From 1783 to 1789, the United States were government by the Articles of Confederation. These articles provided for a very weak central government and very strong states' rights. For examples, states could issue their own currency and levy tariff on interstate commerce. About the only truly central power exercised by the federal government were the army and foreign affairs. In 1787, most of the leaders of the revolution were unhappy with the arrangements and fearful of United States involvement in European upheaval. So, they gathered in Philadelphia in a Constitutional Convention. The debates over a new constitution were long and were held in secret. The result was the Constitution that we now have. There were two major unresolved issues. The first were rights of individual citizens. In 1791, ten Amendments were passed that were called collectively the "Bill of Rights" and these mostly solved the problem. The second was the question of whose authority is predominant should the federal government and the states clash over some important issue. That issue went unresolved until the Civil War when the outcome determined that the Federal Government was the ultimate sovereign power within the United States.
It was President Washington who determined that the central foreign policyof the US government should be strict neutrality. This policy prevailed for about 100 years or until the events leading up to the Spanish-American War.
There were long standing debates about four issues in the years leading up to the Civil War. The first concerned the franchise. The Federalists (predecessors of the Republicans) were in favor of limiting voting rights to property holders. Jeffersonians and Jacksonians (predecessors of the Democrats) wanted to extend the franchise to all white males regardless of economic status. By the 1820's, state after state extended the franchise to all adult, white males. This made Jackson's election possible. The second issue was the desire of the Federalists to industrialize the United States. Their policies gradually prevailed in the northern but not the southern states before the Civil War. The third was state's rights. This came to a head under President Jackson when South Carolina attempted to nullify a federal tariff. Jackson firmly opposed this effort and upheld the Federal right to regulate foreign relations (including tariffs). There was talk of Civil War but it died down. Finally, there was the question of slavery in the south but not in the north. This was to lead to war.
The constitution provided that the states could 'count' three-fifths of their slaves when the census was taken for purposes of deciding how many representatives each state would have in the House of Representatives. Of course, the slaves could not vote not being citizens. The Constitution also forbade any federal attempt to import slaves before 1808 and thousands were imported between 1788 and 1808. The issue that was to lead to war was whether new territory added to the United States should be slave or free. Up until 1860, the compromises effected by the Congress generally extended the Mason-Dixon Line (the border between the states of Maryland and Pennsylvania) westward as the United States expanded. However, each addition territory involved more and more bitter quarreling until there was actual physical fighting among House members in the 1850's and total alienation among northern and southern politicians. To this day, there is a deep north-south cleavage in political opinions and styles about all manner of issues and, while bitterness is limited, it is still present.
Beginning in the 1820's and accelerating thereafter, the New England, Middle Atlantic and Mid-western States began to industrialize using factory style organizations. An example was the Lowell mills of Massachusetts in which linear factories developed where raw material went in the back end and emerged as finished products out the front end. First using waterpower and then steam-power, the mills were increasingly mechanized and productivity went up. The north also developed a very rich and diversified agriculture. Finally, northern states like New York built at first canals (the Erie Canal) and then railroads (e.g. the New York Central Railroad) that that tied regions and cities together.
The Southern economy was dependent on cotton and slavery. Cotton was in great demand in Europe as it was much more comfortable to wear than the wool that preceded it. The only profitable way to compete with cotton from the continent of India was to use slaves. However, the use of slaves discouraged Europeans from emigrating to the South and so the South remained largely Anglo-Saxon and African. The result was that the North developed economically and demographically much faster than the south and, by the Civil Was had an economy and population nearly double that of the South. Indeed, the South was not to industrialize until after World War II.
Finally, in 1857, the Supreme Court effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by declaring that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the new territories. Radical antislavery northerners saw this as a blow to national morality. The new Republican Party had become the party that opposed slavery. Senator Abraham Lincoln of Illinois won the Republican nomination and the election of 1860. The South seceded from the Union and Lincoln determined to force them back into the union. The war was to last four years and cost more lives in proportion to the population of any war in the history of the United States. We have yet to fully resolve the issues raised in that conflict 140 years later although progress is being slowly made to resolving the divisions caused by race in American society.
Upon the conclusion of the Civil War, the Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Amendments to the Constitution were passed that effectively outlawed slavery and legal discrimination in the United States. However, the South gradually seized control over local politics back from the Federal government over the ten years following the Civil War (i.e. by 1876). The period between 1865 and 1876 was called Reconstruction under the direct control of the US Army and was greatly resented. Following the departure of federal troops, white southerners instituted a period of illegal terror in the south and imposed a regime of rigid segregation that was only marginally better than slavery. Black people then began to migrate to the north in a steady and every growing stream. Racism became much more prominent in the north and informal segregation became the rule. In fact, the races were more separate in the north than in the south although the north always had many fewer legal barrier to access to public and quasi-public facilities than was true in the south. Between 1865 and 1914, the South's economy stagnated and steadily became a smaller part of the US economy.
The north became the destination of millions upon millions of eastern and southern Europeans in the half-century between 1865 and 1915. These people were intent on becoming Americanized and had not participated in the great civil conflict over slavery. By and large, they carried the general European nineteenth century sense of racial superiority and, while they never sought to legally impose some variant of slavery upon the Blacks, they also wanted nothing to do with them on a person to person level. So, segregation in the north, while informal, was in many ways more thorough than in the South.
The period between the Civil War and World War I was characterized by the completion of the settlement of the west and by the completion of industrialization in the north. The most famous business leaders of those two generations were Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefellar and J.P. Morgan. Carnegie dominated the steel industry, Rockefellar the oil industry and Morgan the banking and stock market industry. In general, this was a period of overproduction and falling prices. Industrial barons sought to avoid the competition of the marketplace by creating monopolies in which the prices of the products could be controlled to some degree. The excesses practiced by these industrial predators were so outrageous that eventually the Sherman Anti-trust Act was passed to ensure the continuation of competition. It is this act that is the basis for the government prosecution of Microsoft and Intel today and had been used against IBM and AT&T a generation earlier.
Partly in reaction to the growth of great industrial combinations, labor unions gradually grew to nearly equal size (although it took the Great Depression and the friendly Roosevelt Administration to finally permit labor unions to represent a large plurality of the workforce). The conflict between the corporations and organized labor was often bloody and always contentious. There was a radical wing of the labor movement that believed in socialism but it never represented more than a small fraction of American workers who, with few exceptions, were basically conservative people.
Farmers faced even more difficult circumstances because, while productivity of agriculture soared, prices kept falling and many family farms went bankrupt. Eventually, a radical farmers' movement arose in the mid-west and upper mid-west and styled themselves as Progressives.
The Progressives began as an effort to eliminate corruption in politics. The politics of the 19th century was extremely corrupt as there was no civil service and everything depended upon machine politics. The federal government itself was a large patronage machine with the President as the chief dispenser of federal jobs and contracts. It was unbelievably corrupt and, compared with then, the federal government extremely honest. Reform minded candidates sprang up at the local level all over the country and gradually advanced up the political ladder until they, at times, controlled the state legislatures. The era lasted from about 1890 to 1914. The main effort was to try to reform campaign finances and practices (they obviously failed) and to create a depoliticized bureaucracy (there they succeeded). They also began to regulate utilities and to eliminate crime among the police.
In addition to anti-corruption, there were strong social reform movements. These results in legislation like child labor laws and public sanitation campaigns and promotion of public education. In general, the progressives believed that the problems of society were susceptible to scientific, rational solutions. The progressive movement lead to three progressive presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt, Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson between 1901 and 1920. Of these three, Roosevelt and Wilson were the most important.
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