Hello and welcome to lecture number 47. The topic today is 5.5, Sectional Conflict, and we're talking about regional differences. There are two themes, America in regional culture and social structures. The first of two learning objectives is explain the effects of immigration from various parts of the world on American culture from 1844 to 1877. There were three different groups that came during this time, and this key concept covers how they affected culture and society in the United States between 1840 and 1860. It says, Substantial numbers of international migrants continue to arrive in the United States from Europe and Asia, mainly from Ireland and Germany, often settling in ethnic communities where they could preserve elements of their language and customs. The Irish experienced a potato famine in the 1840s.
Between 1840 and 1860, 2 million Irish immigrants come to the United States. Ireland as a whole lost nearly half of its population fleeing the potato famine. Irish migrants usually settle in urban enclaves. They didn't have a lot of money to go and buy land and settle in the interior. They have to adjust to living in a city environment after coming from a largely rural country.
As a result, they have to settle for doing unskilled wage work in factories. Boston and New York develop large Irish neighborhoods that are crowded and often dirty. Due to the high concentration in cities and because of their Catholicism, they experience anti-immigrant sentiment, also called nativism. Another factor that makes them unpopular is their common cultural practice of drinking alcohol.
Whiskey, to be precise. In the previous period, the temperance movement, part of the larger reform movement, was very popular in the United States and spread the message that anyone who drank was a blight on society. The Irish assimilate through the use of party politics.
They'll create political party machines in Boston and New York that allow them to control their neighborhoods and influence state and national politics to help their community. And by the 20th century, they become very loyal democratic party voters. The Germans fled revolutions in Central Europe happening in 1848. Between 1840 and 1860, one million of them came to the United States.
As seen on the map, they spread out a lot more across the Northwest. They came with more money, so they were able to purchase land in the Old Northwest. Their primary economic activity is farming.
They established German language schools and German Catholic parishes to continue to practice their traditional culture. In areas of the modern-day Midwest, like Wisconsin, there is still a very big German influence in food and drink. You won't know this as high schoolers, but some of the biggest breweries, like Miller, are founded in 1885 that are still based in Milwaukee. Their baseball team are the Brewers, and a favorite delicacy at the ballpark is the German bratwurst. You may also associate cheese with Wisconsin, and that's also as a result from the German migration in this period.
Some of the farms that they established in this time were dairy farms where they would make cheese. The Wisconsin football team, the Green Bay Packers, have fans that are referred to as the Cheeseheads. Germans also experienced nativism over their continued use of their own language once they settled, and their alcohol use. The pictures on the slide show other German culture contributions that became part of larger American culture.
Those are the use of a Christmas tree and the use of a kindergarten, providing a school setting for kids in the 4-5 year age range. The Chinese are not specifically listed by the key concepts, but they are important. They're not coming to the United States in as large numbers, only about 65,000 of them had arrived by the year 1860. However, the work that they do in the United States is really important. They work mostly in gold mining and laying railroad tracks in the West.
Their labor was critical for the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Some of them do agricultural and domestic work too. They settle all around the West, and they'll usually be coming over in five-year contracts.
Because their migration to the United States was on a temporary basis, and it was mostly related to work, there was a high disparity between the amount of Chinese men and Chinese women that came to the United States. Thus, it was more difficult for bigger communities to develop since family units did not travel together. Chinese migrants will experience the worst amount of nativism compared to the Germans and the Irish, because they will be completely excluded from migrating to the United States by 1882. The next key concept continues to cover the ways in which migrants were received by the rest of the country. A strong anti-Catholic nativist movement arose that was aimed at limiting new immigrants'political power and cultural influence.
Anti-immigrant sentiment grew so large in the United States that there were large societies or groups that were formed around trying to keep immigrants from coming to the United States. The most prominent one was the Supreme Order of the Stars and Stripes. This started as a secret society, and their members grew to be called the Know-Nothings. As they were a secretive society, any time that they were asked about their group, they would reply with, I know nothing.
So, they got their name, the Know-Nothings. It evolved into a political party, unofficially the Know-Nothing Party, but officially they were called the National Union Party. They got former President Millard Fillmore to run as presidential party candidate in 1856. They were advocating for increasing the time to award citizenship from 5 years to 21 years. They also wanted to limit eligibility of elected officials only to native-born citizens.
That means that even if people came over from Germany or Ireland and naturalized as U.S. citizens, they still would not be able to run for elected office. Their fear-mongering is well represented in the cartoon on the screen, where an Irish man wearing an Irish whiskey barrel around him, and a German man with a beer barrel around him, steal a ballot box. They're trying to instill fear in the rest of the American public, that immigrants are stealing elections to mess with American politics and shape it in their own negative way. The second learning objective of the lecture is, explain how regional differences related to slavery caused tension in the years leading up to the Civil War.
The first key concept of this learning objective is, the North's expanding manufacturing economy relied on free labor in contrast to the Southern's economy dependence on slave labor. Some Northerners did not object to slavery on principle, but claimed that slavery would undermine the free labor market. As a result, a free soil movement arose that portrayed the expansion of slavery as incompatible with free labor. The Northern economy was much more diversified. There was manufacturing, more transportation in the way of railroads, Shipping, banking, and finance, insurance, and for the most part, everyone worked for a wage.
Because wage labor was central to the northern economy, they, workers especially, worried about elements in the economy that might pose unfair competition to labor and depress wages. That's why some northerners disliked slavery, not necessarily on the moral and ethical grounds of taking away people's freedoms, but on the economic grounds that it would hurt the northern economy. The north was starting to take an economic stance against slavery. The free soil movement proposed to limit slavery in the new territories, the ones that were won from the Mexican-American War and that were negotiated from the treaty with Britain and Oregon in 1846. It evolved into a political party and it had a coalition of Northern Whigs and Democrats. They nominate former President Martin Van Buren in the 1848 election and their slogan was Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men.
