Market Revolution & American Citizenship

 

 

How did the Market Revolution challenge the existing ideas about American citizenship during the antebellum period? - a discussion of wage labor and citizenship, shifting concepts of independence, and how such changes are connected to reform efforts during this period.

     Before the Market Revolution independence meant being a landowner (most likely white, always male). The argument was that if you owned land, you had a stake in the nation’s future, and so you were entitled to a vote. Those who did not own land (women, poor white men, most blacks) were considered dependent, therefore did not get to vote. The division was along class lines. By the time the Market Revolution was in full swing, the dividing line had shifted from class to gender and race. 

     Poor white men who had moved to the cities in search of wage labor in factories began to see themselves as independent individuals. Living away from their families, they were looking after themselves, paying their own way, and feeling just as entitled to vote as any farmer who owned land. Working white men began to get involved in the politics that was going on around them, and demanded their right to participate in it. They started to equate their citizenship with the right to vote, and claimed that ownership of land should not be a requirement for voting rights – just ownership of yourself. This was the principle behind Dorr’s War, which eventually resulted in the granting of voting rights to white men whether they owned land or not. 

Dorr inciting a crowd of supporters

     These same rights were not extended to non-whites or to women. Blacks were not considered citizens at all, and enslaved blacks were not even considered men, but property. Women had very few rights, and once married, had practically none – their entire civic identities vanished under those of their husbands. As democracy was expanding for poor white men, it was shrinking for women and non-whites. Intellectual arguments began to be made, justifying the exclusion of these groups based on “scientific” facts. White Anglo-Saxon men were just naturally more intelligent than women and non-whites, and that was that.

"scientific proof" 

    This new concept of the right to vote being related to ownership of self was a reflection of society’s new concept of the importance of the self. The Second Great Awakening was reminding people of their importance in the eyes of God.  People began to feel that the self had a great power and significance, and that individuals could change the world if they tried hard enough. Many still remembered, firsthand, the American Revolution, and they knew that people had the power to effect change. People began to question old rules and values. Radical utopias sprang up all over the nation – communities of people who wanted to radically change the rules of society.

Many focused on changing the accepted norms of gender, and property rights (e.g. the Shakers, pictured above)  – both of which kept personal control out of the hands of non-whites and women. Other attempts to reform society included moral reform movements, institutional reform movements, and human rights movements, such as abolitionism and women’s rights.

     The abolitionist movement of the 1830s demanded immediate emancipation and full inclusion for enslaved blacks – this challenged the deep-rooted idea that America was a white nation, and that blacks could never be citizens.  Abolitionists claimed the right of blacks to be citizens and to enjoy all the rights that went along with being free citizens, including the right to vote. It was a movement made up mostly of women, free blacks and escaped slaves. These were the people in society who had no political voice, but they had a strong conviction that they deserved to be heard just as much as any white man. From the abolitionist movement came the women’s rights movement, as women realized they were just as powerless as blacks in the eyes of the law. Both of these groups fought hard for equal rights to citizenship and suffrage, inspired by the spirit of individualism that thrived during the Market Revolution. 

signed by Frederick Douglass

Slavery and the Civil War

How did the issue of slavery lead to the Civil War? How did slavery change during the antebellum period? How did westward expansion produce sectional conflicts between North and South?

Tensions between the north and the south were at a peak when war finally broke out between them, and the issue that caused most of the tension was slavery. The ideologies of the north had shifted so far from those of the south that they now viewed each other as bitter enemies, each threatening the other’s way of life. For the north, the system they favored was free labor, for the south it was slavery.

Slavery had become a much more profitable enterprise in the early 19^th century. The invention of the cotton gin meant a slave could now produce 50 times more cotton per day than they had previously done. This coincided with an increased demand for cotton, as the textile industries in the north and overseas took off. Cotton plantation owners were making a fortune, and the two things they needed in order to keep it up were slaves and land. The Louisiana Purchase provided the land – the Missouri Compromise was struck, and southern plantation owners now had more land to move into. An internal slave trade began when the African slave trade was banned, and tobacco crops in the east began to fail. Slaves were being sold in markets, chained together and made to walk sometimes hundreds of miles to their new master’s plantations. This was the first time many people had witnessed the brutality of slavery, and it helped to fuel abolitionist thinking.

Since the south was making so much money off the labor of their slaves, they were all the more determined to keep slavery legal and to push for its expansion into new territories. Meanwhile, the north was gradually phasing slavery out, and was beginning to think of itself as a free society. Trade and industry in the north had become much more diverse than in the south, which relied heavily on slave labor. Although there were plenty of active abolitionists in the north, many northerners didn’t oppose slavery on moral grounds, but did so because they resented competing with slave labor for land and work. There were a variety of political parties in the north, most tended to be anti-slavery because they had an interest in keeping policies in place that would benefit northern industry and free labor, not necessarily in ending slavery in the south. They did oppose the expansion of slavery into new states, though, as the balance between slave and free states was delicate and they didn’t want the south to get a majority in Congress.

The acquisition of new land after the Mexican war brought the issue of slavery to the fore once more. The Compromise of 1850 left northerners feeling stung because it seemed to give too much away to the pro-slavery states. Then the Kansas-Nebraska Act declared that the status of these territories should be decided by the states themselves (known as popular sovereignty). This enraged northerners, as a vote like that would almost certainly go to the pro-slavery side. (It also broke the Missouri Compromise deal). 

 





 When the elections were flooded by pro-slavery votes from Missouri, the president allowed it, and a mini civil war broke out in Kansas between pro- and anti-slavery mobs – known as Bleeding Kansas. Congress was also bitterly divided, with violence breaking out there too. This lead to an extreme split in the nation’s politics – the Whigs, the Free-Soilers and the Know Nothings all dissolved, and the northern Democrats deserted the party. A new northern party – the Republicans – emerged. The south remained faithful to the Democrats, and the division ran strictly along sectional lines.

The wedge between the north and the south was driven deeper by the Dred Scott decision, which effectively made slavery legal everywhere in the Union, and by the north’s adoption of John Brown as a martyred hero, after his attack on Harper’s Ferry, and his subsequent execution.  By the time the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter, north and south were as ideologically opposed as they could be on the controversial subject of slavery, and its expansion.