5.5 Sectional Conflict

Overwhelming majority of east coast immigrants came from?

• Germany and Ireland

• Both mostly catholic, contrasted with americans who were Protestant

Irish

Mostly settled in East Coast cities as a part of unskilled labor force in growing factories

Germans

Mostly arrived with some money, so settled in the Midwest as farmers or small business professionals

Anti- Catholic nativist movement

Arose that was aimed at limiting new immigrants political power and cultural influence

Know-Nothing Party

• Arose in the 1840s to prevent immigrants from becoming citizens or voting

• Rooted in anxiety many protestant americans felt about the changing demographic

• Resulted in Irish immigrants getting shut out of jobs

mid 1830’s

• Unity for abolitionist crusade began to crack

• Some frightened by the violence of the anti-abolitionist advised for more moderate approach

• William Lloyd Garrison argued for a more radical approach

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin

• Attempt to arouse public anger through propaganda

• published in 1852

• Stowe was not an author or abolitionist but angered by the 1850 fugitive slave act

“underground railroad”

• helped about 100,000 black Americans escape to freedom before the Civil War

• secret escape route

Harriet Tubman

• Most famous of the underground railroad “conductors”

• helping free over 70 people

1850 fugitive slave act

Empowered “slave patrols” both in the North and South

Free-Soil Party

• Formed before the 1848 election

• Rooted in the desire to stop the expansion of slavery to territories

• Its goals was to ban slavery so white farmers would not need to compete with large slave-based plantations

• came to be because northerners claimed that slavery would undermine the free labor market

North’s expanding manufacturing economy

relied on free labor

Southern Economy’s

Depended on slave labor

John C. Calhoun

• argued that slavery was “a positive good” for the slaves because they enjoyed better working conditions than industrial workers in the North

Southerners also argued that:

• Southern economy, rooted in slavery, was the key to the prosperity of the nation

• Racist arguments about the biological inferiority of Black Americans that southerners claimed inherently unfit to take care of themselves

• slavery and states rights to determine the status of slavery were protected by the Constitution