Antebellum Era. Every period of American history, unfortunately, could be considered “antebellum.” A war has seemed to await the end of each era, defining in retrospect what came before. Yet in all U.S. history only the decades between 1815 and 1861 take their defining identity from the war that followed. That is understandable: Not only did the
Civil War alter the fundamental character of the nation but it grew entirely from conflicts within America itself, within Americans themselves. The notion of the “antebellum era” promises to make sense of what was at once the nation's greatest failure and its most important step toward fulfilling its founding words of freedom.
Precisely because the antebellum label is so convenient, however, other names for this period, other ways of grasping its history, invite consideration. By putting the end of the story first, “antebellum” both compresses too much and leaves out too much. By making everything point toward the bloodshed and redemption of the Civil War, it prevents us from seeing the circuitous paths the sectional conflict followed. The unimaginable slaughter and the unanticipated emancipation that accompanied the Civil War grew from many roots, all of them entangled.
People at the time, ironically, saw their era as fundamentally
post bellum. They viewed themselves as living in the shadow of the
Revolutionary War, trying to measure up to the standards of the new nation and the sacrifices of their ancestors. The names of their towns and cities, their public buildings and holidays, their politics and schools, all were defined by their vision of what the founders had intended. Even arguments about
slavery, the fundamental division in the country, drew on the Revolutionary Era both for defense and attack. Americans looked backward as much as forward, not knowing that later generations would see their half century as prologue to war rather than as a culmination of the founding.
Continental Expansion and Warfare.
A hopeful interpretation might call this time the Era of American Expansion. In 1815 the young nation included only eighteen states, with Louisiana standing exposed at the western boundary, Florida in the hands of the Spanish, and an unsettled line floating between Canada and the United States. The western half of the continent remained only vaguely known to Anglo Americans and seemed far too distant to be of importance any time soon. Even within the country's sketchy borders, American Indians populated large and rich areas in both the North and the
South. But over the next four decades the nation's continental boundaries expanded beyond recognition. A new state entered the Union about every two and a half years, and by the end of the 1850s thirty‐three states—including two on the Pacific coast—claimed a place.
A less hopeful interpretation might call these years the Era of Continental Warfare. Expansion occurred because the young country repeatedly seized, bought, or negotiated territory, often with force. The years of expansion began with the end of British influence on the Western frontier following the
War of 1812, soon followed by Spain's abandonment of Florida. In the 1820s and 1830s, the Cherokee, Choctaw, Sac, Fox, Seminole, and Chickasaw nations, deprived of European allies, faced expulsion from the eastern half of the continent. In the 1840s, the United States provoked a war with Mexico that yielded a territory of unknown possibility stretching from Texas to the Pacific Ocean. Negotiation with Great Britain defined the northern boundary from Maine to Oregon and, after a bit more fine‐tuning with the
Gadsden Purchase, the external boundaries of the current continental United States had been fixed, all in a remarkably short time and on a scale people could barely have imagined only a few decades earlier. The military conflict that made this possible proved easy for the United States, leading many Americans to imagine it their
manifest destiny to expand without limitation. The United States, in fact, claimed the entire western hemisphere as a place under its jurisdiction and protection. In a sense, this period was defined by almost continuous warfare, and not merely by the Civil War at its end.
Social and Technological Trends.
Meanwhile, the population grew relentlessly. The number of Americans increased from 8.4 million in 1815 to 31.4 million by 1860. Not only did men and women marry young and raise large families, but three million additional people crossed the Atlantic from Europe in a mixture of hope and desperation. People of all backgrounds spread out across the vast expanse of the burgeoning country, establishing farms and towns far from the older cities of the east. They were a restless people, with about half the population of any town moving every ten years. By the end of the period, the United States claimed 5 million more people than England and the new nation boasted 8 cities of over 150,000 inhabitants, more than any other country in the world.
Not only did ever‐expanding boundaries and population encourage people to move, but machines changed the scale of life in what historians have come to call the Transportation Revolution. Steamboats transformed water transportation in the 1810s,
canals and waterways boomed in the 1820s, and
railroads arrived in the 1830s. The capacity of ships docking in American ports doubled every decade between 1820 and 1860. American vessels plied the Atlantic with cargoes of cotton and wheat for England and Europe. Clipper ships sailed around South America and into the Pacific, carrying prospectors and immigrants.
A revolution in communication accompanied this revolution in transportation. Newspapers, confined to just a few major cities in 1815, became staples of American life in the 1830s and 1840s, read and published in hundreds of communities of every size. Daguerreotypes and colorful lithographs decorated homes that had been empty of pictures a generation earlier. In the 1840s, the first
telegraph wires carried information from one city to another; by the late 1850s, telegraph cables connected the United States and Europe. Novels sold tens of thousands of copies in a few months. Some of the greatest American writers— James Fenimore
Cooper, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Herman
Melville, Edgar Allan
Poe, and Walt
Whitman, among them—flourished in the new environment, defining and reaching large audiences with bold acts of imagination. Later generations would think of the era as the American Renaissance.
Some historians have argued that the decades of the first half of the nineteenth century brought a market revolution in which American life became newly bound up in the values, opportunities, and constraints of commercial exchange. A class of working people of both genders emerged in the cities of the eastern seaboard. Political conflict polarized around issues of
banking and finance,
tariffs, unions, and corporations. Farmers and merchants more finely tuned their labors to prices established far away. How much change these patterns marked from earlier generations remains a matter of dispute, but without doubt, buying and selling encompassed much of American life in the mid–nineteenth century.
