Politics and regional interests

All politics is local

In a previous lesson, you learned about the primary regional bases for early political parties with the Federalists enjoying their greatest support in New England, the Republicans, later the Democrats, emerging first in the southern and western states, but then becoming competitive in New York and surrounding areas, and the Whig Party drawing its highest levels of support from states in the Upper South, including Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina, as well as mid-Atlantic states including New York and Pennsylvania. Within these states and regions, furthermore, the cultural and economic sources for support varied considerably. Federalists, while never an abolitionist party, were not as supportive of the maintenance and expansion of slavery in the United States, as New England states often had very few slaves and were amongst the first states to either abolish slavery or enact programs of gradual emancipation. Republicans, and beginning in the late 1820s Democrats, primarily favored the maintenance and often expansion of slavery into new territories, at least until the Mexican-American War of the late 1840s when some northern Democrats joined with a number of Whigs to form the short-lived Free Soil Party. The Whigs, particularly under Henry Clay, pursued a regional development strategy with national implications through promotion of what is commonly known as the American system, a proposal for the expansion of infrastructure projects, then known as internal improvements, including bridges, canals, roads and railroads, financed through high tariffs on imported goods.

Henry Clay, Defense of the American System, 1832

This transformation of the condition of the country from gloom and distress to brightness and prosperity, has been mainly the work of American legislation, fostering American industry, instead of allowing it to be controlled by foreign legislation, cherishing foreign industry….Instead of the ruin of the public revenue, with which they then sought to deter us from the adoption of the American System, we are now threatened with its subversion, by the vast amount of the public revenue produced by that system.

Disputes over tariffs would eventually result in confrontation between the state of South Carolina and President Andrew Jackson, a topic about which you learn more later in this chapter.

War of 1812

While you will learn more about the War of 1812 later in this chapter, it is essential that we analyze the regional differences and implications of the United States’s first foreign war after the American Revolution. Discontent in New England over the Jefferson administration’s support of the embargo primarily aimed at France and Great Britain, coupled with increasing resentment over the Virginia dynasty of presidents, and the geographic proximity of New England to Canada all emerged during a largely unpopular war, the War of 1812. While the United States eventually emerged from the War of 1812 with an essential return to the status quo ante bellum, the situation before the war, and President Madison benefited from Andrew Jackson’s victory at the Battle of New Orleans, fought several weeks after the official conclusion of the war but before that news reached the United States, regional tensions surfaced, particularly regarding the Hartford Convention that coincided with the end of the war. While there was brief discussion about the secession from the United States, the primary grievances and prospective solutions advocated by the primarily Federalist delegates were aimed at rectifying what they perceived to be regional political imbalances favoring the southern and western states, including preventing presidential reelection, successive presidents being elected from the same state, repealing the infamous ⅗ compromise in the Constitution, and prohibiting Congress from declaring war without a ⅔ majority in both houses as well as from enacting embargoes lasting more than 60 days. With the end of the War of 1812, the Hartford Convention’s proposed constitutional amendments were not adopted; more importantly, though, suspicions of secessionist support remain the lasting impression of the Hartford Convention for many Americans.

Missouri compromises

As the United States grew in terms of both territory and population, increasingly bitter disputes emerged about the expansion of slavery into new states and territories, and whether Congress possessed the legal authority to regulate slavery. Southern political leaders almost uniformly supported the expansion of slavery into new states and territories while northern and western political leaders evinced greater concern about expanding slavery into new states and territories, partly related to opposition to slavery and partly due to concerns about the potential for southern political dominance in the country. With statehood petitions from both Missouri and Maine pending before Congress, bitter recriminations resounded regarding the extension of the south’s “peculiar institution.” While the immediate crisis, including threats of violence and armed conflict, was ultimately resolved through the admission of Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state and the prohibition of slavery north of the 36th parallel, the southern boundary for most of Missouri and later forming the southern boundaries of Kansas, Colorado and Utah and crossing through Nevada and California, the Missouri Compromise(s) postponed, but did not prevent, the Civil War.

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Holmes, April 22, 1820

But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.

Sectionalism and slavery

As with so much of antebellum US history, the specter of slavery hung over political debates through the end of the Civil War. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, white southerners increasingly publicly embraced slavery, shifting from an earlier position of defending slavery as a necessary evil to proclaiming slavery to be the best and most positive system for southern prosperity as well as for the spiritual and moral improvement of the enslaved persons themselves. Northern and western political sentiments about slavery were mixed, although the rising public presence of abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Weld, and Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, and white northerners opposed to the expansion of slavery as well as what they perceived to be the excessive influence of southerners in the American government produced a variety of political perspectives, including the Free Soil Party and later the second Republican Party, that would challenge southern insistence on the expansion of slavery into new territories.