The United States expanded vastly in terms of territory and population during the early 19th century. There was also an economic expansion with cotton grown in the South fueling the Industrial Revolution in both the northeastern United States and England. Such growth came at the expense of Indigenous Americans, who had their land confiscated and faced severe discrimination, causing cultural decline. The wealth generated by cotton was used as an excuse to keep African Americans enslaved. For white Americans, “inequality of wealth widened significantly” (7). There was also increased tension between the mostly British and Protestant original settlers of the United States, and the Irish and German migrants who increasingly came after 1830.

Enslavement was still the predominant political issue of the time, causing tensions between northern and southern states. Debates over enslavement escalated due to the South’s economic and social dependence on enslavement. In addition, there was the question of whether or not the new states being created should or should not allow enslavement. Abolitionism, the movement to outlaw enslavement nationally, also gained momentum. Its rise was encouraged by the Second Great Awakening, a religious movement that stoked “evangelical enthusiasm” (8) and opposition to enslavement on moral and religious grounds.

The “sprawling growth” (8) of the United States further made the issue of enslavement “explosive” (8). By 1850, the United States had spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific and had “become the most populous nation in the Western world save Russia and France” (9). The country also rapidly urbanized, with the “percentage of the labor force engaged in non-agricultural pursuits” growing from 21 to 45% (9). During the same period, while the birth rate fell, the expansion of immigration meant the population was still growing rapidly. However, the economic boom mostly only benefited the wealthy.

The economic expansion was made possible by vast improvements of transportation. These included the opening of the Erie Canal “linking New York City to the Northwest by water” (11), the invention of steamboats, and the development of railroads. Furthermore, the invention of the telegraph made communication instantaneous. A more extensive newspaper media emerged, able to quickly report the news over large distances. Industrialization “reorganized and standardized the production of a variety of goods for large-volume sale in regional and eventually national markets” (13). This made the American economy rival that of Britain.

There were four reasons often given for the rise of the American economy. The first was the creation of a “democracy of consumption,” meaning “a growing and mobile population for a variety of ready-made consumer goods at reasonable prices” (17). The second was that the development of industry was incentivized by a lack of workers. The United States happened to be rich in land and natural resources, and Americans were highly educated and literate compared to their European counterparts. Further, McPherson argues they were motivated by the so-called “Protestant work ethic,” which emphasized the values of being reliable and hard-working and which was inoculated through the American system of public schools.

Historians disagree on how much American workers resisted industrialization. McPherson argues that labor activism was not a response to industrialization. The Western frontier, uneven technological development across the United States, and “the extraordinary mobility of the American population” (22) all helped save many skilled workers from becoming unemployed for long. Wages rose, albeit unevenly due to the economic depressions of 1841 and 1857.

The labor resistance that did happen was against the very concept of wage labor and the failure of Thomas Jefferson’s “ideal America of farmers and artisan producers who owned their means of production and depended on no man for a living” (23). Some believed that capitalism “was incompatible with republicanism,” and it was from such attitudes that the phrase “wage slavery” (24) originated. Capitalism was also seen as incompatible with important aspects of republicanism, namely “virtue, commonweal, and equality” (24). Virtue meant prioritizing the interests of the community above one’s own interests, something seen as incompatible with capitalism and its promotion of self-interest. Capitalism went against commonweal, the belief that the government should benefit everyone equally rather than rewarding industrialists, railroads, and banks with government funding and monopolies.

The opposition to capitalism manifested in “communitarian experiments” (26) like the Oneida Community and the Democratic Party’s opposition to monopolies and suspicion of banks. The Whig Party in the North, who were replaced by the new Republican Party in 1854, went against the Democrats by arguing for a “free-labor ideology” (28). They argued that workers also benefited economically from industrialization; that bankers, merchants, and entrepreneurs were just as much laborers who created wealth as artisans and farmers; and that each worker had the opportunity to “pull himself up by his own bootstraps and become self-employed or a successful employer himself” (28). Some Americans were troubled by the “frenetic pace and acquisitive materialism” (29) that the free-labor ideology encouraged.

The political parties’ economic positions influenced which groups of voters voted for them. Republican voters tended to be “upwardly mobile Protestants in white-collar and skilled occupations” (30) and farmers who benefited from transportation advances like canals and railroads. Many Democratic voters were “‘outsiders’” (30), such as workers who were harmed by the industrialized economy, immigrants from Catholic-majority countries, and those like some rural farmers who resented bankers and Northerners or who believed industrial capitalism was incompatible with republicanism. Still, there were exceptions, like bankers and merchants in New York City who nonetheless supported the Democratic party.

