Deck 16: Essay

Question 1

How did the right to vote and the benefits of citizenship become accessible to more people from the American Revolution through Reconstruction? Who was left out of this trend toward political democratization?

Answer 1

Answer would ideally include:
Democratization for White Men: White men benefited from a number of changes in voting requirements in the nineteenth century. Twelve of the original thirteen states enacted property qualifications for voting in the 1780s, as only property owners were presumed to have the independence of mind to make wise political choices. In the 1790s, Vermont became the first state to enfranchise all adult males, and four other states soon broadened suffrage considerably by allowing all male taxpayers to vote. As new states joined the Union, most opted for suffrage for all free white men, which added pressure for eastern states to consider broadening their suffrage laws. Between 1800 and 1830, greater democratization became a contentious issue. In the East, half a dozen states had passed suffrage reform by 1820. As more and more white men earned the right to vote, voting laws increased their significance. By the election of 1828, eighteen of the twenty-four states allowed the voters rather than state legislators to choose the electors in the Electoral College. Politics had become much more democratic, and the nation's political parties responded by gearing their campaigns toward common Americans.
African Americans and Reconstruction: During the first half of the nineteenth century, the general pattern was one of expanded suffrage for whites and a total eclipse of suffrage for blacks. Even states in the North that had allowed blacks to vote after the Revolution passed new laws to curtail black suffrage. In the South, where the majority of blacks were enslaved, blacks had almost no political influence. Passed during Reconstruction, the Fourteenth Amendment made African Americans citizens and penalized states that prevented adult men of any race from voting. The Fifteenth Amendment explicitly prohibited states from depriving any citizen of the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. What followed was a dramatic increase in black political participation and office holding. The Fifteenth Amendment, however, did not absolutely guarantee the right to vote; it only prohibited exclusion on the grounds of race. This distinction allowed white southerners to create nominally nonracial ways to exclude blacks from the political sphere around the turn of the twentieth century.
Denial of Suffrage for Women: Abigail Adams's call for her husband to "Remember the Ladies" fell on deaf ears, and women remained outside the formal political process through Reconstruction. The legal doctrine of feme covert held that wives had no independent or legal personhood, meaning they could not vote. Single women were not allowed to vote either. Few men even stopped to question excluding women from voting. While New Jersey allowed women and free blacks to vote after 1790, an 1807 law explicitly disfranchised them. Women's suffrage was rarely addressed in the halls of Congress, despite the protests of women's rights activists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. Even during Reconstruction, when the government radically revamped the definition of citizenship as it pertained to race, officials ignored the calls for women's suffrage. The Fourteenth Amendment marked the first time the work male appeared in the Constitution, and the Fifteenth Amendment included no provision for gender discrimination.

Question 2

Assess the importance of religion in early American history. How were the Massachusetts Bay and Virginia colonies different in terms of their commitment to religion? What trends contributed to the First and Second Great Awakenings? Why was religious fervor greater at some times but not others?

Answer 2

Answer would ideally include:
Massachusetts and the City on a Hill: The Puritans founded Massachusetts Bay as a "city upon a hill," a colony that would demonstrate to the rest of the world the proper way for people to live godly lives. As a result, Massachusetts Bay became the most pious of the American colonies. This religious commitment decreased over time as land became scarce, children left their families, communities splintered, colonists became more enmeshed in the market, and the distance between economic classes grew.
Virginia and the Religion of Tobacco: Most people in Virginia were nominally Protestant, and they were required to attend church services and follow the dictates of the Church of England. But their true faith was tobacco. Most colonists came to Virginia as indentured servants, not as ministers or religious crusaders. The ample land and ease of making money from growing tobacco blunted the importance of religion.
The First Great Awakening Responds to the Enlightenment and Weakening Piety: By the middle of the seventeenth century, piety appeared to decrease in the colonies. Earlier religious fervor had weakened, religious indifference and denominational rivalries grew, and Enlightenment ideas had captured the imaginations of many educated Americans. Clergymen grew uncomfortable with these changes and tried to win followers through a style of preaching that elicited more emotional responses. Religious revivals exploded across the colonies. Ministers like George Whitefield toured the nation, relieving the anxieties of eighteenth-century life by assuring that every soul mattered and that people could choose to be saved.
The Second Great Awakening Responds to the Market Revolution: The Market Revolution again caused Americans to search for order in the midst of social and economic change. From 1800 to 1820, church membership doubled, with evangelical denominations experiencing particular growth. Men and especially women yearned for more immediate access to spiritual peace. The leading exemplar of the Second Great Awakening, Charles Grandison Finney, came to prominence in western New York, where the Erie Canal had fundamentally changed the social and economic landscape. Responding to their new surroundings, Finney and other ministers preached that public outreach could lead to salvation.

