American History Coursework

Andrew capital of manuscripts coming to power, his preference in 1828 and the inauguration that ascertained was a critical moment when a democratic pith took possession of American culture and public life. more e concretelyplace the democratic endeavor was too large and bulky to be reflected perfectly in the jump off of a single overhauler, however influential he might be. solely before looking at capital of Mississippis role and in the national arena where he played this out, I think we requisite to understand the wider scope of opinion that turned America in a more democratic direction and do Jacksons bear witness possible.During the 1820s and 30s the term democracy commencement became in use as a way of describing how American institutions were supposed to work. The Founders had delineate democracy as direct rule by the passeles of the the keen unwashed most of them rejected this approach to government because it was against their conception of a salubrious bala nced republic led by a natural aristocracy. For winners of everyday government in the Jacksonian plosive consonant the people were truly crowned head and could do no wrong. The voice of the people is the voice of God was the clearest reflexion in this principle.Conservatives were less certain of the knowledge of the common folk. provided nevertheless they were coming to see that public opinion had to be won over before major policy decisions could be made. Besides giving a feeling of popular sovereignty the democratic movement seemed to stimulate a process of kind of like a kindly comparability. Earlier Americans had usu altogethery assumed that the rich and intimatelyborn should be treated with special reckon and recognized as natural leaders of the community and guardians of its culture and values.By the 1830s there was a disappearance of inherited social ranks and clearly delimit aristocracies or privileged groups was a primary feature of democracy in America. The ele ction of 1828 saw the accept of a sweet era of mass democracy. Jacksons presidency started with his endorsement of rotation of officeholders or the spoils system. He was the first president to defend this practice as a countenance application of democratic doctrine. Jackson also established a new kind of relationship with the cabinet.Under some different administrations, cabinet ships officers had acted on their own responsibility, reservation major policy decisions and advising Congress on legislation without presidential direction. They would act for the full term of the president who selected them. Key questions affecting the government as a whole had often been specifyd by a absolute majority vote of cabinet. All of that changed when Jackson came into power and when he came into office he reorganized the cabinet. The Whigs were a new national fellowship that got its name because of its associations with twain English and American Revolutionary opposition to royal pow er and specimens.But the of import(prenominal) force of their creation was because of the critical support from southerly prop wholenessnts of states rights who had been upset by the political nationalism of Jacksons stand on nullification and his unconstitutional abuses of power in his withdrawal of federal deposits from the Bank of the U. S. Jacksons presidency was marred with many scandals and impassioned ideals. But in my opinion how he handled the western expansion gave him an F on world a president. The example I want to use is the Trail of part and the ruthless land grabbing his administration was known for. Reference Latner, Richard B.The Presidency of Andrew Jackson White House Politics, 1829- 1837. Athens University of Georgia Press, (1979). 2) Discuss industrialization of the northwestern during the antebellum conclusion There are few developments in all of human history as important as the Industrial Revolution. This great movement created wealth, material goods, and services on a scale unsufferable to the people of any earlier society. It created the resources to win a moderatenessable standard of living for virtually the entire society, and stands of education, medical care, and nutrition unknown anywhere in the world before.Just as important was the percentage of the millions of men and women who made up the labor force in the new factory system. industrial enterprise had about unfortunate social consequences as well as in effect(p) scotch ones, and the history of labor was not necessarily characterized by knockout improvement in all wages or conditions. A derive of factors determined the condition of workers in a particular detail. Among them were the available supplying of labor, the skills necessary to a particular job, the type of industry in which one was apply, and the attitudes of courts and together governmental agencies towarfared labor and business.During much of our industrial history, the economic possibility t hat considered labor a commodity whose value would fluctuate with supply and demand, quiesce as the cost of raw materials or manufactured products might, dominated American thinking. The first half of the 19th century is an especially interest period in American labor history. During those years, industrialization with its substantial technological innovations and the cornerstone of the factory system of labor happened trueheartedly. Yet there was a wide spread fear or distrust for the new machinery and the new constitution of industrial growth.There was also a well established social doctrine as to the position of classes, the responsibilities of the employer and the roles of men and women in the labor force and in the stand. Such deep social beliefs are not easily upstage and that slowly were they modified to meet the demands of the new industrialism. One interesting face of labor history during this period is the way in which some of the new capitalists attempted to recon cile the old social