Irish immigrants were “triple outsiders” (32) since they were Catholic, impoverished, and belonged to a minority culture. “Nativist” (33) political movements, especially motivated by anti-Catholic paranoia, violently opposed Irish migration. The connection between Irish immigrants and the Democratic Party “contributed to the two-party system that preceded the Civil War” (33).

Industrialization also affected women. Previously, women had made common household items such as soap and candles, but increasingly they started buying such necessities. Although some women did take jobs in factories and young women often took jobs for a few years before marriage, the “middle-class ideal for women was home and motherhood” (34). At the same time, more men worked outside of the home and in factories or offices. This encouraged a “cult of domesticity” (34), which believed that men were meant to work and support families and women had to stay at home. Possible positive outcomes of this shift were the increased consideration for children and their education, while marriages between middle-class partners “became more of an equal partnership than ever before” (35). Opportunities for women in higher education and as writers also actually increased.

New ideas of natural domesticity also encouraged abolitionists’ opposition to enslavement, since the institution of enslavement led to the “breakup” of enslaved families (38). This element of enslavement was depicted in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851). Capitalism and wage labor also made enslavement appear more barbaric, something that “inhibited economic development” and “discouraged education” (39). Nonetheless, the South’s prosperous cotton industry, which provided “three-fourths of the world’s supply” (39), made the South economically dependent on enslavement.

Despite a shared language and history, by the 1850s the North and South had become more separated than ever before because of enslavement and free-labor ideology. The North also had much larger immigrant populations while the South was much less literate.

In this era, there was massive westward expansion driven by the concept of “manifest destiny” (42), the idea that the United States should expand all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Among the pioneers were a new religious community, the Mormons, who migrated to Utah and thrived under the leadership of Brigham Young. When the Mormons began practicing polygamy in 1852, violence broke out between the Mormons and other American groups, leading to a war between the United States government and Brigham Young, bringing Utah under the control of the United States. This further rapid expansion, which forced Indigenous Americans onto reservations, increased tensions between the South and North.

With all the Western territory annexed from Mexico after the Mexican-American War and land gained in Oregon from negotiations with Britain, the territory of the United States “expanded by two-thirds” (47). The Democrats supported the Mexican-American War and the overall idea of Manifest Destiny. The Whigs opposed the war and all violent expansion, instead arguing for attracting people to join the United States by building up American institutions and ideals.

The westward expansion made the issue of enslavement more pressing and challenged the Missouri Compromise, which banned enslavement in any new territories outside Missouri itself north of the 36° 30’ parallel of latitude. Many Northerners thought President James K. Polk, who was an enslaver, started the war just to increase the South’s political power by creating and adding more pro-enslavement states. Some members of Congress believed enslavement would not spread westward due to much of the West being comprised of deserts and mountains, but some Southern members of Congress still envisioned enslaved labor in the West.

In 1846, Congress voted on the Wilmot Proviso, which would formally ban enslavement in the new territories. Named for a Representative from Pennsylvania, David Wilmot, it was proposed on behalf of “a group of Northern Democrats who were vexed with Polk and fed up with southern domination of the party” (53). With northern Whigs, they formed a faction across parties called “free soilers” (55), making it a rare piece of legislation that was supported or opposed by factions within both parties. Many free soilers, mostly but not entirely Whigs and including Abraham Lincoln, opposed enslavement because they genuinely viewed it as an “‘unqualified evil’” (55) and believed it “entrenched” (55) poverty even for white people in the South. Others simply opposed enslavement because they were supporters of the former president Martin Van Buren: In 1844, Southern Democrats had stopped Buren from again being nominated as the Democrats’ presidential candidate.

As for the South, some Southerners admitted that enslavement was a moral evil, but claimed it was also “‘necessary’ […] because of the explosive racial consequences of emancipation” (56). With the wealth provided by the cotton industry, more Southerners claimed that enslavement  “civilized” (56) African persons, provided more support for the enslaved persons than a system of wage labor would, improved democratic institutions by equalizing social ranks between white Americans, and allowed the wealthy white elite to focus on civil service and culture rather than economics and labor.

The Southern Representative John C. Calhoun countered the Wilmot Proviso by proposing resolutions that would have prevented Congress from banning enslavement in new territories. Members of Congress sought a compromise by either extending the geographical line established by the Missouri Compromise to the West, or by allowing settlers in the new territories to decide for themselves. In the end, all that happened was that both the Wilmott Proviso and the Calhoun resolutions were blocked.

