capture. The two cavalry units clashed again at nearby Waynesboro on December 4. The intense battle that ensued saw 250 Confederate casualties and 190 Union losses.

Despite these impediments, the two wings of Sherman's army began to converge on Savannah in early December. On December 9, however, tragedy struck Brig. Gen. Jefferson C. Davis's XIV Corps. Davis's men lagged behind the rest of the left wing, and Wheeler's cavalry was hot on their heels. Field Order No. 120 had permitted Black labourers to accompany the column, despite being a potential drain on resources and slowing the army's pace. Just 25 miles (40 km) north of Savannah, Davis's men were crossing a bloated Ebenezer Creek when they were ordered to destroy their bridge. This would prevent the formerly enslaved people from crossing to safety. With Wheeler close behind, many of them attempted to swim the distance. Dozens drowned, and Wheeler captured many of those who lived. Their fates remain largely unknown. Sherman would later defend Davis's actions at Ebenezer Creek as a necessary reality of war.

By December 12 Sherman's force had neared Savannah's outer defenses. Hardee had long since retreated to the coastal city and toiled away at its fortifications, which were effective at supplementing Savannah's natural marsh and river defenses. Determined not to lay a siege unless absolutely necessary, Sherman ordered 4,000 men from the XV Corps to seize Fort McCallister, a crucial element of the city's southern defense. Union troops arrived outside the fort on December 13. It boasted a garrison of 230 Confederates and more than 20 pieces of artillery. Federal troops sprinted the 600-yard stretch to the fort's walls, and within 15 minutes they had captured the structure. The Union lost 130 men in this assault and the Confederacy 40.

Savannah was now surrounded on land. Sherman demanded a surrender on December 17, but his request was promptly rejected. Nevertheless, Hardee knew that his position was untenable. On the night of December 20-21 his Confederate garrison prepared to evacuate. They quietly abandoned their trenches and crossed the Savannah River into Confederate-held South Carolina. On December 21 Savannah's mayor formally surrendered the city to the Union. For Sherman's part, he made immediate contact with the U.S. Navy before sending the following telegram to Pres. Abraham Lincoln:

"I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton."

Casualties and aftermath

Sherman's March to the Sea spanned some 285 miles (459 km) over 37 days. His armies sustained more than 1,300 casualties, with the Confederacy suffering roughly 2,300. Between 17,000 and 25,000 enslaved Black people were freed while on the march, including more than 7,500 in and around Savannah.

The economic impact of the march was staggering. Sherman estimated a total Confederate economic loss of $100 million (more than $1.5 billion in the 21st century) in his official campaign report. In 1870, five years after the war's end, the South's overall agricultural output was 28 percent of the nation's total output, some 10 percent below prewar levels. Some economists have measured residual agricultural effects lasting through 1920.

Together with Sherman's Atlanta Campaign, the March to the Sea may have tipped the scales of victory toward the Union. The pacification of Georgia cut the Confederacy in half and denied the insurgent states much of their former industrial and agricultural capacity. This had significant ramifications across their remaining military operations. Desertions soared as news of Georgia's devastation began to reach the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, which was engaged in some of the war's most intense combat. In South Carolina Sherman waged a new scorched-earth campaign with a vengeance reserved for the first state to have seceded from the Union. Less than six months later Gen. Robert E. Lee would surrender to the Union at Appomattox Court House and bring a formal end to the American Civil War.

Apart from its economic and military payoff, the march's impact may have lingered longest in the Southern psyche. The destruction of Georgia displayed the unfettered might of the Union war machine. Confederate morale reached new lows as Sherman burned his way east. Civilian accounts describe the terror of encountering Sherman's foraging parties and the unauthorized bands of bummers. Locals experienced a sense of growing dread as they anticipated the main columns advancing through their property and seizing everything of value. In the hearts of Georgians, Sherman left behind a smoldering resentment of the North that persisted well into the 20th century.

In addition to its effects on Georgia and the South, Sherman's March to the Sea revolutionized the military tactics of his time. Many scholars of military history contend that his psychological warfare was one of the first modern examples of total war. His focus on crushing civilian morale presaged the bloody World Wars of the 20th century. Like the morale-focused campaigns of future generals, Sherman's march squeezed out a victory with ruthless precision.

Myles Hudson

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Sherman's March to the Sea | Significance, Map, Casualties, & The Civil War

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Sherman's March to the Sea (November 15-December 21, 1864), American Civil War campaign that concluded Union operations in Georgia and crippled the South's war-making capacity. After seizing Atlanta, Union Major General William Tecumseh Sherman embarked on a scorched-earth campaign to the coastal town of Savannah.

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General Winfield Scott created this plan to defeat the confederacy. It consisted of a strong defense of the nations capital, blockade of Confederate gulfs, and attack on the Mississippi river to divide the Confederacy in half. Abraham Lincoln approved of the plan reluctantly.

Source: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/anaconda-plan/

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In 1861, Scott, a native of Dinwiddie County, Virginia, had been general-in-chief of the U.S. Army for twenty years. A hero of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War (1846-1848), and the candidate for president in 1852, he was one of the most famous men in America and, despite age and infirmity, one of its best military minds. Recognizing that the Confederacy had no real navy at the war's start, he called for a blockade of all Southern ports along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. The idea was to isolate the Confederacy both diplomatically and economically, preventing it from exporting cotton and tobacco to Europe and importing weapons, foodstuffs, and other necessities. A massive invasion along the Mississippi River, meanwhile, would cut off vital transportation and communication routes for the Confederates and open them up for Union troops.

Scott's war strategy anticipated realities that other military men and politicians were either unable to see or face. Scott predicted a two-year war when most were preparing for a single, decisive battle. Even though the Regular Army numbered only 16,000 men in 1861, he understood that as many as 300,000 Union soldiers would be necessary to defeat the Confederacy, and he braced the president for casualties numbering as many as a third of that. That he underestimated all of these figures hardly diminishes the plan's prescience. The blockade, which Lincoln instituted beginning in April 1861, had much the effect that Scott intended. And when David G. Farragut captured New Orleans, Louisiana, in April 1862, and Ulysses S. Grant claimed Vicksburg, Mississippi, in July 1863, the Mississippi River belonged to the Union, creating logistical chaos for the Confederacy. What remained was, to some extent, a war of attrition in which Union men and matériel slowly overwhelmed the South.

Still, the Anaconda Plan had problems. Scott's military and political approach was essentially conciliatory. He assumed that the military only needed to create the right circumstances for Unionism to reemerge in the South. As such, he did not consider an approach that, by 1864, Grant and his generals deemed a necessity-a hard, or total, war attacking the Confederacy's agricultural base and its will to fight. He did not plan for a long-term occupation of the South, and he failed to see at least one important effect of the blockade. Deprived of its cotton, Great Britain was, for a time, tempted to intervene on the Confederacy's behalf, a development that might have been devastating for the Lincoln administration.

