39 Sectionalism in the Early Republic
Introduction
Click here to watch the video on increasing political battles over slavery in the mid-1800s.
“Increasing political battles in the mid-1800s” by Kahn Academy is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Slavery divided Americans from the beginning, but Americans demonstrated a shrewd ability to maintain unity in spite of division. In the 1770s, all of England’s North American colonies employed slave labor. Enslaved workers grew food, cultivated cash crops, worked in ports, and manufactured goods. Within a couple decades, however, slavery disappeared from half of the nation and an antislavery movement began to challenge the ancient institution. Battles emerged over the institution’s westward expansion. Enslaved laborers meanwhile remained vitally important to the nation’s economy, fueling not only the southern plantation economy but also providing raw materials for the industrial North.
As the antislavery movement grew, slaveholders managed to survive a range of challenges to their legitimacy in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. But differences over the fate of slavery remained at the heart of American politics, especially as the United States expanded. After decades of conflict, Americans north and south began to fear that the opposite section of the country had seized control of the government. By November 1860, an opponent of slavery’s expansion arose from within the Republican Party. (3)
Sectionalism in the Early Republic
Slavery’s history stretched back to antiquity. Prior to the American Revolution, nearly everyone in the world accepted it as a natural part of life. English colonies north and south relied on enslaved workers who grew tobacco, harvested indigo and sugar, and worked in ports. They generated tremendous wealth for the British crown. That wealth and luxury fostered seemingly limitless opportunities, and inspired seemingly boundless imaginations. Enslaved workers also helped give rise to revolutionary new ideals, ideals that in time became the ideological foundations of the sectional crisis. English political theorists, in particular, began to re-think natural law justifications for slavery. They rejected the longstanding idea that slavery was a condition that naturally suited some people. A new transatlantic antislavery movement began to argue that freedom was the natural condition of man.
Revolutionaries seized onto these ideas to stunning effect in the late eighteenth century. In the United States, France, and Haiti, revolutionaries began the work of splintering the old order. Each revolution seemed to radicalize the next. Bolder and more expansive declarations of equality and freedom followed one after the other. Revolutionaries in the United States declared, “All men are created equal,” in the 1770s. French visionaries issued the “Declaration of Rights and Man and Citizen” by 1789. But the most startling development came in 1803. A revolution led by the island’s rebellious slaves turned Fran