Antebellum America

Maybe your perception is that life was slower in antebellum America, but nothing could be further from the truth. Everything was quite literally in flux.

Between 1840 and 1860, the United States underwent many transformations. The following are a few of the important ones:

• Westward expansion and internal migration
• Rapid technological advances
• Immigration and population growth
• Political change

Students of the Civil War rightly focus a great deal of attention on the antebellum period in order to ascertain the moment when "it all went wrong." Historians, of course, are operating from a standpoint of hindsight. Because we know that the Civil War eventually took place, we look for what historians call "causation." Yet we must also be careful not to ask leading historical questions. To wit, we must ask if such historical trends add up to being the cause of the war, or whether or not they might have portended alternative outcomes.

This first lecture will spend most of its time looking at factors other than slavery, racial attitudes, and politics, which we will examine in greater detail in our next lecture.


Growth and a divergent North and South

All of America grew at a rapid rate during the last decade of the antebellum era, but the nation did not grow everywhere at the same pace. A commonly held perception about the Civil War's causation is that the slaveholding South was a backward place that had drifted politically, culturally, socially, and economically away from the American mainstream as represented by the North. Yet if we look at indices of economic and demographic growth, we must acknowledge that it was actually the North that had become radically different from the South in the first half of the nineteenth century. For sure, slavery had always been a point of division between the two regions, but the economic explosion that occurred in the North between 1840 and 1860 set it apart not only from the South, but the rest of the world. With the exception of England, in many ways the South was actually much more like Europe, both in economic growth and social structure.

Immigration and natural increase made antebellum America grow. It was more telling, however, in the North:

Urbanization and Antebellum America: Some Statistics

City         1850        Rank        1860        Rank

New Orleans       116,375       5     168,675            6
Charleston            42,985        15    40,522            22
Richmond            27,570        26        37,910        25
Wilmington, NC    7,264        99        9,552        100

St. Louis                77,860        8        160,773        8
Chicago                29,963        24        112,172        9
Cleveland             17,034        41        43,417        21
Indianapolis            8,091        87        18,611        48


States:                1850 (slave)                               1860  (slave)      RG=Rate of Growth

Illinois                851,470                              1,711,951   RG = 101%
Ohio                 1,980,329                            2,339,511    RG = 18%
Minnesota               6,077                               172,023   RG= 2730%

Tennessee          763,258 (239,459)                834,082  (275,719)  RG = 9% (15%)
Georgia              524,503 (381,682)               505,088  (462,198)  RG = - 3.7% (21%)
Louisiana                272,953 (244,869)          376,276  (331,726)  RG = 37.8% (35%)


While immigrants, overwhelmingly from Germany and Ireland, flooded into the North in great numbers, native-born Americans of all regions were also on the move within the borders of the United States and its territories, often seeking out new opportunities further west. This resulted in Americans of differing regions and values coming into direct contact with one another, especially in places like Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, Arkansas, Texas, and California.

Technology:

Yet America's great antebellum migrations were not simply driven by immigration and the need for land. Emerging technologies of the antebellum era also lent shape to the directions in which young America traveled. Steam, both on rivers and rails, played an important role in America's economic expansion in the antebellum era. If you could imagine riding on this contraption! In time rail became more significant because it integrated the economies of the North on an east-west basis, and led to greater economic isolation between North and South. Consider the following maps and the impact of transportation networks on the fate of the nation.

Map: Potential routes of the transcontinental railroad in 1850 (Library of Congress)
Map: The growth in rail lines between 1850 and 1860 (Allyn Bacon Longman)

The Illinois Central in 1850

Confluence of the Ohio, Cumberland, Tennessee, and Mississippi River Valleys

Technology also went hand-in-hand with urbanization. Technology also worked to transform the societies that produced new things particularly when viewed on a human-scale basis. Small scale innovation relied upon countless "mechanics" who labored in their workshops. Remember, that the 1850s were a time generally before engineering became a profession. Many developments came about in an unscientific trial-and-error method. Such developments favored the culture of the shopkeeper in the North. Indeed, the fact that the North developed an urban culture of mechanics reveals a great deal about its divergence from the South in terms of social and economic development.  Let's consider the differences in the way antebellum men viewed themselves based on these daguerreotypes from the Library of Congress of shopkeepers at their professions:

A watchmaker at his bench.

A blacksmith in his shop. Note that he's more than a farrier, he has the tools of the practical engineer nearby. The photo, like the one of the watchmaker, is an expression of masculine pride.

Here merchants in antebellum Philadelphia pose in front of their shops.

In these pictures we see the development of a growing class outside of the agrarian tradition.

The rapid economic and technological transformation that took place in the North also transformed its culture in a way that made it diametrically opposed to prevailing institutions in the South. What it meant to be a free white man differed considerably in the two regions.

The culture of the Antebellum South: Patrons and Clients and Paternalism

"Leisure and Labor" by Francis Blackwell Mayer

Although it isn't necessarily a fair comparison to make between the work of Mayer and the daguerreotype of the northern blacksmith, there is something to it.


Deconstructing what it meant to be a southern man.

Social inequality was arguably a more prominent feature in the South than in the North. Elites of both regions might blanche at the "creeping democratization" that they had seen in America in the last thirty years, but with the free labor culture in the North, such democratization was able to more fully manifest itself in political ways. Much of this had to do with urban centers and the growing impersonality of financial institutions in the North. In the far more rural South, personal connections were essential to one's economic health - particularly with regard to that mother's milk of agriculture and commerce - credit.

To use a term associated with Ancient Rome, the social relationships between men operated in the South operated on a patron-client basis. This system of mutual obligations tied southern elites to the middling classes and was particularly useful in a rural social and economic milieu.  I will spend a fair amount of time in class discussing the many manifestations of this system.

Paternalism and patriarchy, while hardly unknown in the North, were also essential to the societal, familial, and gendered relationships in the South.

Modernizing and the South

The South was also interested in modernizing, but had to approach technology and innovation in a way that was compatible with southern cultural values. Perceptions of the South as a strictly agricultural economy, while generally true, are misleading. Younger southerners in particular saw modernization as a way to allow the South to regain its leadership role. Yet others feared what technological innovation and the growth of manufacturing might mean to southern social structure - that it might force the South to become more like the North in ways that southern elites feared. The challenge, then, was to both modernize the South while preserving its cultural fabric.

Beyond "North" and "South" : A Lesson for the Times

We can overstate the differences between the antebellum North and South. While I can certainly point to many examples like the ones in the images above that depict stark contrasts in the livelihoods and worldviews of the two regions' men, it was hardly so clear cut.  As historian Peter Carmichael has shown, young Virginians were looking as much toward modernization and the growth of industry as many of their northern counterparts. Along the border states of Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Tennessee, southern parts of Illinois, Missouri, farmers of all kinds faced the same basic problems and held similar values. Many elite southern men attended college in the North and individuals engaged in all manner of industry conducted business that brought them into economic interdependence across regions. Perhaps the most sobering reality in acknowledging this is that Americans had much more in common with one another than they had real differences. As we will see in the next lecture, however, political rhetoric, a crisis in leadership, and the random nature of historical contingency would plunge the nation into its bloodiest war.