The Southern press understood this immediately and happily ridiculed the plan. Northern editors, meanwhile, sarcastically dubbed it the Anaconda Plan, after the snake that slowly squeezes its prey to death. The imperative of 1861 was action, and any plan that did not immediately strike at was unwelcome. Of course, Scott did call for a massive attack on the Confederacy, with anywhere from 60,000 to 80,000 men in the Mississippi River Valley. But he recognized how critical it was to train those men, while Washington politicians preferred to fight sooner and closer to home. (The same was true in Richmond. The Confederacy's third secretary of war, George Wythe Randolph of Virginia, advocated a focus on the Western Theater and was overruled by Jefferson Davis.) The cry of the day was "On to Richmond" and not "On to Natchez." The Democratic Chicago Tribune, on July 15, 1861, sang a typically impatient refrain under the headline, "The Torpid Anaconda": We are told that the "plan" is bold, vigorous and comprehensive, and cannot fail in its noble results to give great joy to the hearts of patriots, and spread consternation among the rebel host. Night after night has this comforting assurance been carried us on the wings of lightnings, until people have lost faith in electricity, and pronounce its statements unmitigated falsehoods. Hope deferred makes the heart sick, and the country impatiently demands to know the reason for the procrastination.

In the end, Lincoln approved the Union strike that led to the First Battle of Manassas on July 21. It was a disaster for the Union.

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In 1861, Scott, a native of , Virginia, had been general-in-chief of the U.S. Army for twenty years. A hero of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War (1846-1848), and the Whig Party candidate for president in 1852, he was one of the most famous men in America and, despite age and infirmity, one [...]

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President Abraham Lincoln created a reconstruction plan that would allow Confederate states to create new governments if 10% of the male population pledged allegiance and recognized the freedom of formerly enslaved African Americans. The plan wasn't enacted as Congress believed it was too lenient.

Source: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/wade-davis-bill#:~:text=In%20December%2C%20President%20Lincoln%20proposed,freedom%20of%20formerly%20enslaved%20people.

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Signed by President Abraham Lincoln this act gave Americans 160 acres and a mule for a low price. This allowed millions of Americans to move west and become land owners at the expense of Native Americans who had to leave the land.

Source: https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/homestead-act

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Originally vetoed by Andrew Johnson, the act declared anyone born into the United States a citizen regardless of previous condition of slavery. This was the 1st civil rights law in the U.S.

Source: https://ballotpedia.org/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1866#:~:text=The%20Civil%20Rights%20Act%20of,United%20States%20Congress%20and%20the

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This outlined the terms for Confederate states to rejoin the Union and divided the Confederacy into 5 different military sections. Each was forced to write a constitution that would be voted on to approve, and must ratify the 13th and 14th amendment. This was vetoed by Andrew Johnson but overruled.

Source: https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/Civil_War_AdmissionReadmission.htm#:~:text=The%20Reconstruction%20Act%20of%201867%20outlined%20the%20terms%20for%20readmission,Tennessee%2C%20into%20five%20military%20districts.

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This law was made by Radical Republicans and restricted the president's ability to remove certain officials that Congress had already approved. President Andrew Johnson was impeached when he violated this law by trying to fire Stanton.

Source: https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/tenure-of-office-act

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This amendment was approved by Abraham Lincoln, but was ratified by 3/4's of states in 1865. This amendment prohibitied slavery or involuntary servitiude from exisiting in the U.S unless as a punishment for a crime.

Source: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/13th-amendment#:~:text=The%2013th%20Amendment%20to%20the%20United%20States%20Constitution%20provides%20that,place%20subject%20to%20their%20jurisdiction.%22

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This scandal was when a few congressmen illegally manipulated contracts through a construction company when building the Union Pacific Railroad. When the scandal was uncovered congress censured the vice president Schuyler Colfax.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Credit-Mobilier-Scandal

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Last major reconstruction act by senator Charles Sumner in which  African Americans were given equal treatment in public transportation and public accommodations. This was later declared unconstitutional in 1883.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Civil-Rights-Act-United-States-1875

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Informal agreement between southern Democrats and Republicans on the presidential election. Accusations of election fraud led to questions about the real presidency. Rutherford B. Hayes allies met with Southern Democrats to convince them to allow Hayes election, and in return he would remove federal troops in the south ending reconstruction.

Source: https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/compromise-of-1877

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Contents

1. Compromise of 1877: The 1876 Election

2. Compromise of 1877: Election Results

3. Compromise of 1877: Congress Steps In

4. Compromise of 1877: The End of Reconstruction

The Compromise of 1877 was an informal agreement between southern Democrats and allies of the Republican Rutherford Hayes to settle the result of the 1876 presidential election and marked the end of the Reconstruction era.

Immediately after the presidential election of 1876, it became clear that the outcome of the race hinged largely on disputed returns from Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina-the only three states in the South with Reconstruction-era Republican governments still in power. As a bipartisan congressional commission debated over the outcome early in 1877, allies of the Republican Party candidate Rutherford Hayes met in secret with moderate southern Democrats in order to negotiate acceptance of Hayes' election.

The Democrats agreed not to block Hayes' victory on the condition that Republicans withdraw all federal troops from the South, thus consolidating Democratic control over the region. As a result of the so-called Compromise of 1877 (or Compromise of 1876), Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina became Democratic once again, effectively bringing an end to the Reconstruction era.

Compromise of 1877: The 1876 Election

By the 1870s, support was waning for the racially egalitarian policies of Reconstruction, a series of laws put in place after the Civil War to protect the rights of African Americans, especially in the South. Many southern whites had resorted to intimidation and violence to keep blacks from voting and restore white supremacy in the region.

Beginning in 1873, a series of Supreme Court decisions limited the scope of Reconstruction-era laws and federal support for the so-called Reconstruction Amendments, particularly the 14th Amendment and 15 Amendment, which gave African Americans the status of citizenship and the protection of the Constitution, including the all-important right to vote.

Did you know? After the most disputed election in American history, the Compromise of 1877 put Rutherford Hayes into office as the nation's 19th president; outraged northern Democrats derided Hayes as "His Fraudulency."

In addition, accusations of corruption within the administration of Ulysses S. Grant and an economic depression had heightened discontent with the Republican Party, which had been in the White House since 1861. As the 1876 presidential election approached, the Democrats chose Governor Samuel B. Tilden of New York as their candidate, while the Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, governor of Ohio. In his acceptance of the nomination, Hayes wrote that if elected, he would bring "the blessings of honest and capable local self-government" to the South-in other words, restrict federal enforcement of unpopular Reconstruction-era policies.

Compromise of 1877: Election Results

On Election Day that November, the Democrats appeared to come out on top, winning the swing states of Connecticut, Indiana, New York and New Jersey. By midnight, Tilden had 184 of the 185 electoral votes he needed to win and was leading the popular vote by 250,000. The Republicans refused to accept defeat, however, and accused Democratic supporters of intimidating and bribing African-American voters to prevent them from voting in three southern states- Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina. As of 1876, these were the only remaining states in the South with Republican governments.

