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Historical Background

An Emergent Nationalism, 1815-1828 (continued)

ECONOMIC EXPANSION AND SECTIONALISM

While nationalistic sentiment increased in the United States after the War of 1812, so did sectional economic specialization and sectional feeling. In the South, each year more bolls of upland cotton waved over the rich soil of Alabama and Mississippi; they represented the resurgence of the plantation system. In the West, corn, wheat, and livestock production burgeoned to help feed Europe and the Eastern States. In the East, increased commercial activity, the beginnings of industrialization, and advancing urbanization registered economic health.

Ominously, during the years 1815-28 residents of the three economically and socially different regions became more aware of their differences. The Missouri debates of 1819-21 brought the sectional issue to the surface of politics, and the Missouri Compromises of 1820 and 1821 laid it aside again without solution. In 1828 John C. Calhoun's "South Carolina Exposition and Protest" once again returned the issues of sectionalism and States rights to the political foreground. As the years passed, they would return again and again.

Vice President John C. Calhoun. A prominent advocate of States rights, he also served as Representative Senator, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State. From an engraving by James B. Longacre, after a painting by C. B. King. Courtesy, Library of Congress.

In 1828 agriculture remained the basis of the economy, but since 1783 it had undergone significant changes. Europe's industrial evolution, which had been accelerating since the 18th century, had created new demands for foodstuffs and agricultural raw materials. Planters in the South and farmers in the Midwest were quick to take advantage of the demands.

Since colonial times, Southern planters had utilized the plantation system to provide tobacco, rice, indigo, and other staples for the export market. The plantation was a practical solution to the problem of abundant land and scarce labor. Then, toward the close of the 18th century, it had seemed that the South would have to modify its economy in order to grow. In eastern Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, good land was scarce. Much of the soil was worn out. Southern interest in the application of new agricultural techniques and more diversified production seemed to many to bode the end of the plantation system and the eventual abandonment of the institution of slavery. But this was not to be. The industrialization of the British textile industry, the opening of Western lands and waterways to the Gulf of Mexico after the War of 1812, and the widespread adoption of the cotton gin provided the stimulus required to bring about the revitalization of plantation agriculture.

Before 1800 a few Southern coastal planters had reaped large profits from the production of "sea island" cotton for export. Without much difficulty the seeds could be separated from the lint. But this cotton demanded a maritime climate. Upland cotton, which would grow well inland, required so much labor to separate the lint from the seeds as to make its commercial production unprofitable. In 1793 Eli Whitney, of Connecticut, constructed a simple device that quickly and efficiently separated upland cotton bolls into lint and seeds. Whitney's cotton gin saved hours of labor and constituted an agricultural breakthrough of foremost importance.

Artist's rendition of the first trip, in 1807, of Robert Fulton's steamboat, the Clermont, from New York to Albany. Soon after the Clermont's success, steamboat travel began to flourish. From an etching by an unknown artist, probably S. Hollyer, copyrighted in 1907. Courtesy, Library of Congress.

The spread in use of the gin and the British mills' insatiable demands for cotton caused production to increase by leaps and bounds. After the War of 1812 cotton was on its way to becoming "king." The wholesale price of cotton—and production—rose continuously until 1837. In 1801 U.S. production totaled 100,000 bales. In 1810 it rose to 171,000 bales. In the next 20 years, as cotton production spread through most of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and north into Tennessee, the annual crop more than quadrupled, reaching 731,000 bales in 1830. The economic importance of cotton would have national political repercussions.

But not everyone in the South was a cotton planter. Tobacco, rice, sugar, hemp, peas, beans, livestock, and wheat were also widely grown products. Less than 1 percent of all southerners owned more than 50 slaves, and most Southern farmers owned no slaves at all. On the other hand, most farmers aspired to own slaves and become large planters. The economic importance of cotton as a way to financial success would be significant in giving conscious identification to the South as a political entity.

The Ohio Valley States, too, were emerging as a self-conscious region and had special economic problems. The regional specialty was agriculture—but of a different sort than in the South. The climate north of Tennessee was unsuited to cotton production, and slavery was prohibited by law north of the Ohio. Intensive cultivation, utilizing crop rotation and fertilizers, was the rule. Tobacco and corn were the principal products of Kentucky, southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. In the northern regions of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and in lower Michigan, wheat was the major crop. The land was rich and it produced a salable surplus. The West could grow rich—if only it could get the surplus to market.

Transportation was the problem. The Ohio-Mississippi River system flowed eventually to New Orleans, which seemed the most likely outlet for Western agricultural produce. The region's trade with New Orleans was considerable and led to the development of Western river ports, where produce was gathered for shipment downriver. Louisville, at the fall line of the Ohio, was one such port; Cincinnati, called "Porkopolis" after the local specialty, was another. But the river system was not wholly satisfactory as an outlet for Western goods. The trip downriver was long and slow. Furthermore, the shallowness of the rivers during much of the year often forced farmers to send their surplus downriver during the spring and fall floods. The dumping of so much produce at New Orleans at the same time glutted the market and depressed wholesale prices.