The ongoing conflict between Free Soilers and southern Whigs led to the Whigs nominating a Mexican-American War veteran, Zachary Taylor, as their presidential candidate for the 1848 election. Taylor had no definite view on enslavement. For the election, the Whigs “adopted no platform at all, and nominated the hero of a war that most of them had opposed” (58). This caused tensions to erupt between the so-called Conscious Whigs, who completely opposed enslavement, and the Cotton Whigs, who had supported the Wilmot Proviso but sought to compromise with the South on enslavement.

Meanwhile, the Democrats had their own factional in-fighting. On one side were Southern Democrats who sought to preserve and even expand enslavement. On the other side were the Barnburners. Comprised of New York Democrats, they backed as the Democratic candidate Martin Van Buren, who opposed enslavement in the western territories and supported banning it in Washington, DC. The Conscience Whigs left the party and established a new, explicitly anti-enslavement political party, the Free Soil Party, which put forward their own candidate, Joshua Leavitt.

Taylor defeated Van Buren and Leavitt in the presidential election. This was because “Whigs had an easier time appearing to be all things to all men” (62-63). Leavitt’s candidacy did not win a single state. Nevertheless, the Free Soiler Party made the 1848 election the first one where enslavement was a “central issue” (62) for at least one candidate.

Around this time, the discovery of gold in California led to a large influx of settlers in a movement known as the Gold Rush, forcing the issue of enslavement in the West. Calhoun and other politicians from the South threatened that the southern states would secede if enslavement was not allowed in the territories. Motivated by a desire to reunite the Free Soil Party and the Whigs, President Taylor pushed for the admission of California and New Mexico as new free states, knowing that enslavement was highly unpopular among settlers in both territories. This set off Southern anger and renewed threats of secession. The settlers of New Mexico voting for a state constitution that outlawed enslavement, and threats by Texas, a pro-enslavement state, to press their claims to lands in eastern New Mexico through military force added fuel to the fire.

While facing heated debate and intense opposition, the prominent Senator Henry Clay proposed a series of bills that would become the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise included admitting California as a free state but also admitting Utah and New Mexico as states without a federal ban on enslavement. It also let New Mexico claim land disputed between their government and that of Texas in exchange for Texas’ debts being paid off by the federal government, and strengthening the Fugitive Slave Act, which forced free states to return escaped enslaved persons.

The Compromise revealed “divisions” that “occurred mainly along sectional rather than party lines, another sign that the existing two-party system was crumbling under the weight of slavery” (75). Further, the Compromise of 1850 did not satisfy the Free Soilers or the fire-eaters, Southern politicians who were zealous proponents of enslavement.

While “antebellum southerners stood for state’s rights and a weak federal government,” they still supported the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which “gave the national government more power than any other law yet passed by Congress” (78). This was in response to efforts by Northerners to protect and help escaped enslaved persons and the refusal of Northern state governments to intervene. The law “put the burden of proof on captured [African Americans] but gave them no legal power to prove their freedom” (80) and required federal agents to assist in the capture of enslaved persons. The Fugitive Slave Act was challenged in courts, but it was upheld by the US Supreme Court in 1859.

This decision caused many Black Americans in the North to flee to Canada. At the same time, for abolitionists the passing of the law “eroded the commitment to nonviolence” (84). An enslaver was killed while trying to recapture escaped enslaved persons in the town of Christiana, Maryland. Federal marshals arrested many of those involved, but the government’s case was so weak that the charges were dismissed.

Southern politicians were further enraged by reports of violence, but the profits from cotton made the planter class of the South reluctant to support secession. Opponents of secession in the North, the Unionists, advised against any action against enslavement that went further than the Compromise of 1850. However, outrage over the Fugitive Slave Act led to the election of “a growing number of radical antislavery men” (87) to congressional offices. Although in parts of the North racist attitudes led to a few states banning the immigration of Black people, anger over the Fugitive Slave Act was further stoked in the North by the success of Harriet Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which effectively presented the enslaved Tom as a “Christ figure” (90-91) in a way that resonated among Christian readers.

From the South’s perspective, anger also simmered from “a sense of economic subordination to the North” (91). The North was more industrialized, offered more jobs, had more immigrants settling in the region, and “[t]hree times as many people born in slave states had migrated to free states as vice versa” (91). The South’s prosperity came from growing and exporting cotton. However, much of this cotton was sent to the North to be used in clothes and other forms of manufacturing. This was the basis of the idea that the South’s commerce was dominated by the North.