In South Carolina, the election had been marred by bloodshed on both sides of the party line. Supporters of the Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wade Hampton, a former Confederate general, had used violence and intimidation to confront the African-American voting majority. A clash between black militia and armed whites in Hamburg in July ended in the death of five militiamen after their surrender, while at Camboy (near Charleston), six white men were killed when armed blacks opened fire in a political meeting.

With both sides accusing each other of electoral fraud, South Carolina, along with Florida and Louisiana, submitted two sets of election returns with different results. Meanwhile, in Oregon, the state's Democratic governor replaced a Republican elector with a Democrat (alleging that the Republican had been ineligible), thus throwing Hayes' victory in that state into question as well.

Compromise of 1877: Congress Steps In

To resolve the dispute, Congress set up an electoral commission in January 1877, consisting of five U.S. representatives, five senators and five Supreme Court justices. The commission's members included seven Democrats, seven Republicans and one independent, Justice David Davis. When Davis refused to serve, the moderate Republican Justice Joseph Bradley was chosen to replace him.

During the commission's deliberations, Hayes' Republican allies met in secret with moderate southern Democrats in hopes of convincing them not to block the official counting of votes through filibuster and effectively allow Hayes' election. In February, at a meeting held in Washington's Wormley Hotel, the Democrats agreed to accept a Hayes victory and to respect the civil and political rights of African Americans, on the condition that Republicans withdraw all federal troops from the South, thus consolidating Democratic control in the region.

Hayes would also have to agree to name a leading southerner to his cabinet and to support federal aid for the Texas and Pacific Railroad, a planned transcontinental line via a southern route. On March 2, the congressional commission voted 8-7 along party lines to award all the disputed electoral votes to Hayes, giving him 185 votes to Tilden's 184.

Compromise of 1877: The End of Reconstruction

Hayes appointed Tennessee's David Key as postmaster general but never followed through on the promised land grant for the Texas and Pacific. Within two months, however, Hayes had ordered federal troops from their posts guarding Louisiana and South Carolina statehouses, allowing Democrats to seize control in both those states. As Florida's Supreme Court had earlier declared a Democratic victory in the 1876 gubernatorial election, Democrats had been restored to power all across the South.

The Compromise of 1876 effectively ended the Reconstruction era. Southern Democrats' promises to protect the civil and political rights of Black people were not kept, and the end of federal interference in southern affairs led to widespread disenfranchisement of Black voters.

From the late 1870s onward, southern legislatures passed a series of laws requiring the separation of whites from "persons of color" on public transportation, in schools, parks, restaurants, theaters and other locations. Known as the " Jim Crow laws" (after a popular minstrel act developed in the antebellum years), these segregationist statutes governed life in the South through the middle of the next century, ending only after the hard-won successes of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

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The Compromise of 1877 was an agreement that resolved the disputed 1876 presidential election between Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden and Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes. As part of the compromise, Democrats agreed that Hayes would become president in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending the Reconstruction era.

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Stole $30 - $200 million from New York City slums. Controlled Tammany Hall and thus controlled Democratic party nominations to all city positions. Thomas Nast, a political cartoonist, exposed the corruption and had Tweed charged.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Boss-Tweed

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Boss Tweed: Boss Tweed, American politician who, with his 'Tweed ring' cronies, systematically plundered New York City of sums estimated at between $30 million and $200 million. He was finally exposed by The New York Times, the satiric cartoons of Thomas Nast, and the efforts of reform lawyer Samuel J.

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This was the 1st significnat immigrant restirct law, signed by Chester Arthur. This was a 10 year ban on all Chinese laborers entering the U.S under the assumption it endangered certain places. This also hurt Chinese people who were in the U.S before the Act.

Source: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/chinese-exclusion-act#:~:text=It%20was%20the%20first%20significant,immigrating%20to%20the%20United%20States.

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Herbert Spencer, using the evolutionary ideas from Charles Darwin, that the strongest will survive in humans and so the white European race was destined to rule over everyone.

Source: https://www.allaboutscience.org/what-is-social-darwinism-faq.htm

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This bill was sponsored by George Pendleton and dismantled the federal spoils system by choosing federal jobs based on merit rather affiliation. It allowed for open selection of government employees regardless of gender or race.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Chester-A-Arthur

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Multiple violent railroad strikes across the country. The strikes happened because of multiple wage cuts by railroad companies. The strikers stopped all trains from moving until the wage cut was removed. Henry Matthews, the governor, sent state militia to stop the strike. The strike had spread to multiple states.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Great-Railroad-Strike-of-1877

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Great Railroad Strike of 1877, series of violent rail strikes across the United States in 1877. That year the country was in the fourth year of a prolonged economic depression after the panic of 1873. The strikes were precipitated by wage cuts announced by the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad-its second cut in eight months. Railway work was already poorly paid and dangerous. Moreover, the railroad companies had taken advantage of the economic troubles to largely break the nascent trade unions that had been formed by the workers before and after the American Civil War.

On July 16, 1877, workers at the B&O station at Martinsburg, West Virginia, responded to the announcement of 10 percent wage cuts by uncoupling the locomotives in the station, confining them in the roundhouse, and declaring that no trains would leave Martinsburg unless the cut was rescinded. West Virginia Gov. Henry M. Mathews dispatched the militia when police were unable to break up the supportive crowd that had gathered. When the militia then proved incapable of freeing the 600 or so trains stranded in Martinsburg (perhaps because many of the militiamen were themselves railroad workers sympathetic to the strike), Mathews requested and received assistance from federal troops. After their arrival, trains were able to begin leaving Martinsburg on July 20.

Meanwhile, the strike had begun spreading along the mainline of the B&O all the way to Chicago, and on July 19 it grew to include Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania Railroad. On July 19 flagman Gus Harris unilaterally refused to work on a "double-header" (a train hauled by two engines, thus requiring fewer workers), and the rest of the crew joined him. The resulting strike quickly grew and was joined by men from the nearby iron mills and factories. Elsewhere, on July 20 militiamen were sent to Cumberland, Maryland, where strikers had halted trains. At least 10 people in a crowd were killed by militiamen that were en route to Camden Depot, prompting the assignment of federal troops to Baltimore, Maryland.

Back in Pittsburgh, when local police and National Guard units were reluctant to act against their fellow townsmen, Pennsylvania Gov. John F. Hartranft called in guardsmen from Philadelphia. On July 21, after local forces had made only a token effort to clear the tracks of the growing mob, the troops from Philadelphia made a bayonet charge. A riot erupted, with guns fired on both sides, and as many as 20 deaths resulted. As anger swelled among the workers, the guardsmen withdrew into a roundhouse while the crowd set fire to the Pennsylvania Railroad's engines, cars, and buildings. Gunfire was exchanged through the next night, with 20 more crowd members being killed, along with five guardsmen. A virtual general strike ensued in the city, with iron and steel workers, miners, and labourers joining the action.

