Tag Archives: Federal government

BEFORE ELI Whitney invented the cotton gin, Southern plantation owners were beginning to wonder if they should not give up their slaves. There was a good market for cotton; the English were buying all the cotton they could get to make into cloth in their new factories. It took too long to separate raw cotton from the seed and raising cotton simply did not pay. If the plantation owners stopped raising cotton, they would really have no need for slaves. Then after the invention of the cotton gin, raising cotton began to pay — and pay well! Cotton became the South’s big cash crop and the more cotton the plantation owners raised, the more slaves they needed. So, slavery grew in the South while it was dying out in other parts of the world. Slavery had been outlawed in the British colonies in 1833, in the French colonies fifteen years later; by this time, too, most of the Latin-American republics had liberated their slaves. The economy of the South was based on slave labour and the vast estates of the plantation owners, with their mansions, slave quarters and outbuildings, resembled the manors of feudal Europe. As a matter of fact, there was much in Southern society that resembled feudalism. The plantation owners formed a kind of aristocracy and lived the lives of country gentlemen; they owned most of the slaves and most of the land. The poorer Southerners also lived by farming, but their land holdings were small and they worked in the fields beside the one or two slaves they could afford. The South had little industry. In the North, on the other hand, while thousands of people still lived by farming, industry was growing day by day. The North needed free labour rather than slaves and Northerners began …

ALTHOUGH THE Federalists continued as a party for some years after their defeat in 1801, they would never again be strong enough to threaten American democracy. Jefferson’s party remained the only strong party in the country during and after Jefferson’s two terms in office as President. Still many citizens were not satisfied. They felt that they should have the right to vote even though they were poor and did not own property. Some of them won the right to vote by moving westward, into one of the new western states. All the new states gave every white man the right to vote whether he was rich or poor. This was so because in the frontier states no one was very rich and everyone wanted as much opportunity as possible to get ahead. Six western states entered the Union between 1812 and 1821, during the same period four of the older states did away with the requirement that men had to be property owners in order to vote. By the time Andrew Jackson was elected President in 1828, only five of the original thirteen states still limited the right to vote to those who owned property. Jackson owed his election to the rising strength of the common people, who looked on him as one of their own. He first won fame as an Indian fighter and he became the nation’s hero when he turned back the British in the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812. That war helped draw Americans closer together and to strengthen their feeling of nationalism. Jackson won the support of both the workers in large eastern cities and the settlers in the new western states and his election was regarded as a victory for democracy. So, in the United States, democracy and nationalism continued …