philosophy of the paternal employer and his responsibility for the worker with the factory system of labor and the introduction of women workers. some(prenominal) of the women of the period extended their concerns to sectors such as the anti break ones backry crusade after they had become exacerbate by the discrimination they findd as women. Many other first began working in abolition and humanitarian reform movements and turned their vigilance to the womens rights crusade only after discovering that their meddling in these area evoked taunts and threats of women in public affairs. Their reforms ranged from dress styles that afforded more freedom to equality in marriage, law, and employment. Women entered industry, journalism, medicine, teaching and in many other areas.But throughout the nineteenth century the majority of American women still saw their roles as those of wives and mothers. Females were still expected to devote all of their time and strength t o providing a home for their husband and children. To write or lecture in political causes was unfeminine. despite the reforms of the Jacksonian period, there is little tell of substantial changes in either male or female attitudes towards women. Reference contende, Norman. The Industrial Worker 1840-1860. pecker Smith 1959, (1924). 3) Discuss the agrarian economics of the southbound during the antebellum period siemenserners became increasingly alarmed by their regions lack of economic self-sufficiency. Dependence on the northwards for capital, commercializeing facilities, and manufactured goods were seen as evidence of a dangerous subservience to external economic interests. Southern nationalists called for the South to develop its own industries, commerce, and shipping. Southerners did not believe that such diversification would take aim a massive shift to free wage labor. They saw no reason why slaves could not be used as the main(prenominal) work force in an industrial revolution.Men with capital were doing too well in plantation agriculture to ask their money in other ventures. I think it would be difficult to determine whether it was some congenital characteristic of slavery as a labor system or simply the strong market demand for cotton and the Souths capacity to meet it that kept most slaves working on plantations and farms. A minority of about 5 percent during the 1850s were successfully employed in industrial tasks. Besides providing most of the labor for mining, lumbering, and constructing roads, canals and railways slaves also worked in cotton mills and tobacco factories.In the 1840s and 50s a debate raged among white capitalists over whether the South should use free whites or enslaved mordants as the labor supply for industry. Some wanted to defend a white labor policy arguing that factory work would provide new economic opportunities for a degraded class of brusk whites. But others that were for industrialization feared that the gro wth of a free working class would lead to social conflict among whites and preferred using slaves for all supervised manual(a) labor. Some factories employed slaves, others white workers and a few even experimented with co-ordinated work forces.As nearly as con be determined, mills that chartered or purchased slave labor were just as profitable and economic as those paying wages to whites. By 1800 slavery had been eliminated in the North and in 1808 Congress banned the further importation of slaves from Africa. Although some criminal importations continued, other factors primarily accounted for the extraordinary need and expansion of slavery in the nineteenth century. One factor was the invention of the cotton gin which allowed the quick cleaning of as much cotton as the slaves could pick.A second contribution was the acquisition of vast new territories beyond the Mississippi River, which created a market for slaves and gave rise to the domestic slave trade within the United Stat es. amidst 1820 and 1860 the slave creation increased by more than 400,000, Southern planters comprise slavery to be economically profitable. There was also the high birth rate among African Americans and before the civilized War there were quatern million black people lived as permanent, hereditary slaves.This formed the chief labor force from tobacco fields of Virginia to the cotton fields of Alabama, blacks were very important to southern agriculture and to sever other parts of the southern economy. As chattels, bought and sold like livestock, they were an easily marketable property that could bestow ready cash to the slave proprietor. Slaves brought with them their own culture and beliefs that when considering the size of the population did influence, and one could say, Africanized the South. Reference Owens, Leslie H. This Species of Property Slave Life and Culture in the Old South.New York Oxford University Press, (1976). 4) Discuss some of the major events which intensi fied the conflict amongst the North and South.. Many birth looked for the reason in the crisis that worked up to the disruption of the amount, but have failed to agree on exactly what they were. Some have said it was the clash of economic interests between agrarian and industrializing regions. But this does not reflect the way people at the time uttered their concerns. The main issues in the sectional debates of the 1850s were whether slavery was right or wrong and whether it should be extended or contained.Many disagreements over protective tariffs and other economic measures allegedly benefiting one section or the other were only secondary. It has never really been clear why the interests of northerly industry and those of the Souths commercial agriculture were irreconcilable. There was really no reason for producers of raw materials to go to war with those who marketed or processed them. Some have blamed the crisis on irresponsible politicians and agitators on both sides as macrocosm the problem. But the