Crispush Dbq

888 Words4 Pages
By 1860 there began to fundamental differences that were shown between the northern and southern United States. There was evidence that as far back as from the beginning of American colonial history were primarily responsible–that differences in the systems of labor, climate, forms of agriculture, and religion laid the groundwork for the contradictory differences between to the two halves of the nation. During the Revolution colonists, both black and white, worked together to fight what they saw as British injustices. Interracial mobs rioted against the Stamp Act of 1765 and other despised regulations imposed on the colonies throughout the 1760s. In 1770 Crispus Attucks, a fugitive slave of mixed African and Native American descent,…show more content…
Few people worked for wages early in the nineteenth century, but far more did in 1860, particularly in eastern cities. Labor became a commodity, bought and sold like flour or rum. South Carolina was deterred from leaving the Union, which it and some other states claimed was Constitutional, over tariffs that protected Northern industry because no other state was willing to join it, and the tariff it threatened to secede over was lowered. Subsequently, after the Whig Party collapsed and a new, sectional party (the nation's first, the Republican), was formed that included in its ranks many who wished to abolish the nation's two great sins: slavery and polygamy (labeled the enslavement of women), the rest of the South's attitude changed. Shortly before the 1860 presidential election, U. S. troops under the command of a future Confederate general were sent to where polygamy was practiced (Utah, a territory gained in the Mexican War that the Mormons had fled to). Shortly thereafter polygamy was outlawed and polygamists were jailed. (Utah was denied statehood until the Mormon Church changed its position on polygamy.) Then, in 1860, a Republican, Abraham Lincoln, was elected president. Although there were strong social and political reasons for white Southerners' alarm over the election of a man opposed to slavery: a great willingness to accept the social and political equality of blacks, Southern whites were strongly economically motivated, for, although most Southerners did not own slaves, this form of "property" represented much of the region's wealth, and non-slaveowners were not anxious to compete with free blacks. In 1860, the Southern press was aflame with intemperate articles and speeches by firebrands over the possibility that now Southerners were going to be deprived of their property without compensation and the South turned into another Haiti.
Open Document