Although the entire National Guard of Pennsylvania was summoned, many units were delayed in arriving by the actions of strikers in other towns in the state. In Harrisburg, factories and stores were closed; in Lebanon, a National Guard company mutinied; and in Reading, a mob tore up tracks, derailed cars, and set fires. Nevertheless, by July 29 a fresh contingent of the National Guard, supported by federal troops, had brought calm to Pittsburgh and reopened railroad operations.

By the end of July, the railroad strike had spread, to a greater or lesser degree, throughout the Northeast to cities such as Albany and Buffalo in New York and to Midwestern cities such as Newark, in Ohio, and Chicago. The leaders of the major railway fraternal organizations (the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, the Order of Railway Conductors, and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers), however, appear to have been as frightened of the riots as the authorities were. Most disavowed the strike. Many in the middle and upper classes, recalling the Paris Commune of some six years earlier, assumed that the aggressive strikes had been organized communist insurrections. In Chicago the Marxist Workingman's Union did provide more structure and organization to the demonstrations than elsewhere, but the actions they encouraged were quickly suppressed by the police and the National Guard. Only in St. Louis was there anything approaching an organized effort to take control, but by the end of July the strikes had collapsed almost everywhere.

The strikes dissipated, first and foremost, because the federal army did not break. Unlike the militias, those professional soldiers stayed together and followed orders. The strikes also collapsed because, despite the fears of the industrialists and the government, they were not organized uprisings but rather spontaneous outbursts. Once the anger of the strikers and crowds had run its course, so too did the revolt. There had been no leaders with greater political vision to take command of the strikers.

More than 100,000 workers participated in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, at the height of which more than half the freight on the country's tracks had come to a halt. By the time the strikes were over, about 1,000 people had gone to jail and some 100 had been killed. In the end the strike accomplished very little. Some national politicians talked of labour reforms, but nothing came of it. Industrialists continued to cut wages and break unions. In a few years the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was all but forgotten.

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Great Railroad Strike of 1877 | History, Facts, & Significance

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Survey of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, a series of violent rail strikes across the United States. More than 100,000 workers participated in the strikes, at the height of which more than half the freight on the country's tracks had come to a halt. Read about the events and outcome of the strikes.

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Passed by Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, this allowed the federal government to break up tribal lands to assimilate Native Americans by forcing them into agriculture. Only the Natives that accepted were granted U.S citizenship.

Source: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/dawes-act.htm

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Founded in 1886 by Samuel Gompers, it replaced the Knights of Labor as the strongest industrial union. It only allowed skilled workers into the organization. The goals of AFL were equal rights for workers, and higher wages.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/American-Federation-of-Labor

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This made railroads the first industry regulated by the federal government. This banned special rates that railroads would arrange among themselves, and hurt the monopolies plaguing the industry.

Source: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/streamliners-commerce/

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In 1887, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, making the railroads the first industry subject to federal regulation. Legislators designed the law, which established a five-member enforcement board known as the Interstate Commerce Commission, largely in response to public demand that the railroads' conduct should be constrained.

Railroad workers, Library of Congress

In the years following the Civil War, railroads were privately owned and entirely unregulated. Though each company held a natural monopoly as long as it serviced its own destinations, the railroads became fiercely competitive once they started expanding into each other's markets. They were regarded with distrust by much of the public, who charged them with anything from forming monopolies and wielding corrupt political influence to stock manipulations and rate discriminations. None of the accusations were unfounded.

The first attempt to regulate the railroad industry's practices came in 1871, at the state level. Illinois passed regulatory legislation first, and states across the South and Midwest quickly followed suit. The states, however, were powerless to regulate interstate commerce, and the railroads were expanding their operations across more state borders all the time.

The Interstate Commerce Act sought to address the problem by setting guidelines for how the railroads could do business. However, the task of establishing specific measures was complex, and regulators lacked a clear mission. The law sought to prevent monopoly by promoting competition, and also to outlaw discriminatory rate-setting. Its most successful provisions were a requirement that railroads submit annual reports to the ICC, and a ban on special rates the railroads would arrange among themselves. Determining which rates were discriminatory proved to be technically and politically difficult, though, and in practice the law was not highly effective.

The Hepburn Act of 1906 and the Mann-Elkins Act of 1910 strengthened the Interstate Commerce Commission, stating the government's regulatory power more definitively. The Hepburn Act empowered the ICC to change a railroad rate to one it considered "just and reasonable," after a full hearing of a complaint. The Mann-Elkins Act placed the burden of proof on the railroads; for the first time, they would have to actively demonstrate that a rate was reasonable. With these new powers, the ICC gained almost complete control over rail rates, and therefore much of rail competition.

In the following years, the government continued to strip the railroads of their power. One important piece of legislation, the Adamson Act of 1916, enacted an eight-hour workday for railroad workers. Government control culminated when President Woodrow Wilson seized American railroads in 1918; the once-private industry would now be a tool of the federal government in the war effort. Wilson promised to return the railroads to private ownership after a peace treaty was signed.

The Esch-Cummins Transportation Act of 1920, which returned the railroads to private hands, advocated a sharp reversal on past policies. The federal government, which had once been ardently anti-monopoly, now encouraged mergers, provided the mergers paired strong lines with weak ones. The ICC, in fact, dictated the merger combinations. In addition, Esch-Cummins empowered the ICC to fix minimum rates and dictate extensions and abandonments of routes. The railroad industry, which had long sought to eliminate unprofitable routes, was now saddled with them.

As devastating as the new legislation was, the railroads had a still greater enemy: increased competition from cars, buses, and trucks on an ever-growing network of roads. Passengers were electing more and more to travel by car or bus; freight shippers were increasingly choosing trucks for short- or long-haul jobs. Trucks, buses and cars could take flexible travel routes from point to point; railroads could not.

For 20 years the railroads' situation worsened. Although they were losing business to competing modes of transportation, they were still considered a threat. The Transportation Act of 1940 amended the Interstate Commerce Act to extend its reach to the other industries, but the fact remained that while regulations were not relaxed on railroads, private cars, trucks, and 90 percent of inland water carriers were exempt from government control.

It wasn't until 1958 that the government reversed its policy. Railroads, it was determined, no longer posed a monopoly threat; regulations could be loosened. By this time trucks had usurped much of the railroads' high-value freight traffic, and airplanes had taken the lion's share of long-haul passenger business, as well as the lucrative contract to carry the U.S. mail.

By the 1970s and 1980s, railroads were enjoying freedom they hadn't known since the Gilded Age of the 1870s. Unfortunately, business did not keep pace. In 1971, the government formed Amtrak, a federally-supported corporation, to operate intercity passenger train service. In 1980 the Staggers Act furthered railroad deregulation, but by then, many railroads were operating under greatly reduced circumstances, if they were operating at all.