modern view has the roots lying in the ideologic differences over the morality and use of slavery as an institution.Increased tension during the Mexican War began because the Constitution had not predetermined the status of slavery in future states and led to the Missouri crisis that resulted in compromise that was designed to decide future cases and remain a rough division between slave and free states by drawing a line between them and extending it west through the unsettled portions of what was them American soil. When Texas was admitted as a slave state, northern expansionists could still look to Oregon to counter balance, but the Mexican war raised the prospect that California and New Mexico would be acquired and then what.Then with the free crusade and the proposed amendment to the military appropriation bill that would ban slavery in any territory that would be acquired from Mexico trouble began to brew. A chain of events in late 1859 and early 1860 turned southern anxiety about northern attitudes and policies into a crisis of fear. These events alarmed slaveholders because they appeared to threaten their safety and dominance in a new and direct way. The first was the incident of John Browns raid on Harper Ferry.Brown was a fervent abolitionist who had shown in Kansas the he was prepared to use violence against the enemies of black freedom. Browns aim was to arm the local slave population to commence a guerrilla war from havens in the Appalachians that would eventually extend to the plantation regions of the put down south. After Brown was sentenced to be hung Southerners were stunned and outraged by the leaping of sympathy and admiration that Brown got from the North before his execution.Southerners interpreted the turn over of northern sympathy as an expression of the majority of opinion and the real attitude of the North. Then there was Lincolns election that create the secession of seven states of the Deep South e ven though it did not lead immediately to an armed conflict. After Lincolns election there were doubts as to if he could do the job because of his lack of experience and with the collapse of compromise efforts only increased the tensions that brought this country closer to the Civil War.But probably the most important reason for the south to be so upset was because of Lincolns belief in ending slavery, a very important factor in Southern life. Reference Donald, David H. closeness and Union. Boston Little, Brown, and Co. , (1978). 5) Why was the partnership unsuccessful in establishing its Independence By early 1863 the Confederate economy was in shambles and its diplomacy with England had collapsed. The social order of the South was also showing signs of severe strain.Masters were losing authority of their slaves, and non slaveholding whites were becoming disillusioned with the hardships of a war that some of them described as a rich mans war and a poor mans fight. As slaves fl ed from the plantations, increasing numbers of lower-class whites neglectful the army or refused to be drafted in the first place. Whole counties in the southern backcountry became deserter havens. Appalachian mountaineers, who had remained loyal to the Union, resisted the confederacy more at a time by mounting a small scale war lav southern lines.Yet the North was slow to capitalize on the Souths internal weaknesses because of its own serious morale problems. The long series of defeats on the eastern front had engendered war weariness and the new policies that military prerequisite forced the government to adopt encountered fierce opposition. The last two and a half year of the struggle saw the implementation of more radical war measure. The most important of them was the Norths attempt to follow through with Lincolns passion to free the slaves and bring the black population into the fight on the Union side.The battle turned in the summer of 1863, but the south continued to res ist for 2 more years until it was overtaken by the weight of the Norths advantages in custody and resources. The limits of the Jeffersonian vision were very apparent even to contemporaries. The people who spoke of equality often owned slaves. It was not surprising that leaders of the Federalist caller accused the Republicans, especially those who lived in the South of hypocrisy and in mummy Federalists defined Jeffersonian democracy as a plantation owner with many slaves.The race issue simply would not go away. Jeffersonian did not fulfill even their own expectations. As members of an opposition party during the presidency of John Adams, they insisted upon a strict interpretation of the Constitution. Large navies were life-sustaining in the scramble for colonies, and in the 1870s the United States had almost no navy. One of the most powerful fleets in the world during the Civil War, the American navy fell into rapid decline.With the military effort to seize control of the Missi ssippi Valley halted at Shiloh, the Union navy soon contributed dramatically to the pursuit. On April 26th a fleet under flag officer David Farragut, coming up from the Gulf, captured the port of New Orleans after boldly running past the forts below the city. The occupation of New Orleans, besides securing the moth of the Mississippi climaxed a series of naval and amphibious operations around the edges of the Confederacy that had already succeeded in Capturing South Carolinas Sea Islands and North Carolinas Roanoke Island.Strategically located bases were provided to enforce the blockade of the southern coast. The last serious argufy to the Norths naval supremacy was when the Confederate ironclad watercraft the Merrimack had demolished wooden hulled northern ships was repulsed by the Monitor an armored Union gunship. It was later both ships were lost, the Merrimack at Norfolk and the Monitor in a gale in December. Reference McPherson, James M. Ordeal by Fire The Civil War and Recons truction. New York Knopf, (1982).