Hi guys, welcome back to lecture two on our video series about the Jacksonian era. If you will go to PowerPoint slide one of this session, we'll go ahead and get started. So as we mentioned earlier, the need to expand land in the United States and thus move natives all stemmed from the need to gain new lands for cotton growth. as old cotton lands ruined by being overused.
In the South, cotton was the most valuable product, because cotton was still globally rare and expensive due to how labor-intensive it was to grow and harvest. The crops required constant attention. To harvest, it was physically taxing, and the sharp stalks sliced your hands as you collected the white lint.
After that, the seeds still had to be separated from the cotton by hand. All of this meant that it was a crop primarily produced through slavery and that it fetched a high profit on the open market. Slide 2. I know we're going back in time here. I promise we'll leap forward again here in a second. In 1792, a young Yale graduate named Eli Whitney visited a friend from college named Phineas Miller that had taken a job in the South as an overseer on a plantation.
An overseer did all the daily management and discipline of slaves that planters. generally found too gritty for their own administration. Whitney had never been to the South before or seen slavery, and so decided to accept the invitation and visit. The plantation mistress, the master's wife, spoke to Whitney about his future plans, and though he was unsure, he communicated that he enjoyed building things. She suggested that he devise a mechanism that might remove the seeds from cotton and solve one of the biggest economic dilemmas of the South.
It took Whitney 10 days to invent a prototype of the cotton gin. Within a year, he had a working model that could generate 50 times as much cotton separated. as one person could by hand within the same time.
This meant that landowners could plant their entire land ownership with cotton, have their slaves tended, and then have their slaves harvested fall and winter rather than just fall because they no longer needed them to sit indoors and separate it by hand. This means that the cotton gin simultaneously made slavery an even worse institution because there was no season of physical rest, and made slavery exponentially more profitable. It also initiated the wastage of slave lands for frantic profits. Planters for the time were quickly rededicated to the institution of slavery.
and began to passionately defend its future in politics. Planters also began to buy up western lands in anticipation of needing to move their operation when their southern lands stopped or slowed agricultural production due to overplanting. This land frenzy really came at a climax with Jackson's administration.
And there was confidence that this would work because Jackson was in power. Such a well-known slave owner, trader, and Southern supporter wouldn't stop Southerners from making tremendous profits off of their slaves and expanding their slaveholding. So there was a lot of comfort in this technique, and that's why people were putting so much of their time and energy and money into this strategy.
Slide three, whether you believed America was a special place because of slavery and southern culture or northern manufacturing. There was a generally shared concept in the 19th century that the United States had a special mission on Earth and was an exceptional nation with exceptional people. Now, the two sectors didn't agree on why. or a vision of the future, but they still would have agreed on the concept alone, without an explanation. During Jacksonian America, a style of literature emerged called the Romantic Movement.
It had nothing to do with romance novels. It was mostly poetry. It influenced art and the way people felt and thought.
in general. In romantic literature, writers and readers explored their feelings about themselves and the world they lived in. It's romantic in the sense that it explores one's heart.
One of the big concepts that was to really mark the romantic movement was to identify issues that you cared about. For a lot of people an issue they felt strongly against was slavery and its worryingly quick expansion under Jackson. This may not seem politically important, but it is. Consider how many people you know that have a favorite politician, a politician that changed their way of thinking or living, not somebody that they like because they agree with them, somebody that changed their thinking. Okay, now consider how many people you know that have a favorite movie, song, or book that changed their life or way of thinking.
That second number is probably much, much higher. Politics is important, of course, but it turns out that art changes people's opinion. more. Next slide. From the Romantic movement and literature sprang the Transcendentalist movement.
This went a step further than the Romantic movement because it asked you what you were going to do about the things you now knew you cared about. So you care about slavery. What are you going to do about it?
This literature was transcendentalist in the sense that it transcended ordinary thinking and living. It also placed a large emphasis on individualism. The idea was that it shouldn't matter what everyone else was doing or how prevalent something was or even what the law said.