By 1995, the Interstate Commerce Commission had lost most of its mandate. With deregulation complete, the ICC could no longer set rates, and the commission was dissolved in the ICC Sunset Act. The Surface Transportation Board, under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Transportation, now performs the few regulatory tasks that had remained with the ICC.

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Interstate Commerce Act | American Experience | PBS

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In 1887, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, making the railroads the first industry subject to federal regulation. Legislators designed the law, which established a five-member enforcement board known as the Interstate Commerce Commission, largely in response to public demand that the railroads' conduct should be constrained.

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A massive explosion of unknown origins sinks the U.S.S Maine that was in Cuba Havana harbor and kills the U.S citizens on board. This event was publicized through newspapers, such as William Randolph Hearst, doing yellow journalism about the event. This encouraged America to go to war with Spain.

Source: https://www.pbs.org/crucible/tl10.html

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Five legal cases combined into a single supreme court ruling. This ruling deemed Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional and Jim Crow/racial segregation laws are legal. Decreased the rights of African Americans.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Civil-Rights-Cases

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During this time restrictive immigration laws were increasing, and Arthur was continuing the trend. The bill was sponsored by Martin Ambrose Foran and banned the use of contract labor in the U.S. Many Americans believed contract workers threatened the job prospects of native workers.

Source: https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/foran-act

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Before this the nation was tied to the gold standard, until people who supported free silver wanted unlimited coinage of silver. Richards P. Bland created a bill to address these concerns by allowing silver to be minted into dollars. Debtors and miners believed it didn't go far enough, and others believed the gold standard was better.

Source: https://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h718.html

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A book written by Helen Hunt Jackson published in 1881 about the brutality that Native Americans experienced in hopes to inspire change. She sent the book to every member of congress with a personal message to call to action.

Source: https://study.com/academy/lesson/a-century-of-dishonor-summary-author.html

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The article, created by Andrew Carnegie an immigrant who became wealthy from the steel industry, in which he said wealthy Americans had a duty to spend money to benefit humanity and decrease the gap between the rich and poor.

Source: https://www.albert.io/blog/gospel-of-wealth-ap-us-history-crash-course/

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The slaughter of 150 - 300 Lakota Indians to repress Plains Indians by breaking any organized resistance to reservations. Big Foot surrendered peacefully but because of a misfired gun the soldiers attacked and killed.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Wounded-Knee-Massacre

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Wounded Knee Massacre | Facts, History, & Legacy

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Wounded Knee Massacre (December 29, 1890), the slaughter of approximately 150–300 Lakota Indians by U.S. Army troops in the area of Wounded Knee Creek in southwestern South Dakota. The massacre was the climax of the U.S. Army’s late 19th-century efforts to repress the Plains Indians.

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Historian Frederick Jackson Turner spoke at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition about his theory that once the American frontier closes America would still want more land. This caused the increase in expansion outside of just the western area.

Source: https://www.pbs.org/crucible/tl2.html

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Said by Booker T. Washington in a speech at Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. He believed vocational education was more important for African Americans than social advantages.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Atlanta-Compromise

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Atlanta Compromise, classic statement on race relations articulated by Booker T. Washington, a leading Black educator in the United States in the late 19th century. In a speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 18, 1895, Washington asserted that vocational education, which gave African Americans an opportunity for economic security, was more valuable to them than social advantages, higher education, or political office. In one sentence he summarized his concept of race relations appropriate for the times: "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." In return for African Americans' remaining peaceful and socially separate from whites, the white community needed to accept responsibility for improving the social and economic conditions of all Americans, regardless of skin colour, Washington argued. This notion of shared responsibilities is what came to be known as the Atlanta Compromise. Washington closed his address by saying:

Booker T. Washington Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file number cph.3a49671)

Nothing in thirty years has given us more hope and encouragement and drawn us so near to you of the white race as thise opportunity offered by this Exposition, and here bending, as it were, over the altar that represents the results of the struggles of your race and mine, both starting practically empty handed three decades ago, I pledge that in your effort to work out the great and intricate problem which God has laid at the doors of the South, you shall have at all times the patient, sympathetic help of my race....Far above and beyond material benefit, will be that higher good, that let us pray God will come, in a blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions, and in a determination even in the remotest corner, to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of law. This, this, coupled with our material prosperity, will bring into our beloved South [a] new Heaven and [a] new Earth.

White leaders in both the North and the South greeted Washington's speech with enthusiasm, but it disturbed Black intellectuals who feared that Washington's "accommodationist" philosophy would doom Blacks to indefinite subservience to whites. This criticism of the Atlanta Compromise was best articulated by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903): "Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission....[His] programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races." Advocating full civil rights as an alternative to Washington's policy of accommodation, Du Bois organized a faction of Black leaders into the Niagara Movement (1905), which led to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909).

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Adam Augustyn, Managing Editor, Reference Content.

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Atlanta Compromise, classic statement on race relations by Booker T. Washington in a speech in Atlanta in 1895. He argued that vocational education, which provided an opportunity for economic security, was more valuable to African Americans than social advantages, higher education, or political office.

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American sugar planters overthrew Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii to establish a new government with Dole as president. This happened because the Queen replaced the constitution with one increasing her power, and ignoring the one set by the U.S.

Source: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/americans-overthrow-hawaiian-monarchy

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Widespread railroad boycott because the Pullman Railroad company cut wages. The federal response was the 1st time an injunction was used to stop a strike. When workers met with George Pullman to negotiate wages he had them fired and the strike began.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Pullman-Strike

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Table of Contents

What was the Pullman Strike?

Why did the Pullman workers go on strike?

What were the effects of the Pullman Strike?

What was the significance of the Pullman Strike?

What role did Eugene V. Debs play in the Pullman Strike?

Pullman Strike, (May 11, 1894-c. July 20, 1894), in U.S. history, widespread railroad strike and boycott that severely disrupted rail traffic in the Midwest of the United States in June-July 1894. The federal government's response to the unrest marked the first time that an injunction was used to break a strike. Amid the crisis, on June 28 Pres. Grover Cleveland and Congress created a national holiday, Labor Day, as a conciliatory gesture toward the American labour movement.

The strike and boycott

In response to financial reverses related to the economic depression that began in 1893, the Pullman Palace Car Company, a manufacturer of railroad cars, cut the already low wages of its workers by about 25 percent but did not introduce corresponding reductions in rents and other charges at Pullman, its company town near Chicago, where most Pullman workers lived. As a result, many workers and their families faced starvation. When a delegation of workers tried to present their grievances about low wages, poor living conditions, and 16-hour workdays directly to the company's president, George M. Pullman, he refused to meet with them and ordered them fired. The delegation then voted to strike, and Pullman workers walked off the job on May 11, 1894. As soon as the plant had emptied, company representatives posted signs at all the gates: "The works are closed until further notice."

