As American settlers spread westward during the 18th and 19th centuries, New Englanders felt threatened by the West, which siphoned off many of their region’s most capable and vigorous labourers. Moreover, an expanding railroad network made it possible for Western agriculturalists to produce wool and grain that undersold the products of the poor New England hill country. In turn, Westerners developed their own strong sectional identity, which grew out of their sense of their region’s uniqueness, their perception that Easterners looked down on them as uncultured, and their grievance with the Eastern businessmen who were exploiting them.
Early North-South Sectional Struggles Over Slavery
Notwithstanding this East-West rivalry, the most conspicuous and distinctive section of the United States was the South, which was set apart from the rest of the country by virtue of its temperate climate, by a plantation system that had developed to produce such staple crops as cotton, tobacco, and sugar, and, most notably, by the persistence and proliferation of the “peculiar institution” of slavery, which had been abolished or prohibited in all other parts of the United States by the mid-19th century. Still, most white Southerners were not directly involved in slavery. In 1850, for example, of a total white population of about 6,000,000 in the slave states, only about 350,000 were slaveholders, and about half that number held 4 or fewer enslaved persons each. Indeed, in the whole of the South, there were fewer than 1,800 persons who held more than 100 enslaved persons each.
auction of enslaved persons
auction of enslaved persons
Sale of Estates, Pictures and Slaves in the Rotunda, New Orleans, 1842, depicting the sale of enslaved persons in New Orleans.
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Nevertheless, the interests of this small slaveholding planter class were paramount in the region, from colonial times to the Declaration of Independence on to the framing of the Constitution and through the national struggle over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into the new lands of the West. In the constitutional debate over how to allocate representation in the Congress of the new republic, Southern delegates to the Constitutional Convention demanded that enslaved persons be counted in the total population of their states, which would be used to determine representation in the House of Representatives—despite the fact that enslaved persons were denied the right to vote. Although there was significant opposition to slavery among Northern delegates, in the interest of solidifying a national government, a compromise was reached whereby an enslaved person was to be counted as three-fifths of an individual in determining a state’s population. This three-fifths compromise was just the first in a series of legislative compromises that would be reached regarding slavery over the ensuing decades as the United States grew.
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The Missouri Compromise
In 1820 the escalating political struggle over the spread of slavery into new territories was eased, at least temporarily, by the Missouri Compromise. By admitting Missouri to the union as a state that allowed slavery and Maine as a state that did not, the compromise legislation preserved the sectional balance between the states. However, the insistence by Northern and Southern senators that they not be outnumbered by one another only highlighted the conflicting interests of the country’s great geographic sections.
United States: Missouri Compromise, Compromise of 1850, and Kansas-Nebraska Act
United States: Missouri Compromise, Compromise of 1850, and Kansas-Nebraska Act
Compromises over extension of slavery into U.S. territories.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Despite their opposition to slavery, however, few Northerners made serious efforts to eradicate it nationally during the first decades of the 19th century. Tellingly, in 1831, when abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison started his newspaper The Liberator, calling for the immediate emancipation of all enslaved people, he had only a tiny following. But as the country expanded and its sections became more closely entwined, sectional differences over the issue of slavery became visible in institutions across American society. During the 1840s, attitudes toward slavery caused splits in major national religious denominations, including the Methodists and Presbyterians. In politics, the Whig Party, once an alliance of Northern and Western conservative business interests with Southern planters, divided sectionally and, following the 1852 election, virtually disappeared.
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