Question 3

Explain the economic, social, and labor differences between the North and South during the antebellum period. What accounted for these differences?

Answer 3

Answer would ideally include:
The Industrial North and the Agricultural South: During the nineteenth century, the economies of the North and South grew increasingly different. The North developed a mixed economy of agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing. Mechanization produced a huge growth in manufacturing. Manufacturers could produce more with less labor by using the principles of the "American system." New England led the nation in manufacturing, while Pennsylvania and Ohio produced coal for industrial fuel. The North and Midwest also benefited from the railroad, as nearly two-thirds of the nation's 9,000 miles of track ran through these regions. The South, on the other hand, remained agricultural, with its primary cash crops being tobacco, sugar, rice, and cotton. Its climate and geography were ideally suited for cotton. Southerners produced nearly five million bales of cotton in 1860, nearly three-fourths of the world's supply. This cotton fueled the growth of the textile industry in the North and served as a valuable export commodity. The South failed to diversify in part because planters saw no reason to do so.
The Urban North and the Rural South: Northern industry led to great urbanization. Nearly 37 percent of New Englanders lived in cities. Northern cities also attracted European immigrants, mostly Germans who settled in the middle stratum of society and poor Irish laborers looking for industrial jobs. With its emphasis on agriculture, the South developed few cities and, with fewer urban industrial jobs, attracted fewer immigrants. In 1860, only 12 percent of southerners lived in cities.
Free Labor and Slavery: Northern society was organized around the principle of free labor, which celebrated hard work, self-reliance, and independence. Proponents of free labor argued that success was open to anyone, not just those Americans born into wealth. The South was dominated by slave labor. By 1860, the South contained over four million slaves, workers who produced 75 percent of the cotton on southern plantations. Although white planters dominated southern politics, most slave owners owned fewer than five slaves, and most southerners held no slaves at all. Plantation-belt yeomen worked small farms in the upcountry, and most poor whites were hardworking, landholding small farmers.
Overall Class Structure: Free labor did not create equality in the North. In fact, its proponents argued that economic inequalities were a natural outgrowth of freedom: Some people worked harder than others, or luck fell their way. In reality, very few workers in the North ascended into the class of self-employed producers. Many more lived as landless wage laborers. African Americans and Irish immigrants tended to find themselves at the bottom of this social ladder. In the South, divisions were typically forged around race rather than class. The gentry cultivated friendly relationships with yeomen, and yeomen depended on the gentry for political favors and for economic assistance. Poor whites rarely staged class protest because they understood that their membership in the white race ensured that they would always rank higher than any African American, free or slave.

Question 4

How did the Spanish and the British differ in their treatment of Native Americans? How were their methods similar? Which method formed the model for the United States' relations with Indians after the Revolutionary War?

Question 5

How did the dominant system of labor change during the colonial era in the Chesapeake? What factors caused these changes? How did labor changes reshape social class in the South?

Question 6

After the American Revolution, white Americans pushed the federal government to remove Indians in order to clear the West for white settlement. How did the government accomplish its goal of Indian removal in Ohio, New York, Indiana, and Georgia from 1776 to 1840?

Question 7

How did the issue of slavery complicate territorial expansion? How did American officials attempt to solve the problem of slavery in the territories?

Question 8

How did women express themselves politically and shape American society even while being denied entry into formal politics? Consider especially women's roles in religious and reform movements and in the political arena.

Question 9

How did African Americans take advantage of the social upheaval that occurred during and after the American Revolution and the Civil War to make a case for their equality and their freedom?

Question 10

How did the United States use international diplomacy and military might to expand its western border to the Pacific Ocean in less than a century? What were its motives?