At the time of the strike, 35 percent of Pullman's workforce was represented by the American Railway Union (ARU), which had led a successful strike against the Great Northern Railway Company in April 1894. Although the ARU was not technically involved in the Pullman workers' decision to strike, union officials had been in Pullman and at the meeting at which the strike vote was taken, and Pullman workers undoubtedly believed that the ARU would back them. When the ARU gathered in Chicago in June for its first annual convention, the Pullman strike was an issue on the delegates' minds.

A great deal of sympathy existed in Chicago and elsewhere for the Pullman workers, who were seen as common men and women tyrannized by an abusive employer and landlord. The question was how the ARU could support the workers, who, after all, did not exactly work on the railroads. One plan was to refuse to hitch Pullman cars to trains and to unhitch those that were already attached. Another idea was a boycott: ARU members would refuse to handle Pullman cars or any trains with Pullman cars until the railroads severed their ties with the Pullman Company.

On June 22 the ARU delegates passed a motion to initiate a boycott unless the Pullman Company agreed to submit the dispute to arbitration by June 26. During the next three days, several committees were sent to the company in the hope of winning concessions that would make the boycott unnecessary, but all were turned away.

Crucial to the success of any boycott would be the switchmen, who had joined the ARU in large numbers. The ARU's president, Eugene V. Debs, predicted that, once the switchmen refused to add or remove Pullman cars from trains, the railroads would fire them and try to replace them with nonunion workers, and that in turn would lead other union members to walk out in solidarity, thus bringing more and more trains to a halt.

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The scenario played out as Debs had predicted. On June 27, 5,000 workers left their jobs and 15 railroads were tied up. By the next day, 40,000 had walked off, and rail traffic was snarled on all lines west of Chicago. On the third day, the number of strikers had climbed to 100,000, and at least 20 lines were either tied up or completely stopped. By June 30, 125,000 workers on 29 railroads had quit work rather than handle Pullman cars. The ARU had few locals in the East or the Deep South, but the boycott seemed remarkably effective everywhere else.

Debs may have been pleased by the effectiveness of the boycott, but he was also alarmed by the anger expressed by the workers, which he feared could lead to violence. During the first week of the boycott he sent some 4,000 telegrams, hundreds every day, urging the ARU locals to stay calm and not to overreact.

On June 29 Debs spoke at a large and peaceful gathering in Blue Island, Illinois, to gather support from fellow railroad workers. After he left, however, groups within the crowd became enraged, set fire to nearby buildings, and derailed a locomotive. Unfortunately for the strikers, the locomotive was attached to a U.S. mail train. That greatly upset Pres. Grover Cleveland in that the strike had now prevented the federal government from exercising one of its most-important responsibilities.

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Pullman Strike | Causes, Result, Summary, & Significance

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Pullman Strike, (May 11, 1894-c. July 20, 1894), in U.S. history, widespread railroad strike and boycott that severely disrupted rail traffic in the Midwest of the United States in June-July 1894. The federal government's response to the unrest marked the first time that an injunction was used to break a strike.

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Emilio Aguinaldo, a Filipino nationalist, rallied against the U.S after the colonial power took over once the Spanish-American war ended with the Treaty of Paris. The war was brutal with guerrilla warfare tactics.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Philippine-American-War

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Sparked by the sinking of the U.S.S Maine and yellow journalism using sensational headlines, the U.S declared war against Spain. Once the war ended because of the Treaty of Paris, Spain gave away Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines Islands, Guam, and other islands.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Spanish-American-War

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Spanish-American War | Summary, History, Dates, Causes, Facts, Battles, & Results

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Spanish-American War (1898), conflict between the United States and Spain that ended Spanish colonial rule in the Americas and resulted in U.S. acquisition of territories in the western Pacific and Latin America. The U.S. emerged from the war a world power, and Spain, ironically, experienced a cultu…

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Supreme court ruling that racially separate but equal accommodations was legally allowed. The case was about Homer Plessy sitting in a whites only train compartment and refusing to leave was charged with violating state law. He was a part of a civil rights group trying to challenge racist laws.

Source: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/plessy-v-ferguson

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Proposed by Senator Henry M. Teller of Colorado, the amendment declared Cuba was independent of Spain and allowed the president to use military might to achieve that goal.

Source: https://faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/slatta/hi453/PS/deteller.htm

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The Teller Amendment
[On April 20, 1898, Congress responded to President McKinley (below left) with a joint resolution. It declared Cuba independent of Spain, and authorized the president to use military force to achieve that result. With little debate, and with no opposition from the administration, Congress adopted the fourth of the following resolutions, known as the Teller Amendment, named for Senator Henry M. Teller of Colorado (below right). It addressed an issue that McKinley had not raised in his message: the future of Cuba.]

Joint resolution for the recognition of the independence of the people of Cuba, demanding that the Government of Spain relinquish its authority and government in the Island of Cuba, and to withdraw its land and naval forces from Cuba and Cuban waters, and directing the President of the United States to use the land and naval forces of the United States to carry these resolutions into effect.

Whereas the abhorrent conditions which have existed for more than three years in the Island of Cuba, so near our own borders, have shocked the moral sense of the people of the United States, have been a disgrace to Christian civilization, culminating, as they have, in the destruction of a United States battle ship, with two hundred and sixty-six of its officers and crew, while on a friendly visit in the harbor of Havana, and can not longer be endured, as has been set forth by the President of the United States in his message to Congress of April eleventh, eighteen hundred and ninety-eight, upon which the action of Congress was invited: Therefore,

Resolved, First. That the people of the Island of Cuba are, of right ought to be, free and independent.

Second. That it is the duty of the United States to demand, and the Government of the United States does hereby demand, that the Government of Spain at once relinquish its authority and government in the Island of Cuba and withdraw its land and naval forces from Cuba and Cuban waters.

Third. That the President of the United States be, and he hereby is, directed and empowered to use the entire land and naval forces of the United States, and to call into the actual service of the United States the militia of the several States, to such extent as may be necessary to carry these resolutions into effect.

Fourth. That the United States hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said Island except for the pacification thereof, and asserts its determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control of the Island to its people.

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On April 20, 1898, Congress responded to President McKinley (below left) with a joint resolution. It declared Cuba independent of Spain, and authorized the president to use military force to achieve that result. With little debate, and with no opposition from the administration, Congress adopted the fourth of the following resolutions, known as the Teller Amendment, named for Senator Henry M.

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Started by Secretary of State John Hay's with an Open Door Note to major European powers. This policy made China open to trade with all countries equally, and nations with spheres of influence shouldn't interfere with treaties. This policy occurred because U.S wanted to expand markets.

Source: https://bluebox.creighton.edu/demo/modules/en-boundless-old/www.boundless.com/u-s-history/textbooks/boundless-u-s-history-textbook/the-gilded-age-1870-1900-20/american-imperialism-164/the-open-door-policy-900-8274/index.html

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The speech was delivered by William McKinley during Democratic National Convention in Chicago during the campaign for the presidential election. It consisted of free coinage of silver and gold to help support the farmers and working class.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Cross-of-Gold-speech

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Table of Contents

This article was most recently revised and updated by

Cross of Gold speech, classic of American political oratory delivered on July 8, 1896, by William Jennings Bryan in closing the debate on the party platform at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago during the campaign for the presidential election of 1896.