You knew intuitively what was right and wrong and you should live and act. according to your conscience. Next slide.
More than any other person, Ralph Waldo Emerson was the creator of the literary basis on transcendentalism, or as many people term it, the transcendentalist gospel. Emerson's young neighbor and eventual friend, Henry David Thoreau, however, became the most famous and influential transcendentalist. Thoreau's father was a pencil manufacturer and his mother was an outspoken activist, abolitionist, before that was even a political movement. So Thoreau had been raised with very modest means, but very high ideals. His work prompted integrity and individuality above all else.
Thoreau showed no interest in wealth and even claimed that it could corrupt happiness. Thoreau believed that no matter how much money you earn, you'd find a way to spend it or an anxiety to save it. And you would always feel you needed more.
You'd get stuck on what is called the hedonic treadmill. Have you ever really wanted some item? You might have showed a picture to a friend.
family member when you were young and thought to yourself that when you had that item you'd be really happy that you got the item. How long were you really happy for? The high of attainment wears off, and then you need or want something different. The same is true of big-ticket items like cars and houses.
They're new for a while, and then they're just your car or house, and you want something more. Thoreau worried that people got stuck in jobs they hated in order to pay for things they ended up not caring about and had no time to pursue their real interests or passions. Next slide. We're jumping ahead a little bit here, but during the Mexican-American War, Thoreau claimed that the war was unjust because the land grab by the United States was only an attempt by the slaveholding South to acquire more cotton lands.
We are going to go back, we're going to talk about the entire setup to the Mexican-American War, but for now just take that into consideration. During the war itself, the president levied a poll tax to pay for the war. It was a small tax, one dollar per person. A poll tax is a tax that you pay in advance. of going to the polls and voting.
Poll taxes are illegal today because they're an obstacle to your rights, but at the time, it was illegal to not pay the poll tax if you were an eligible voter. Thoreau, believing that the war was unjust and that you had to take action on the things you believed in, refused to pay the tax. He was arrested and spent one night in jail.
The next day, his aunt paid his tax and bailed him out. From this experience, though, Thoreau wrote his very famous book, Civil Disobedience in 1849, which outlined passive resistance, refusing to follow unjust laws nonviolently. Thoreau said, quote, If the law requires you to be an agent of injustice to another, then I say, Break the law.
Now, if you break the law, there will be consequences. But your intuition tells you that it's right to suffer for what is good. Civil disobedience and passive resistance became the foundation of many successful rights movements globally. It would influence leaders like Muhammad Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., who we will talk about next semester when we talk about civil rights.
Next slide. With the rise of romanticism and transcendentalism came the growing movement of abolitionism. In response, the South became increasingly paranoid and defensive of slavery.
In 1840, pro-slavery Southern volunteers went in huge numbers to participate in carrying out. the census, which is conducted in the United States every 10 years to account for the population. This was the first census in American history to ask for a number of insane persons. When you look at the recorded totals of free Blacks living in the South, it turns out, according to the census, that there were more free insane Blacks. then there were known free Blacks living in the South.
So these census workers weren't even talking to free Black households. They found their households, estimated the number of people that lived there, and marked them all as insane. The pro-slavery Southerners were trying to manufacture a document that they could point to as evidence of the benevolence of their system. by claiming that slavery protected African Americans from going insane when free and on their own. Today, no researchers use the census of 1840 because it's so fraudulent.
Next slide. Among all the targets of reformers inspired by romanticism and transcendentalism, human bondage, slavery. became the one most people fixed on and the abolition movement continued to grow. I know this was a really short lecture separated in ideology from our first which was really focused on Jackson himself.
But we're going to go ahead and stop here for this week, and then we will carry on next week. So you guys go ahead and complete your multiple choice quiz on the Jacksonian era. And you have two critical thinking assignments this week.
So if you guys go ahead and work on those and get them submitted, we'll be ready to continue. questions or concerns while you're working on your critical thinking assignments, feel free to send me an email. Otherwise, I will see you guys next time.