Women's lives took on a new texture in these same years. While difficult labor in the household, on the farm, and in
childbirth continued to consume the energies of most American women, a new ideal of separate spheres emerged. Women were especially suited for nurturance, this notion held, because they were more sensitive, moral, and pure than men. Accordingly, women were urged to separate themselves as much as possible from the hurly‐burly of the marketplace, the street, and the crowd, focusing their energies and talents on their children and others who would benefit from their tender attentions. The ideal woman became both elevated and isolated.
Enabled, heartened, and worried by the many kinds of changes around them, Americans made these years an Age of Reform.
Revivalism flourished as
Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians vied for converts. Reform groups emerged to stamp out alcohol and war, to encourage education and humane treatment of the unfortunate, to improve diet and health. Most importantly, black and white abolitionists launched a decades‐long struggle to bring an end to slavery, risking their lives in the process. Women accounted for many members of these organizations, lending their energy and intelligence to activities beyond the home, using the separate‐spheres creed to the advantage of themselves and others and laying the ground‐work of the
women's rights movements. These reform organizations electrified Americans with the sense that society could be fundamentally altered and improved, that evil could be overcome with sufficient effort and God's help.
Reform Movements and Party Politics.
These years have also been known as the Era of the Common Man. Andrew
Jackson typified the aspirations of many white men, common or not: independence, pride, and self‐determination, built on control of female, black, and Native dependents. Political parties—
Democratic,
Whig,
Free Soil,
Know‐Nothing, and
Republican—mobilized nearly all white men, who swore allegiance to their parties, expressing their passions and beliefs in slogans, songs, and parades. On election days, as many as eight out of ten eligible voters went to the polls. The modern world had never seen such a vibrant—if messy, coarse, and sometimes corrupt—democracy.
Slavery and the Coming of the Civil War.
The modern world had also never seen such a vast and powerful slave society. In the fundamental tragedy of this time, this era of revolutions in politics, transportation, and reform was also a period when an empire for slavery extended across a quarter of the new nation. Slavery, propelled by the same territorial expansion and technological innovation that drove so much else in the new country, spread like a hemorrhage. Over 300,000 slaveowners held nearly 4 million people in bondage by 1860. Slavery, contrary to the expectations of virtually everyone in 1815, grew stronger with each passing decade, embracing an ever larger part of the continent to the
South and
West, holding more people within its bonds, accounting for a larger share of the nation's exports. Cotton and slavery created a per capita income for white southerners higher than that of any country in Europe except England.
The discussions in the churches, the reform organizations, and the political parties turned repeatedly, if fitfully and sometimes obliquely, to the morality of slavery and the sectional conflict it bred. Rivalry and distrust between the North and the South came to infect everything in public life. Each section viewed the other as aggressive and expansionist, intent on making the nation all one thing or another. The North claimed that the slaveholder South would destroy the best government on earth rather than accept the results of a fair election. The white South claimed that the arrogant and greedy North would destroy the nation rather than tolerate a labor system the
Constitution itself had acknowledged. Both sides were filled with righteous rage, accepting violence to gain the upper hand, whether that involved capturing fugitive slaves or applauding John
Brown's failed insurrection. Americans could not stop the momentum they themselves had created.
What most Americans thought of as progress brought on the Civil War. Had the nation not expanded so relentlessly, the elaborate compromises of 1820, 1850, and 1854 might have held. Had the nation not been made so aware of itself through newspapers, novels, and sermons; through political parties and reform organizations; and through railroads and telegraphs, the bargains and evasions of the Revolutionary generation might have endured. Had cotton not been so in demand and so crucial to the prosperity of the nation and Europe, slavery might have faded rather than growing stronger. No one sought a war that would kill 630,000 Americans, but the killing came on the heels of many changes people did desperately seek. The war that broke out, suddenly and irrevocably defining this era, bore the marks of the emerging modern world. It would rage with terrifying efficiency and far‐reaching consequences, forever, changing the way Americans thought of the years that had come before.
See also
Agriculture: 1770s to 1890;
Anti‐Catholic Movement;
Antislavery;
Bank of the United States, First and Second;
Cherokee Cases;
Compromise of 1850;
Cotton Industry;
Education: The Public School Movement;
Expansionism;
Immigration;
Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900;
Journalism;
Labor Movements;
Literature: Early National and Antebellum Eras;
Lowell Mills;
Methodism;
Mexican War;
Nativist Movement;
Painting: To 1945;
Prisons and Penitentiaries;
Romantic Movement;
Science: Revolutionary War to World War I;
Steam Power;
Texas Republic and Annexation;
Transcendentalism;
Utopian and Communitarian Movements;
Working‐Class Life and Culture.
Bibliography
George Rogers Taylor , The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860, 1951.
Eric Foner , Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, 1970.
Kathryn Kish Sklar , Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity, 1973.
Eugene Genovese , Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, 1974.
David M. Potter , The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, 1976.
Kerby A. Miller , Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America, 1985.
David S. Reynolds , Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville, 1988.
Harry L. Watson , Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America, 1990.
Charles G. Sellers , The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846, 1991.
Ronald Walters , American Reformers, 1815–1860, 1996.
Edward L. Ayers