The Republican Party platform for the election, formulated at its convention in St. Louis in June, declared, "We are unalterably opposed to every measure calculated to debase our currency." When the Democrats gathered a few weeks later, their platform called for "the free and unlimited coinage of both silver and gold." In an eloquent plea for the coinage of silver and an attack on the thesis that gold was the only sound backing for currency, Bryan closed with the peroration, "you shall not press down on the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold." The speech so electrified the convention that the delegates nominated Bryan as their candidate for president, though he was only 36 years old and his experience as an officeholder was limited to two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. In November he lost to the Republican candidate, William McKinley. In later years Bryan delivered numerous variations on the speech, some captured on early phonograph recordings.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Jeff Wallenfeldt.

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Cross of Gold speech | Summary, Meaning, Audio, & Facts

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Cross of Gold speech, classic of American political oratory delivered on July 8, 1896, by William Jennings Bryan in closing the debate on the party platform at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago during the campaign for the presidential election of 1896. The Republican Party platform for the election, formulated at its convention in St.

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He was one of the people who signed the Declaration of Independence, and was a member of the Continental Congress. After the Louisiana Purchase by Thomas Jefferson, he was appointed the governor of the Louisiana territory.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Henry-Harrison

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First owned by France before the project was abandoned after thousands died from the mudslides and mosquito. U.S bought the rights, and at first the canal construction was a disaster with death and people leaving until John Stevens arrived. He stopped the spread of mosquitoes, dammed the canal, and finished construction. This decreased travel time and increased profits for companies.

Source: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/tr-panama/

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On February 1, 1881, driven by patriotic fervor and capitalized by over 100,000 mostly small investors, the French Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique began work on a canal that would cross the Colombian isthmus of Panama and unite the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, led the project. His plan called for a sea-level canal to be dug along the path of the Panama Railroad. Some 50 miles in length, the canal would be less than half as long as the Suez. De Lesseps estimated that the job would cost about $132 million, and take 12 years to complete.

Europeans had dreamed of a Central American canal as early as the 16th century; President Ulysses S. Grant sent seven expeditions to study the feasibility of such a work. As travel and trade in the Western hemisphere increased, the need for a canal grew increasingly more obvious. To sail from Atlantic to Pacific, ships navigated around Cape Horn, the treacherous southern extremity of South America. A New York to San Francisco journey measured some 13,000 miles and took months.

A canal across Panama would save incalculable miles and man-hours. It would also, Ferdinand de Lesseps believed, make its stockholders rich, just as the Suez had done for its investors. Ample evidence supported de Lesseps' claims; the tiny cross-Panama railway had made in excess of $7 million in the first six years of operation. That construction of the railroad had cost upwards of 6,000 lives failed to dampen de Lesseps' enthusiasm.

The French hacked a broad pathway through the jungle from coast to coast, and on January 20, 1882, commenced digging. They commanded an impressive array of modern equipment, from steam shovels and locomotives to tugboats and dredges. Their work crew consisted mostly of local black and Indian laborers. In the first months, the digging progressed slowly but steadily. Then the rains began. De Lesseps, who visited Panama once-during the dry season-had disregarded the warnings of men who knew Panama intimately. Now his crew discovered the real Panama-mile upon mile of impassable jungle, day upon day of torrential rain, insects, snakes, swamps, hellish heat, smallpox, malaria, yellow fever and the Chagres River.

The Chagres snaked across the canal route a total of 14 times. Ignoring the warnings of engineers who deemed the task impossible, de Lesseps' decided to dam and divert the river, which he had only seen at low ebb. In the rainy season, the Chagres rose to a monstrous, churning torrent that swept away anything that stood in its way. It was distinctly inhospitable to taming.

Chest deep in mud, the French force dug onward. Time and time again, the rain and the Chagres destroyed what engineering and hard labor had wrought. Mudslides buried men, supplies, and machines. And from the freshwater pools that lay everywhere, a deadly plague of insects rose.

In 1881, the French recorded about 60 deaths from disease. In 1882, the number doubled. The following year, 420 died. Malaria and yellow fever were the most common killers. Because the company often fired sick men to reduce medical costs, the numbers probably reflect low estimates. Believing the fumes from rotting vegetation caused the disease, doctors at the French hospital at Ancon advised workers to avoid the night air. Only after thousands of deaths would the cause be attributed to virus-carrying mosquitoes.

Three out of four men hospitalized at Ancon died, despite the massive investments that made the hospital among the finest in the tropical world. In no small manner was this hastened by the architecture of the hospital gardens. To protect the potted plants from attack by ants, gardeners had set the pots in pottery bowls filled with water. Disease-carrying mosquitoes multiplied in these reservoirs by the million and carried their deadly cargo through the screenless windows of the hospital each night.

Year after year, the digging-and the dying-continued. As the toll mounted, so did discontent. French investors grumbled at the lack of progress. In the page's of Harper's Weekly, American cartoonist Thomas Nast caricatured de Lesseps, wondering "Is M. de Lesseps a Canal Digger or a Grave Digger?"

When the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique failed in December,1888, thousands of French investors lost their money. The word Panama quickly became synonymous with scandal and fraud. About $287 million had been spent. Fifty million cubic meters of earth and rock had been moved. Eleven miles of canal had been dug. Twenty thousand men had died. The canal remained unfinished, but the dream had not yet ended. Theodore Roosevelt would soon take up the cause.

Shortly after ascending to the presidency, Roosevelt spoke of the Panama Canal in a speech to Congress. "No single great material work which remains to be undertaken on this continent," Roosevelt said, "is as of such consequence to the American people."

Roosevelt acted quickly. In 1902, the United States reached an agreement to buy rights to the French canal property and equipment for a sum not to exceed $40 million. The U.S. then began negotiating a Panama treaty with Colombia. The U.S Department of War would direct excavation. Many, both in the press and in the public, sensed a scandal, or, worse yet, good money thrown after bad.

In the New York Journal, William Randolph Hearst opined that "the only way we could secure a satisfactory concession from Colombia would be to go down there, take the contending statesmen by the necks, and hold a batch of them in office long enough to get a contract in mind." Hearst's statement proved prophetic.

When Colombia grew reticent in its negotiations, Roosevelt and Panamanian business interests collaborated on a revolution. The battle for Panama lasted only a few hours. Colombian soldiers in Colón were bribed $50 each to lay down their arms; the U.S.S. Nashville cruised off the Panamanian coast in a show of support. On November 3, 1903, the nation of Panama was born.

The U.S quickly assumed parental interest. Americans had written the Panamanian Constitution in advance; the wife of pro-canal lobbyist Phillipe Bunau-Varilla had sewn the country's first flag. A payment of $10 million secured a canal zone and rights to build. Bunau-Varilla, installed as Panamanian minister to the U.S., signed a treaty favorable to American interests. The $40 million given to J.P Morgan for distribution to French stockholders disappeared amid rumors of larcenous speculation.