McPherson looks at various historical theories about why the South’s economy and level of industry was behind the North, concluding that it was not entirely because of enslavement. Instead, McPherson suggests historical evidence “points to the South’s agrarian value system as an important reason for lack of industrialization” (98), meaning Southern culture was fundamentally hostile to industrialization. However, McPherson also believes another reason was the South’s economic dependence on cash crops like cotton, tobacco, and sugar, to the point that cotton was termed “King Cotton.” It ironically caused “this agricultural society” to start turning into “a food-deficit region” (100).

Southerners hoped to improve their position in the United States by annexing Cuba and turning it into a pro-enslavement state. Due to this plan, Southern politicians, who were called “filibusters” (105), supported efforts to overthrow Cuba’s colonial Spanish government. The United States government tried and failed to buy the island from Spain in 1848. By 1853, President Franklin Pierce backed a filibuster expedition to provoke a Cuban revolt, but he stopped the plans when he became afraid that his administration would be seen as too pro-enslavement as a result. Filibusters also attempted to cause or exploit political unrest abroad to acquire territory for the South elsewhere in Latin America, as with the efforts of William Walker in Nicaragua.

At the end of the 1850s, Southerners turned from plans to improve their economy by diversifying their agriculture away from cash crops to the ambition of creating a Southern empire in Latin America and the West Indies.

President Millard Fillmore (who became president after the death of Zachary Taylor in 1850) had his administration enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Although Fillmore was a Whig, the anti-enslavement Whig faction now led by William H. Seward rebelled against Fillmore. For the 1852 presidential election, Seward orchestrated the nomination of an anti-enslavement candidate, Winfield Scott, driving many southern Whigs out of the party and leading the Whigs to suffer devastating electoral losses, especially in the South. These losses included Scott’s loss in the election to the Democratic candidate Franklin Pierce, who was from the North but sympathetic to the South.

Pierce continued to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, to the point that he sent the military to capture the escaped enslaved person Anthony Burns in Boston despite local opposition. This led to widespread outrage, radicalizing moderate northern Whigs who had previously supported the Compromise of 1850 and “New England states passed new personal liberty laws that collided in various ways with federal law” (120).

“Even more important […] in arousing northern militancy was the Kansas-Nebraska Act” (121), which repealed the “ban on slavery north” (123) of the 36° 30 parallel line established by the Missouri Compromise and effectively established Kansas and Nebraska as future pro-enslavement and free states respectively, regardless of the wishes of the people of those territories. This had the effect of finishing off the Whig party, with southern Whigs eventually becoming Democrats. In the North, Whigs formed political coalitions that coalesced into the new Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln achieved national fame by debating the author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Stephen Douglas, and set the tone for the Republicans by presenting an “affirmation of moral opposition to slavery” (129).

At the same time, there was a “tidal wave of nativism” (130) that saw the emergence of the Know-Nothing Party, which vehemently opposed immigration. Nativism had been a force in politics in the opening years of the 1840s, but had died down by 1844. The “revival of nativism” (131) was inspired by the increasing numbers of impoverished Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany, who were blamed for rising crime and welfare rates. In addition, they were subjected to anti-Catholic hatred. Conservative Catholic American campaigns for tax support for private Catholic schools and against lay ownership of church property, along with the papacy’s growing opposition to modern thought and culture and its role in the violent suppression of Italian nationalism in Europe, were seen as justifying anti-Catholic sentiment.

Lastly, the new immigrants were stereotyped as having alcohol dependencies and were resented for their opposition to temperance laws against the sale of alcohol popular among middle-class Protestants.

The Know-Nothing Party was popular with “young men in white-collar and skilled blue-collar occupations” (135). They supported the temperance movement and sought to limit the influence of immigrant voters by increasing the “waiting period for naturalization” (136) from five to 21 years and other restrictions on immigrants voting or holding political office. The northern Know-Nothings opposed enslavement, seeing “slavery and Catholicism alike as repressive institutions” (137). Nonetheless, some Republican leaders “recognized the incompatibility of nativism” (137) with their own anti-enslavement views, although this did not stop Free Soil politicians from forming political alliances with the Know-Nothings.

In the South, the Know-Nothing Party grew stronger, but in the north Know-Nothings tended to end up joining the Republicans. Nativism was overshadowed by the issues of enslavement and African-American rights, which led Democrats to accuse abolitionist Republicans of being “Black Republicans” (143), supporters of total African-American emancipation. In the end, the Know-Nothing Party did not last long and was for the most part absorbed into the Republican Party. McPherson argues that “Bloody Kansas” made enslavement look like more of a threat than Catholicism.