To emphasize their concern, the map on the screen shows the concentration of enslaved people in the United States. They're mostly concentrated along the Mississippi River Valley, and they start to expand further out west towards Texas. What the Free Soil Party is trying to do is to stop that movement that's continuing to move westward. Those who wanted to do away with slavery altogether, not just stop its spread, were called abolitionists, and they're covered in the next key concept. African American and white abolitionists, although a minority in the North, mounted a highly visible campaign against slavery, presenting moral arguments against the institution, assisting slaves escapes and sometimes expressing a willingness to use violence to achieve their goals one of the most visible and popular attempts that abolitionists used in spreading their message was the publishing of uncle tom's cabin it was a novel written by harriet beecher stowe which depicted all the evils that a typical enslaved person would face it's the story of an enslaved man named tom who is sold away from one plantation to the next and journeys through the south as a result it gives accounts of what it was like to be sold at an auction and beaten and punished It convinced a large portion of the North that slavery was evil.
It became a bestseller across the world. Great Britain also started reading this book and buys lots of copies. It made them into a more abolitionist country than they were before.
Another book published during this time was The Impending Crisis of the South by Hinton R. Helper. It used an economic argument against slavery. Helper wrote that the use of slavery in this export agricultural economy is going to be detrimental for the South, because a point will come when they will no longer be able to financially maintain it. A cost of land was going to continue to rise, the cost of labor and buying enslaved people would also continue to rise, and the price of cash crops that they exported would soon start to fall.
So, basing their economic system on slavery was keeping them from developing. Helper points to the lack of large cities in the South, a smaller white population in the South compared to the North. They only had 5.5 million people. There were also abolitionists who assisted enslaved people in their escape from slavery.
The Underground Railroad was a network of stations, or safe houses, for those escaping slavery. The safe houses were evenly spaced apart to help enslaved people make their way up to a free state, or as far north as Canada. The conductors were the people who would aid the enslaved people up from the south and then up to the north. Harriet Tubman took more than a dozen trips back and forth from the south to the north, helping free about 300 people. Now for the abolitionists that were willing to go to the lengths of using violence.
John Brown was a radical abolitionist, and he had a long history of using violence against those who defended slavery. In 1856, he goes to the Kansas Territory as pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces rush there to determine the fate of slavery in the territory, as it had been opened to the opportunity through popular sovereignty. In response to an attack by pro-slavery supporters, Brown carries out a killing of five pro-slavery supporters in Pottawatomie, Kansas.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act, which brought about this chaotic situation in the territory, is covered further in the next lecture. By 1859, John Brown has another plan. He wanted to lead a raid on a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, take weapons, and lead an insurrection of enslaved people.
He goes into the arsenal and a shootout ensues between federal troops and Brown supporters. He's taken alive and arrested. He's put on trial for attacking a federal arsenal, found guilty, and sentenced to death.
The next day he's hung, but before he's executed, he writes down his last words and gives them to his jailer. They were, I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.
He thought that the nation would have been saved with a small amount of bloodshed. but he now sees that there's going to be even more bloodshed than has already occurred in Kansas, and more than occurred at the Harpers Ferry. He accurately foreshadows the violence to come in the Civil War.
His arrest and his attack on the federal arsenal have the effect of heightening southern tensions and suspicions of abolitionists. It makes them more wary of northerners and more wary of the Republican Party, so that by the time that Abraham Lincoln is elected in 1860, South Carolina perceives that as the federal government's soon-to-abolish slavery in the South. The last key concept covers those who supported slavery. Defenders of slavery based their arguments on racial doctrines, the view that slavery was a positive social good, and the belief that slavery and states'rights were protected by the Constitution.
In response to Uncle Tom's Cabin, a Southern writer, Mary Henderson Eastman, wrote a book called Aunt Phyllis's Cabin, which was a response to Uncle Tom's Cabin. It showed positive interactions between enslaver and slave, trying to show that the enslaved were better off being enslaved than being free. Another book that would have been more prominent and read by other southerners was called Sociology for the South. It was written by a sociologist named George Fitzhugh.
He was proposing that wage labor was more exploitative than slavery, that northerners who were working in factories 11 to 12 hours a day for 6 or 7 days a week were in a worse position than the people who were enslaved in the South. He wrote that at least the people who were enslaved in the South were being given shelter or care by those who were enslaving them. This is the economic and sociological response for the South on slavery.
to arguments made by the likes of Hinton R. Helper. In 1857 there was a financial panic and the North was heavily affected because it was heavily invested in the industries that caused the panic. Since the southern economy was centered on the export of cotton and the export of cotton in the shipping industry was not affected by the panic, the South fared pretty well. It emboldened the South to think that their mode of economic activity and the labor that they used in order to achieve that was superior than that of the North. It creates a false sense of superiority that convinces them that they could potentially succeed as their own country.
Alright, that is it for this lecture. Let's go through the recap. Irish, German, and Chinese immigrants come to the U.S. and contributed to the country's development in experienced nativism. The Free Soil Movement advocated for slavery to stop expanding. Abolitionist movements rise with literature, the Underground Railroad, and violent incidents.
And finally, Southerners defend slavery more forcefully as they perceive more threats to the institution. Thank you for watching. If you would like to watch the next lecture, you can click on the video link on the screen, and if you're looking for more practice to help you on the AP exam, you can visit apushlights.com.
I wish you the very best in all of your studying, and look forward to seeing you back on the next lecture.