1904, the Americans' first year in Panama, mirrored the French disaster. The chief engineer, John Findlay Wallace, neglected to organize the effort or to develop an action plan. The food was putrid, the living conditions abysmal. Political red tape put a stranglehold on appropriations. Disease struck, and three out of four Americans booked passage home. Engineer Wallace soon followed. The Americans had poured $128 million into the swamps of Panama, to damned little effect.

The arrival of Wallace's replacement, the rugged and ingenious John Stevens, marked a turn in fortunes for the beleaguered canal. Stevens had built the Great Northern Railroad across the Pacific Northwest. In rough territory from Canada to Mexico, he had proven his tenacity. And his new plan of action would ultimately save the canal.

The kind of work that needed done, Steven reasoned, could only be done by a well-housed, well-fed, disease-free labor force. Stevens began work not by not digging, but by cleaning.

Dr. William Gorgas, who had helped to eradicate yellow fever in Havana years before by killing the mosquitoes that carried it, directed sanitation efforts. Workers drained swamps, swept drainage ditches, paved roads and installed plumbing. They sprayed pesticides by the ton. Entire towns rose from the jungle, complete with housing, schools, churches, commissaries, and social halls.

The canal's engineering also changed. After nine months of Capitol Hill lobbying, the push for a "lake and lock" canal, favored by Roosevelt, succeeded. Stevens would dam the mighty Chagres to create the vast Gatun Lake in Panama's interior. A series of locks would raise ships from the Atlantic side to the level of the lake. The boats would cross the lake, then descend by another set of locks to the Pacific. Ironically, the plan was nearly identical to one proposed by the French engineer Godin de Lépinay in 1879, at the same meeting in which M. de Lesseps promoted his sea-level plan.

With sanitation efforts complete, Stevens began work on a scale never before witnessed. Gigantic Bucyrus steam shovels scooped tons of earth. Railroad cars ran continuously on a double track, dumping the tailings to form the Charges dam.

By December 1905, yellow fever had been officially eradicated on the Isthmus. In November, 1906, Roosevelt himself visited the canal, posing at the controls of a Bucyrus shovel. It seemed that the project could not fail. Then, on February 12, 1907, a dispirited Chief Engineer Stevens resigned.

Colonel George Washington Goethals, an Army engineer with experience building lock-type canals, assumed the Chief Engineer's post. Demanding and rigidly organized, Goethals quickly picked up where Stevens left off.

Nowhere were efforts more dramatic than at the Culebra Cut, where 100,000,000 cubic yards of earth and rock would have to be removed. The laborers at Culebra -- mostly English-speaking West Indian blacks who made ten cents an hour -- moved as much as 200 trainloads of spoil a day. When mudslides filled the Cut repeatedly, Goethals simply ordered it dug out again. There were accidents of all sorts, lost equipment, and deaths, but there was progress.

At the Gatun Locks on the Atlantic side, workers poured enough concrete to build a wall 8' wide, 12' high, and 133 miles long. They built culverts the size of railroad tunnels to channel water from Gatun Lake into the locks. Pittsburgh's furnaces roared as more than 50 mills, foundries, and machine shops churned out the rivets, bolts, nut, girders, and other steel pieces the canal builders needed.

In May, 1913, steam shovels broke through the Culebra Cut, and the last cement was poured at the Gatun locks. The Chagres filled Gatun Lake, and engineers prepared for the canal's first trial run. It came on September 26. The tugboat Gatun traveled through the first set of locks and out onto the lake. The locks worked flawlessly. After nine years, the end was at last in sight.

The Panama Canal opened officially on August 15, 1914. The world scarcely noticed. German troops were driving across Belgium toward Paris; the newspapers relegated Panama to their back pages. The greatest engineering project in the history of the world had been dwarfed by the totality of World War I.

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TR and the Panama Canal | American Experience | PBS

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Shortly after taking office, TR said of the Panama Canal that, "No single great material work which remains to be undertaken on this continent is as of such consequence to the American people."

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Informal agreement between the U.S and Japan in which Japan only allowed passports to U.S for businessmen and Theodore Roosevelt would allow Japanese children to stay in non-segregated schools. This was because people feared the Japanese would decrease wages.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Gentlemens-Agreement

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Caused because of tensions over political and commercial interests in East Asia Russia and Japan went to war. The Treaty of Portsmouth, negotiated by Theodore Roosevelt, recognized Japans rights in Korea and gave territory back to Japan.

Source: https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/russo-japanese_war

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Banned selling miss-branded livestock and that livestock was killed and processed in a sanitary manner. This reformed the meat packing industry, and was partially inspired by book The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Meat-Inspection-Act

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The official name was "Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force" and small parts were leaked to the public by Ellsberg and his co-defendant Anthony Russo.

Source: https://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers#:~:text=The%20Pentagon%20Papers%2C%20officially%20titled,the%20press%20and%20widely%20distributed.

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Nikita Khrushchev created a secret agreement with Fidel Castro to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba pointing at the U.S to deter any future invasions. During routine surveillance flights a U.S plane discovered this and JFK blockaded Cuba. The threat of war was high but Khrushchev said he would remove the missiles.

Source: https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/cuban-missile-crisis#:~:text=The%20Cuban%20Missile%20Crisis%20of,came%20closest%20to%20nuclear%20conflict.

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Once Fidel Castro overthrew the previous dictator Fulgencio Batista, the CIA planned to send trained Cuban exiles back into Cuba to invade. The plan expected the people of Cuba to support the invasion, but the plan ultimately failed.

Source: https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/the-bay-of-pigs

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Established by Harry Truman, the doctrine allowed the U.S to provide economic assistance to democratic nations under attack by internal or external forces. The money was sent to Greece and Turkey, 2 nations that depended on Britain foreign aid that would soon end.

Source: https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/truman-doctrine

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Proposed by Secretary of State George Marshall, the plan was to provide economic assistance to restore economic infrastructure in European countries after WW2. Over 4 years Congress sent $13.3 billion dollars for European recovery.

Source: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/marshall-plan#:~:text=On%20April%203%2C%201948%2C%20President,economic%20infrastructure%20of%20postwar%20Europe.

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Announced by Dwight Eisenhower this allowed countries to request American aid if being threatened by other countries, especially if communist. This doctrine was caused by the increase of Soviet influence in the Middle East.

Source: https://history.state.gov/milestones/1953-1960/eisenhower-doctrine

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President Lyndon B. Johnson, with the support of Roy Wilkins and Clarence Mitchell, passed this act. It banned discrimination based on race, sex, religion, etc. it also banned segregation in public places and federal funded programs.

Source: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/oasam/civil-rights-center/statutes/civil-rights-act-of-1964#:~:text=In%201964%2C%20Congress%20passed%20Public,hiring%2C%20promoting%2C%20and%20firing.