James Monroe, fifth President and author of the Monroe Doctrine. From a lithograph by John Pendleton, after a painting by Gilbert Stuart. Courtesy, Library of Congress.

In addition, New Orleans' western location raised the cost of manufactured goods—the shoes, clothes, and household goods upon which westerners were coming to depend—to prohibitive levels. Store goods usually had to come by wagon over the mountains from the East. This circuitous counterclockwise trade was a hardship to westerners. So, too, was the section's helplessness against the fluctuations of the European grain market. The depression known as the Panic of 1819 struck the Western States particularly hard and helped to make them conscious of their geographic isolation and economic dependence on Europe, the East, and an inadequate transportation system. National political power was the West's best weapon against isolation. As the conflict between Northeast and South deepened, both sections would woo Western political support—the Northeast by improving roads and building canals and railroads and the South by improving the river transportation system, developing the colorful river steamboats and, less successfully, building its own canals and railroads toward the West.

During the period 1815-28 the economy of the Northeastern States grew further apart from that of the South. Most easterners continued to be small farmers, but many of them—significant beyond their mere numbers—grew rich in mercantile and industrial pursuits. After the War of 1812 the shipping industry, depressed by the embargo, the wartime dislocation of the European trade, and the British blockade, had come to life again. Ships from New England, New York, and Philadelphia ranged the North American coast and ventured to Europe, the Indies, and even China in search of profit. An ever-increasing number of U.S. ships cleared Eastern ports, particularly New Bedford, Mass., to challenge Great Britain's supremacy in the pursuit of the whale. On land, industrialization gathered speed.

As early as the 1790's Samuel Slater had smuggled the secrets of British textile manufacture to the United States. In 1800 Eli Whitney had demonstrated in the manufacture of muskets for the U.S. Army the basic principle of interchangeable parts that was so important to the mass production process. Little came of either development as long as more advanced British industry could undersell struggling U.S. manufacturers. The period 1807-12 gave U.S. industry the chance to take root. To prevent the British from uprooting it after the War of 1812 with a flood of cheap manufactured goods, Congress enacted the protective tariff of 1816.

Woolen- and cotton-textile mills using water or steampower proliferated in New England. In 1814, at Waltham, Mass., Francis Cabot Lowell opened a textile mill in which a single power source provided all the power necessary to operate the whole clothmaking process. In 1826 the township of Lowell came into being. Located at the falls of the Merrimack River in Massachusetts, it would become a 19th-century industrial center. Within 14 years, it would contain nine textile mills and the Nation's largest machine shop.

After the war the manufacture of iron, a basic ingredient of the industrial revolution, flourished in Pennsylvania. Production increased slowly, but after 1817 and the introduction of new processes for ore separation using coal instead of charcoal, the iron furnaces could leave the forests and come to the cities. Philadelphia, Scranton, and, to a lesser degree, Pittsburgh would become iron manufacturing centers.

The growth of trade, the burgeoning of cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore, and industrial stirrings characterized the East. In spite of the diversity and internal competition, easterners came to share a broad cluster of common political ideas that sometimes conflicted with those of the West and frequently with those of the South.

"View of Boston and the south Boston Bridge." Lithographed by Deroy, figures by V. Adams, from the drawing by Jacques G. Milbert. Courtesy, Library of Congress.

Slavery had been a source of debate in the country since the 17th century. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, it had been the subject of extended discussion. As early as 1786 some people were helping runaway slaves to escape to Canada. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 was unpopular in the Northeast, and the law of 1808 prohibiting importation of slaves into the United States irritated some Southern planters. Yet for a decade after 1808, slavery seemed a dead issue, but it suddenly awakened after Missouri petitioned for statehood in 1817.

Missouri was to be a State in which slavery was legal, and her admission would give the slave States a 24-22 vote majority in the Senate. The majority might affect legislation on sectional issues—the tariff and internal improvements—but only temporarily. It was known that Maine would soon seek admission as a free State and restore the balance. But in 1819, as Congress considered Missouri statehood, an amendment to the Missouri Enabling Act, submitted by Representative James Tallmadge of New York, came as a political bombshell. The Tallmadge Amendment proposed that admission be contingent upon an end to the importation of slaves into Missouri and the gradual emancipation of those already there. The amendment passed the House of Representatives by virtue of the Northern majority, but Southern votes rejected it in the Senate.

The deadlock between the two branches of Congress occasioned a prolonged and heated debate. Proponents of the amendment claimed that the framers of the Constitution had intended that slavery wither away—that it was a temporary institution. Their opponents argued that new States, like older States, had the constitutional right to determine their own internal arrangements. These were significant expositions of conflicting interpretations of the Constitution. But ominously, as the debates grew heated, legislators on both sides of the issue abandoned constitutional argument for emotional appeals based on the moral aspects of slavery. So long as emotionalism prevailed, no compromise was possible.